Jul 17, 2011
Whether the Bible is a collection of texts that can be used for
moral guidance is an unresolved question for Western society.
Bible-based religions use the book as a guide in order to shape
ethics not only for their adherents, but for governance of the
larger society as well. Hector Avalos, PhD, Professor of Religious
Studies at Iowa State University, has been deconstructing the
monolith of respect that we are supposed to afford the Bible in
several books and collections. Avalos' method lays out a careful
and critical examination of the book itself as well as the
apologetics approach that believing scholars use to misrepresent
the ethics of this collection of authoritative scriptures. Laying
aside the verifiability of the texts collected into the Bible,
which Avalos examined in his book The End of Biblical Studies,
Avalos now turns to its ethics of slavery. Apologists claims that
the Bible was a key tool in the 18th and 19th century abolitionist
struggles for the ending of human slavery. In order to maintain the
position that The Bible could be used to argue that God didn't want
people to own other people, scholars need to misrepresent its clear
teachings and Avalos shows in his forthcoming book Slavery,
Abolitionism and the The Ethics of Biblical Scholarship. Avalos not
only looks at the Bible itself, but also examines civilizations in
the Middle East, both preceding the time line of the Bible and
concurrent to discover whether or not its teachings were an
improvement over the ethics of slavery for non-adhering societies.
"Creationists for Genocide" article at Talkreason.org by Hector
Avalos http://talkreason.org/articles/Genocide.cfm "Slavery in the
Bible" at Christianthinktank.com
http://christianthinktank.com/qnoslave.html