[Stealth]

now you want to do no research on it yourself and just have me tell you everything, so you can then dispute it?  Nosir, go do some research on it yourself.

and if so then why is it kept around as part of the cannon

...

why do we keep history books?  Why do we study history, if most of it is no longer relevant?

[Bobboau]

meh...
/*only moderately interested*/

/*directed at first part, before you edited*/

[Stealth]

OK, in that case don't do research on it

[Bobboau]

well if it's no longer "The Rules" why is it in The Rule Book?
I could see keeping it around, but if it conflicts with the current enforced rules then keeping it in the cannon is only going to confuse people.

[Goober5000]

The New Testament did not abolish the Old Testament.  It completed it.  The OT was a shadow of things to come.  That doesn't make it wrong, only incomplete.  And the OT wasn't automatically invalidated when the NT came along.  The morals and laws of the OT still apply.

Not everything in the OT was a law, though.  There are at least three different kinds of rules I can think of:

1) Moral laws, which reflect God's moral order and cannot be changed
2) Regulations, which established protocol in various areas
3) Orders, which applied to specific cases

As I said, moral laws (such as the Ten Commandments) still apply.  However, rules such as mixing types of garments, eating certain types of food, cutting your hair a certain way, and associating with different types of people fall into the second category.

IMO, these rules were designed to set Israel apart as "unique", but they didn't reflect any particular moral order.  In fact, God specifically told Peter, in Acts 10, that eating forbidden food and associating with forbidden people was perfectly fine.  I think that these rules, in setting Israel apart culturally, were a foreshadowing of Christians being set apart spiritually.  Note that Jesus ate all kinds of things, hung out with all sorts of people, and broke many established rules and regulations.

Originally posted by Raa
God created 'sex'? And it's a 'gift'? Interesting... Seems more like a curse to me, at times...

God designed sex to be a wonderful thing before sin came along and corrupted it.  In fact, it was intended to be one of the most wonderful things he made.  The reason it's been corrupted so much is that it's so valuable in its purest form.  Think about it - nobody counterfeits a $1 bill.

[Ford Prefect]

I've never actually encountered counterfeit sex. It all seems to work pretty much the same.

[Bobboau]

hmmm... well all I can say at this time is the following;

"and on the twelveth hour of the evening the LORD God our father said "let there be sleep" and there was much slumber in all the lands"

[Ace]

Originally posted by Goober5000
As I said, moral laws (such as the Ten Commandments) still apply.  However, rules such as mixing types of garments, eating certain types of food, cutting your hair a certain way, and associating with different types of people fall into the second category.

IMO, these rules were designed to set Israel apart as "unique", but they didn't reflect any particular moral order.  In fact, God specifically told Peter, in Acts 10, that eating forbidden food and associating with forbidden people was perfectly fine.  I think that these rules, in setting Israel apart culturally, were a foreshadowing of Christians being set apart spiritually.

Or, more likely. One day a guy named Peter looked around and saw more people going to the temples to Isis and Mithras. He decided: "Well gee shucks, if we lower our restrictions we'll get more members!"

Thus Peter, much like Mohammad did when his first wife died, decided to have a vision from god which added some nice, new, convenient rules.

However, Robot Jesus in seeing the stupidity of organic meatbags does not believe in revisionist history.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Goober5000
Not everything in the OT was a law, though.  There are at least three different kinds of rules I can think of:

1) Moral laws, which reflect God's moral order and cannot be changed
2) Regulations, which established protocol in various areas
3) Orders, which applied to specific cases

As I said, moral laws (such as the Ten Commandments) still apply.  However, rules such as mixing types of garments, eating certain types of food, cutting your hair a certain way, and associating with different types of people fall into the second category.

IMO, these rules were designed to set Israel apart as "unique", but they didn't reflect any particular moral order.  

So the laws on owning slaves and stoning women who were raped where just to set the jews aside? How? I can't see any way that you can claim that those rules were regulations rather than moral laws.

[Goober5000]

The regulations on owning slaves were just that, regulations.  If it was a given that Israelites were going to own slaves, they were given rules on how to go about it.

As for the second case, I think certain rules were combinations of a moral law and a regulation law.  For example, "you shall not commit adultery" is an unqualified moral law.  But proscriptions for stoning just outlined the punishment for breaking the moral law.  Many cultures execute adulterers, but only the Israelites stoned them.

As for women who were raped, the OT treats that carefully.  If a woman was within the city limits and didn't scream, she was treated as an adultress because she consented - and therefore, by OT definition, wasn't raped.  However if the woman was outside the city limits, it gives her the benefit of the doubt and does not order her execution.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Goober5000
The regulations on owning slaves were just that, regulations.  If it was a given that Israelites were going to own slaves, they were given rules on how to go about it.

What on Earth do you mean if it was a given that the Israelites were going to own slaves? As if God couldn't do something about it and is just a politician who has to put up with a necessary evil.
 By making regulations on the treatment of God gives his tacit approval to slavery thereby making it moral to own slaves.
 This is like the British parliment passing laws stating what implements you can use to beat your wife and then claiming that it's not okay to beat her.

Originally posted by Goober5000
As for women who were raped, the OT treats that carefully.  If a woman was within the city limits and didn't scream, she was treated as an adultress because she consented - and therefore, by OT definition, wasn't raped.  However if the woman was outside the city limits, it gives her the benefit of the doubt and does not order her execution.

Not carefully enough. The defence "But she didn't scream when I held a knife to her throat so I'm innocent" would be laughed out of court today. Are you seriously telling me that it was a valid defence in biblical days?

Oh and BTW I've heard women scream when being consensual. Seems like there was an easy way to beat the stoning

[Goober5000]

Originally posted by karajorma
What on Earth do you mean if it was a given that the Israelites were going to own slaves? As if God couldn't do something about it and is just a politician who has to put up with a necessary evil.
 By making regulations on the treatment of God gives his tacit approval to slavery thereby making it moral to own slaves.
 This is like the British parliment passing laws stating what implements you can use to beat your wife and then claiming that it's not okay to beat her.

Not exactly.

A bit of background.  God was redeeming mankind gradually.  Things like slavery, polygamy, and castes used to be very common thousands of years ago; but God gradually brought societies out of them.  Slavery was so ingrained in the human psyche that he let it be for the time being; IIRC nearly all the movement throughout the world to abolish slavery occurred in the space of one century, the 1800s.  It took that long for humanity to be pried away from it.

So God allowed certain activities despite his disapproval of them.  It's the same as when Jesus said, regarding divorce, "Moses permitted you to divorce because your hearts were hard."  In other words, God allowed slavery because to disallow it would probably have made things worse.  Israel might have said, "Forget this, I'm not giving up my slaves; I'll go find some other god to worship."

And if you look, you can find God disapproving of slavery in the OT.  He commanded all slaves to be set free every 50 years, for example - not that this was ever followed, which supports the original point.

Not carefully enough. The defence "But she didn't scream when I held a knife to her throat so I'm innocent" would be laughed out of court today. Are you seriously telling me that it was a valid defence in biblical days?

Here's what the passage says:

Deuteronomy 22:23-24
If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death-the girl because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man's wife. You must purge the evil from among you.

Apparently it's assumed that the woman has enough time to scream.  However, many documented OT cases included some sort of consultation of God, so I'm sure God would have clarified the issue in such a situation.

Oh and BTW I've heard women scream when being consensual. Seems like there was an easy way to beat the stoning

Presumably the Israelites would know enough to differentiate between the types of screams.

[Stealth]

obviously the woman would scream if she resisted... and someone would come help.  if she didn't scream, it was implied that she 'enjoyed' being raped.


EDIT:

i should mention that i did say  "should mention that obviously there are still universal laws and examples that we can learn from in the old testament, so it's not completely obsolete" so yeah, obviously there are still lessons we can learn from the OT, but we don't abide by the laws that, nowadays, seem absurd.

[Bobboau]

so, we pick and choose wich rules we want to follow.

rules that are inconvenient for us were just regulations meant to set Isreal aside from other nations, but the rules that we can forge into a political weapon, oh, those were mortal law.

unless you can provide a passage somewere that specificly refutes all of the OT, exept maybe a few choice parts, or refutes a huge number of specific parts of it, I'm going to just sit here and beleive that you just haven't realy looked at the situation with an open mind, you automatically assume that all laws in the bible are moral, and thus any law that doesn't fit into your 21st century ethos you simply ignor/rationalise away.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Goober5000
In other words, God allowed slavery because to disallow it would probably have made things worse.  Israel might have said, "Forget this, I'm not giving up my slaves; I'll go find some other god to worship."

Sorry but I just don't buy it.

Are you trying to tell me that the same God who wiped out 3000 people for praying to the Golden Calf was worried about people worshipping another God and needed to do some touchy-feely weening of people off of slavery because he was worried about people worshipping another God?

If God didn't want people to have slaves he'd have done the same thing he did with every other thing he didn't want and burnt the lot of them if they dared to argue with him. I really don't buy this whole argument.

As for the rape thing lets go for the less ambiguous one then. The whole "rape yourself a new wife for 50 shekels" thing in deuteronomy 22:28? Are you trying to claim that this was also just a regulation then?

[Stealth]

Originally posted by Bobboau

unless you can provide a passage somewere that specificly refutes all of the OT, exept maybe a few choice parts, or refutes a huge number of specific parts of it, I'm going to just sit here and beleive that you just haven't realy looked at the situation with an open mind, you automatically assume that all laws in the bible are moral, and thus any law that doesn't fit into your 21st century ethos you simply ignor/rationalise away.

frankly, you can do whatever the hell you want, it's "no skin off my nose"...

but anyway.  there are verses that state that the old covenant was nailed "to the cross" with Jesus... in that Jesus' death signaled the end of the Mosaic covenant.  as i said though, the OT is still part of the Bible, because it's very imporant... it's in the old testament that prophecies regarding Jesus were given, and there are many examples people can learn from, recorded in the old testament.

[Stealth]

Are you trying to tell me that the same God who wiped out 3000 people for praying to the Golden Calf was worried about people worshipping another God and needed to do some touchy-feely weening of people off of slavery because he was worried about people worshipping another God?

If God didn't want people to have slaves he'd have done the same thing he did with every other thing he didn't want and burnt the lot of them if they dared to argue with him. I really don't buy this whole argument.

If you do believe in God, then don't try to justify what God did in the past.  Your reasoning is infinitely primitive in comparison to God's (that is, if you believe he exists even), so don't try to call out what God did that was right and what was wrong.  if you think about it, that's hilarious for you to try to do.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Stealth
but anyway.  there are verses that state that the old covenant was nailed "to the cross" with Jesus... in that Jesus' death signaled the end of the Mosaic covenant.  as i said though, the OT is still part of the Bible, because it's very imporant... it's in the old testament that prophecies regarding Jesus were given, and there are many examples people can learn from, recorded in the old testament.

But if the old covenant is gone then everything not stated in the new covenant is defunct so why in hell's name do christians constantly go on about the 10 commandments?

And even if it does say in the NT that they are still valid where does it say which other parts are valid?

[aldo_14]

IIRC there's a scientific opinion that parts of the Bible related to Israel were written in the Kingdom of Judah and thus reflect the ambitions of that kingdom (as Israel and Judah were synonymous).  There are a number of other arguements with regards to historical accuracy and bias within the OT, I believe.

I believe there is a similar issue / debate over the New Testament; I think the NT has been dated as written as much as 300AD - although AFAIK 130AD or so is a more accepted date - and was edited or modified numerous times before becoming canon.

I think that the Bible - in my reasoning regardless of the existence of God or not - is not written by (a/any) God, but by men.  As such, it is subject to the biases and errors of its writers, intentional or unintentional.

[Stealth]

Originally posted by aldo_14
I think that the Bible - in my reasoning regardless of the existence of God or not - is not written by (a/any) God, but by men.  As such, it is subject to the biases and errors of its writers, intentional or unintentional.

well obviously the Bible was written by man... I mean God didn't write the Bible and hurl it down to Earth... it was written by men who were inspired by God.  There are some statements and prophecies in the Bible that no one knew of at the time, that were found out/proven/fulfilled much later... man is not possible of forseeing the future, so...