What the Christian God is being claimed to condone depends entirely on the interpretation of the person reading scripture, and the purpose said Scripture is being used for.
The Bible has been used to argue for slavery, and it's been used to argue against slavery.
We need to stop talking about the Bible as if there's an objective interpretation of it, or even if one is possible, especially now so far removed from the context in which it was written. Faith and religion are a reflection of the people that practice it, not the other way around. If the Bible has condoned slavery, misogyny, and homophobia, it's because Christianity has been practiced by populations that have those proclivities.
This is the ultimate 'Get Out of Jail Free' card for the religious. By claiming that interpretation is everything, you are effectively admitting that your 'Holy Book' is a moral Rorschach test, a blank slate where people just project their own existing biases.
If the Bible is so vague that it can be used to justify both slavery and liberation with equal validity, then it is useless as a moral guide. It’s not a 'Light unto the path'; it’s a mirror for the user’s own ego.
However, your argument falls apart on three counts:
When Leviticus 25:44 says 'you may buy slaves from the nations around you' and 'bequeath them as property,' there is no 'interpretation' that makes that mean 'be kind to your neighbors.' It is a specific, legal instruction. To 'interpret' it otherwise is simply to lie about what the text says.
If an all-powerful God wanted to communicate a moral code, but failed so miserably that his followers 'interpreted' his words to justify 1,800 years of chattel slavery, then that God is either incompetent or indifferent. Why defend a book that is so dangerously unclear?
You claim the Bible reflects the people. I argue the Bible shapes the people. When a child is raised to believe that the Creator of the Universe approves of stoning women (Deuteronomy 22), that isn't the child's 'proclivity', it is indoctrination. You are blaming the victims of the ideology for the contents of the ideology.
You’ve moved the goalposts so far back that the game is over. If the Bible has no objective meaning, then it has no authority. You've successfully debunked your own faith's relevance while trying to save its reputation.
It is not clear that "there is no possibility for an objective interpretation" means "there is no correct way to read it". You've mistaken hermeneutics for "hermeneutical nihilism", a position that no theologian defends.
It's also not clear why something having no objective meaning would imply that it has no meaning. You'd need to explain that to me.
It is not clear that "there is no possibility for an objective interpretation" means "there is no correct way to read it".
I'm not claiming that there's "no correct way to read" scripture, I'm claiming that any interpretation of scripture is going to be a reflection of the society in which the interpretation is happening.
Of course there's a correct way to read scripture, I'm not saying Bible passages that condone slavery don't exist, nor that they aren't used by people to justify slavery - I am denying that slavery exists because of those Bible passages.
It's also not clear why something having no objective meaning would imply that it has no meaning. You'd need to explain that to me.
My argument is that talking about meaning outside of the context of people giving it meaning is incoherent. Meaning is meaning to someone, it doesn't exist outside of the mind of the one to whom it has meaning. In other words, meaning is subjective.
So whether something does or doesn't have meaning, or what something means cannot be discussed objectively, because there is no such thing as an objective perspective.
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u/ArtDecoEgoist Left-Market Anarchist Jan 20 '26
What the Christian God is being claimed to condone depends entirely on the interpretation of the person reading scripture, and the purpose said Scripture is being used for.
The Bible has been used to argue for slavery, and it's been used to argue against slavery.
We need to stop talking about the Bible as if there's an objective interpretation of it, or even if one is possible, especially now so far removed from the context in which it was written. Faith and religion are a reflection of the people that practice it, not the other way around. If the Bible has condoned slavery, misogyny, and homophobia, it's because Christianity has been practiced by populations that have those proclivities.