With presidential politics filling the news each day, and Senator Obama's strong showing among democrats, now might be a good time to reflect on the continuing demise of racial prejudice in the 140+ years since the end of the Civil War. Only problem is, that brings us back to "God's Inerrant Word - III." Why on earth would an all-knowing and merciful God inspire the writing of things that for centuries gave justification to something as terrible as slavery?

There's a good treatise on that called, "The Civil War, Slavery, and the Bible" contained within the article, "The Uniqueness of the Christian Experience" by Edward T. Babinski, and can be found at, http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ed_babinski/experience.html. But a warning, the article is lengthy, so unless you like to plow through a lot, do a FIND for the treatise title.

Two things in the article caught my eye. First that it took the Southern Baptists longer to apologize to American blacks concerning their view on slavery than it did for the South Africans to apologize for apartheid. And two, the following paragraph pretty well shows where the Southern Baptists got their stand.

""At God's command Joshua took slaves (Josh 9:23), as did David (1 Kings 8:2,6) and Solomon (1 Kings 9:20-21). Likewise, Job whom the Bible calls 'blameless and upright,' was 'a great slaveholder' (Job 1:15-17; 3:19; 4:18; 7:2; 31:13; 42:8...Slavery is twice mentioned in the ten commandments (the 4th and 10th), but not as a sin ['Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, or his male slave, or his female slave.' Exodus 20:17]...God tells the Jews in Leviticus 25:44-46, 'You may acquire male and female slaves from the nations that are around you. Then too, out of the sons of the sojourners who live as aliens among you...they also may become your possession. You may even bequeath them to your sons after you, to inherit as a possession forever [i.e., the slave's children would be born into slavery along with their children's children, forever].'"[37] So, slaves from "foreign" nations were treated as "possessions...forever."

Inerrant? Inspired?? Word of God??? C'mon!