How I learned that God doesn't exist.

@Zaphod42 This doesn't hold up because God created us in His image meaning we’re capable of knowing Him, reflecting Him, and relating to Him in a way the rest of creation isn’t described as doing. The biblical view of God is that His awareness isn’t divided like that. He’s not choosing between galaxies and you the way we choose between tasks. The idea is that He can fully sustain and know all of it at once, cosmic and microscopic, without strain. If a being exists that isn’t limited the way we are then the size of the universe doesn’t actually compete with our significance at all.

@ArkBallet Hence the aforementioned human centric view.

@Zaphod42 Of course it’s human-centric, the Bible is a text written to humans. It’s not trying to describe every corner of the universe equally, it’s trying to describe how humans fit into whatever the bigger picture is. Also, and this part is easy to miss, the Bible repeatedly de-centers humans in other ways:

It emphasizes that humans are small, fragile, temporary
It describes creation as vast and not dependent on us
It even has moments where God basically says, “you don’t grasp the scale of what I’ve made”

Your critique assumes the Bible is saying:
“Humans are the most important thing in existence, full stop.”

Some bible quotes for thought:

Psalm 8:3–4 - “When I consider your heavens… the moon and the stars… what is mankind that you are mindful of them?”

Psalm 147:4–5 - “He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name… his understanding has no limit.”

Deuteronomy 7:7–8 - “The Lord did not set his affection on you… because you were more numerous… but because the Lord loved you.”

@Zaphod42 @ArkBallet I like this whole conversation. Thank you.

@ArkBallet The bible is written by men, for men. Slavery is promoted and women are property.

@BlueSkyKing Yes, it’s true that the Bible describes slavery, polygamy, and women being treated as property, but that doesn’t mean God is endorsing those practices as ideals.

The Bible is an historical record of a deeply flawed ancient Near Eastern culture, not an instruction manual for how things should be forever. The Old Testament regulated slavery because it was the economic engine of the ancient world. Meanwhile, the New Testament planted the seeds to destroy it.

Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

God works with humanity as it exists because of Original Sin. God’s laws in the Bible often reflect a step toward an ideal, not the final form of that ideal.

@ArkBallet Like that one story about the two men who shoved a woman outside to satisfy an angry mob? I used to wonder why the bible told that story, and then I realized that it was literally just stating what happened. It wasn't justifying what those two men did.

@SinlessOnslaught Yeah that’s exactly it. The Bible doesn’t sanitize people. It shows the worst parts too. It’s showing how far things had fallen and how broken people could be. The broader narrative is about moving humanity toward something better, even if the people within the story fall far short of that ideal.

@BlueSkyKing Isn't not coveting slaves the first step toward not owning them?

@BlueSkyKing No, there is no morally defensible framework, past or present, in which one human being can justly be treated as property, inherited like livestock. If that’s the standard, then yes, parts of the biblical world fall short of it. When we read the Bible, we’re not reading a single, timeless ethical code dropped into history fully formed. We’re reading texts that emerged across centuries within the ancient Near East, a world where systems we would call slavery were not a marginal evil but the default economic structure. In that context, the Old Testament laws function less like endorsements and more like constraints. They regulate, limit, and in some cases humanize a system they never outright abolish. That’s morally unsatisfying to us, and it should be, but historically it’s not nothing.

You’re right about the Tenth Commandment. It reflects a society where households included persons alongside property. That’s not defensible by modern ethical standards. But it’s descriptive of that world, not necessarily the final word of biblical ethics.

In The New Testament emerges a set of ideas that quietly destabilize the institution from the inside. In texts like Epistle to Philemon, a slave (Onesimus) is no longer framed as property but as a “beloved brother.” In Epistle to the Galatians, the claim that “there is neither slave nor free” introduces a radical theological equality that cuts against the entire logic of ownership.

And I'm aware The New Testament stops short of explicit abolition, and historically, Christians have used both Testaments to justify slavery as often as to oppose it. The approach I take is to read it as progressive revelation, an unfolding moral trajectory moving, however slowly and imperfectly, toward greater human dignity. Another is to read it as a human document, shaped by its time, containing both moral insight and moral limitation.

So I’d put it this way: the Bible does not give us a morally sufficient account of human equality by modern standards. But it does contain the seeds of ideas that later generations used to argue against slavery, even if those seeds should have, from our perspective, been a fully grown tree much earlier.

@SinlessOnslaught To covet means to have a strong desire for something, especially something that belongs to someone else, often with an envious feeling. It implies wishing for something earnestly or inordinately.