re: Why can’t we separate Conservative values from religion?

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They do, however, originate from God.

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Which one?

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They do, however, originate from God.

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What if you are dyslexic and the child of a lesser God, like you believe in Dog.

I was not aware that we had some difficulty presented by the task of separating Conservative values from Religion.

I'm not certain that this is a problem.

We have a genre of Literature focused on Existentialism that deals with the problem of finding morality and goodness in an atheist worldview that highlights the absurdity of human existence. The protagonist in that literature finds a way to act from an atheist standpoint, but acts in perfect alignment with Religious values.

The Plague by Albert Camus comes to mind.

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Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Alan Guth, and Edward Tryon to name a few. I see atheists claim this on the regular, citing "quantum mechanics" as a basis for it.

Of course, the phenomenon we see with quantum mechanics takes place in an environment in which time, space, and matter DO exist, so it's obviously a complete apples and oranges comparison that holds no water. But there are no lengths that people will stop at to deny a Creator if they don't want to be confronted with one.

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Quantum mechanics is something, not nothing. I suspect you misunderstood/confabulated such quotes that the universe literally sprang out of "nothing".

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So there had to be a creation event

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Oh really?

Using that same logic I can say "Science also says matter can't be created, so matter has to have always existed (no creation event)".

You can't just focus on the potential impossibilities of one theory then demand that means we accept its opponent when its opponent very well may also have similar potential impossibilities.

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Yes, but Mohammed was a military conquerer.

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Irrelevant to the original criteria stated of "impact on history".

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Jesus was a blue collar tradesman who never fought a single battle, never travelled more than 200 miles from where he was born, had only a three year spiritual ministry, yet we've found more (extra-Biblical) writings about him than the emperor of Rome (Tiberius) during his lifetime, and in the modern world our calendar still revolves around his life.

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Mostly true, but Jesus had[b]zero[/b] contemporary writings of his existence. So the "during his lifetime" addition makes that line false.

Also, while there wasn't a man named Jesus leading military campaigns spreading Christianity by force, the Northern Crusades in the 11-13th century did forcibly convert pagans in Northern Europe, which accounts for/explains the vast majority of the modern day Christian population.

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Lots if you take that idea seriously, which would take a thread of its own.

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You have the floor.

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Ah, but you can internally manufacture thought process to deny what you don't want to accept emotionally.

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People's desires and emotions can bias their reasoning in order to accept/reject a proposition. But the process is unconscious unless, taking the example of a husband not wanting to accept the fact that his wife is cheating on him, consciously accepts that she is cheating on him and still invents reasons to believe she isn't. There are unconscious draws, for whatever reason, to believe or not to believe something, and those unconscious draws certainly do influence conscious behavior. But the draws are still unconscious.

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Am I to disregard the problem on that basis?

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Have we even established there is a problem to begin with (that there is a bad afterlife we're trying to avoid)?

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but how is the uncaused first cause logically absurd?

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My phrasing was "both *sound* logically absurd". Phrased differently, both sound highly unintuitive.

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"Their chattle slavery wasn't exactly like the chattel slavery America practiced."

Okay, cool. But it's still chattel slavery.

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Yeah, and an employment contract and kidnapping victim may both be labeled "unfree labor", but the circumstances are substantively different.

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Also, FYI, a lot of the points you made also apply to American slavery. Legally you couldn't kill a slave in most southern states. So saying the Bible also disallowed it is weak sause.

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Again, it's pretty much apples and oranges by comparison. The slaves in America had to escape and try to find a place that would take them in hundreds or thousands of miles away (and not get caught during their long and dangerous escape and travel) as the only way to be free, and they were not typically treated as human beings. Even the laws were not set up in their favor. For the first 100-150 years of slavery in America, it was more typical than not that killing a slave was not considered murder, but more like destruction of private property with some fines attached. When states started making killing a slave "with malice" a crime, the entire system was set up to keep the slave owners from being convicted. People of color couldn't testify as eyewitnesses against the slave owner, and the slave owner could always just say the slave was killed during discipline, which would get them acquitted anyway. There was also racial prejudice that was common, where white juries would not convict a white person for killing a black slave.

None of that was the case in Israel. If a slave owner killed his slave, he was put to death, himself. If he injured his slave to the point of even knocking out a tooth, the slave was to be set free. Slaves could also escape to any city and get refuge; no one was able to extradite the slave back to his master. That's a huge difference from American slavery. That fact alone makes all the difference: if Israel slavery was just like American slavery, then slaves would have had easy ability to leave if there were abuse, but they didn't, because slavery was typically entered into voluntarily for the support of the person (either to pay off debts or due to poverty, and even those bought from other nations typically needed support).

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Trying to argue the same God who drowned children, targeted them in the 10th plague of Egypt, ordered the Hebrews to kill child POWs, somehow had a kind version of chattel slavery is laughable to the point of being cartoonish.

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It may be to you, but you're either ignorant of those circumstances or are purposefully mischaracterizing them to make them more cartoonish than they were.

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Again, it's pretty much apples and oranges by comparison. The slaves in America had to escape and try to find a place that would take them in hundreds or thousands of miles away (and not get caught during their long and dangerous escape and travel) as the only way to be free, and they were not typically treated as human beings. Even the laws were not set up in their favor. For the first 100-150 years of slavery in America, it was more typical than not that killing a slave was not considered murder, but more like destruction of private property with some fines attached. When states started making killing a slave "with malice" a crime, the entire system was set up to keep the slave owners from being convicted. People of color couldn't testify as eyewitnesses against the slave owner, and the slave owner could always just say the slave was killed during discipline, which would get them acquitted anyway. There was also racial prejudice that was common, where white juries would not convict a white person for killing a black slave.

None of that was the case in Israel. If a slave owner killed his slave, he was put to death, himself. If he injured his slave to the point of even knocking out a tooth, the slave was to be set free. Slaves could also escape to any city and get refuge; no one was able to extradite the slave back to his master. That's a huge difference from American slavery. That fact alone makes all the difference: if Israel slavery was just like American slavery, then slaves would have had easy ability to leave if there were abuse, but they didn't, because slavery was typically entered into voluntarily for the support of the person (either to pay off debts or due to poverty, and even those bought from other nations typically needed support).

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It's still slavery. Trying to claim it's not slavery because it wasn't as bad as American slavery ignores the point: it is slavery.

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But "slavery is bad" is just your opinion, right? Because you're certainly NOT talking about objective morality according to your claims.

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This is an exercise in examining the futility in discussing "objective morality", specifically as it applies to the Bible/Christianity.

If objective morality exists, we haven't found the text describing it.

That raises questions about the existence of "objective morality". We are doing the "if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?" stage of the analysis.

THEN, there is the " is evaluating objective morality just subjective morality via subjectivity?" analysis, which we can't get to yet.

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Men could be set free after 7 years but women and children remained property. If the man admitted he loved his family and wanted them to leave with him he was treated like cattle.

Why are you lying?

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Here's the actual text:

"If you buy a Hebrew servant, he shall serve six years; and in the seventh he shall go out free and pay nothing. If he comes in by himself, he shall go out by himself; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master has given him a wife, and she has borne him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself. But if the servant plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,’ then his master shall bring him to the judges. He shall also bring him to the door, or to the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall serve him forever." -Ex. 21:2-6

What you are lying about (or I could be generous and say "misrepresenting"), is that the scenario you mentioned only happened if the master already had a female slave and he gave her to the other slave as a wife. This scenario assumes the female slave is already in a permanent slave status. If so, then the male slave already knows what he's getting into before getting married and having children, so that would be a voluntary arrangement.

In addition, if a woman was sold into slavery by her father for the purpose of being a wife to the master or his son, she had additional protections. If the master or his son didn't want to marry her, he had to let her go free without selling her, and he couldn't sell her to a foreign people if she wanted to remain a slave (Ex. 21:7-11). Regardless of why she was a slave, she was treated as a separate person under contract according to the law, which is why she and any kids had to stay behind if the husband wanted to leave. The text also specifically mentions a scenario where a husband and wife go into slavery together, that they both shall leave together. So, your characterization here seems to be purposefully muddled for effect.

Also, if by "treated like cattle", you mean the ear-piercing ceremony, then you are also misrepresenting that. It was a public, legal, and voluntary contract that the man was entering into based on his confessed love, and the ear piercing was an evidence of it (similar to wearing wedding rings symbolize the marriage covenant people enter into). And once someone was a slave, the legal protections mentioned previously go into effect. They were treated differently than cattle.