Wed 18 Feb 2009
Well, I’m back on the east side of the country. It is rather nice 
I will feel more normal when I am in the north, as well as the east, though 
I am still sick, which is ridiculous, but I can’t really do much about that. Water, tea, vitamin C, etc. I even ate two garlic cloves the other night. The newest symptoms are sore throat and fever. I’m coughing a little less. But enough about that.
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One thing that I have been thinking about is ownership of persons; do parents *own* their children? Do husbands *own* their wives? Why do fathers give their daughters away - or worse, sell them as property? I’m trying to find a passage in the New Testament about the punishment of slave traders. I’m not imagining I saw such a thing, am I? I know I saw it at one point.
When are people individuals before God?
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My computer went into Best Buy for repair; they sent it back saying they reset something in the BIOS, “fixed known issues.” I plugged it in, worked fine for a few hours. The next day, the same problem was happening again and I couldn’t use it. Now it works sometimes but it’s mostly broken. Hopefully a new battery and power supply will fix the problem.
I have heard rumors that Best Buy is changing their warranty. No longer will the lemon law (4th repair gets you a new machine) apply unless there are 4 repairs for the same problem. If that’s so, it’ll really stink. But I haven’t heard it right from them, and the warranty I bought several years ago can’t be changed now because of new policies, as far as I know. The work on the software, the power supply, and the battery are covered by the warranty, though, which is very nice
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Posted by Bonnie under Uncategorized
February 19th, 2009 at 1:44 am
You need some comments, even if it is not from a new reader. Even when I was new to you, I was anything but new. This is nothing new, so far!
This then would be appropriate then, in terms of how anyone should “own” anyone else, in my humble (possibly God-driven) opinion:
Consider yourself owned by you and your Creator. Again, this is nothing new. It is “another reminder” from some who at least *wants* to understand enough to keep trying.
That is all for now! (I just sneezed again! Yeshu!)
Bless you, Bonnie, forever, if I have anything at all to say about it. I hope and pray that I do.
♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
–g♥
February 19th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
“Thou art He that took me out of the womb; that didst make me hope when I was upon my mother’s breasts. … Thou art my God from my mother’s belly.”
(A psalm’s answer to your question, When are people individuals before God?)
February 19th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Oh and I do not know of any scripture about slave-trading, but here is an interesting one from Moses’s Law: “You shall not hand over to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you. He shall live with you in your midst, in the place which he shall choose in one of your towns where it pleases him, and you shall not mistreat him.”
Actually I do know a scripture about slave-trading, but it is rather obtuse and can’t be what you meant: “I saw another angel come down from heaven … and he cried mightily … ‘Babylon the great is fallen … for her sins have reached to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities. … The merchandise of gold and silver … and slaves and souls of men.’ “
February 20th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Then again — I wonder if you were remembering this instruction in Paul’s first letter to Timothy: “The law is not made for a righteous man but for the lawless … for [various crimes, and] menstealers … .”
And here is the statute of Moses’s Law Paul may have had in mind: “He that steals men and sells them, or is found holding them, he shall surely be put to death.”
February 21st, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Ah, I knew Porter would probably figure this out. Usually Paul defers to Moses as the source of anything he says, or someone in the succession of near-perfect men who were sinners just like us. Paul was not writing down (again) the Law for us because we do not know what God wants. He clarified misunderstandings, and re-explained what they had forgotten. If it’s in the New, it should be in the Old as well. And slaves of the unlawfully bought-and-sold kind, like Porter (Moses) is describing here, are not the ordinary slaves (which concept I reject anyway); they have been stolen in the first place. I bet that’s the answer, or most of it. Yay!
Here’s something I’ve been looking at: they used to have the 50-year Jubilee (Yovel is a word I ran across) which mostly leveled the playing field for everyone, reset the financial imbalances (like our tumbling stock market does to itself every 100 or so), and freed all the slaves (and that spells ‘fats’ not ‘fast’) that had become indentured (not the born-slaves though). It was the equalization for our differences, and it happened every seventh sabbath-year. When they stopped observing it with solidarity, things began to crumble. It required two successive years of not planting any new crops, instead of only one.
Probably totally unrelated the slave-trader thing, but then again maybe not. And I do think this is the answer to what you thought of: owned people and lifelong slaves were not synonymous entities back then. We should not treat family members as either kind of slave, at any rate!
–g♥
March 10th, 2010 at 12:15 am
Nice Website. You should think more about RSS Feeds as a traffic source. They bring me a nice bit of traffic.