Summary
Rightwing groups across the US are driving a wave of legislation to restrict books in school and public libraries, targeting content deemed “sexually explicit” or “obscene,” often affecting LGBTQ+ and race-related titles.
Texas leads with 31 bills and 538 book bans in the 2023–24 school year.
Proposed laws, like Texas Senate Bill 13, shift book selection power from librarians to parent-led advisory boards.
Critics, including librarians and legal scholars, warn these efforts amount to censorship, risk violating First Amendment rights, and reduce access in underserved communities.
Also no. It allowed servitude to pay off debts, but all debts were supposed to be forgiven after 7 years, and so it was strictly limited.
Where do you think the ideas that all humans are equal and deserve equal rights that reduced slavery in modern times come from?
Definitely not the Bible, which tells women to be subservient to their husbands and enslaved people to obey their masters. I am utterly uninterested in the moral lessons of a book written by people who endorse debt slavery. Which, I guess still needs to be pointed out, is bad! Even if it’s “only” 7 years!
I understand your position, but I respectfully urge you to study more history, all modern western ideas of universal human rights are based on or heavily influenced by the Bible. Dominion by Tom Holland, despite the terrible name, is a good source on the subject.
Also, sure, we are partially past it, but considering that until 300 years ago almost everybody considered slavery a natural right, a 3000 years old law limiting servitude to 7 years is VERY progressive.
You are not convincing my queer trans ass there is anything worth studying in there to guide people morally. I had that inflicted on me for the first two decades of my life and literally have PTSD from it.
The history can be interesting, and it’s something people accomplished in spite of what is in that book, not because of it.
I’m really sorry you went through that, I hope you can find healing.
I imagine it’s not much, and you don’t have any reason to believe me, but because of it I wouldn’t hesitate in protecting you in these dangerous times.
I believe you, I just think the average person doesn’t realize how damaging the Bible can be, especially taken literally. The use for it as a moral guide has long since been overtaken by philosophies like humanism, the same way that precise brain surgeries have eclipsed the trepanation practiced in the Neolithic.
The equality of women is indeed a point where the bible failed, but you can’t do everything right at once. I’m not a fan of the bible, but in it’s days, it was a good book that taught good values. Values that were better than society was at the time and it really improved society.
Abraham had sex with his (wife’s) slave Hagar to produce Ishmael – and both Hagar and Ishmael were then exiled after Abraham was able to conceive with his wife and produce Isaac.
Certainly not the kind of values I’d want for my family.
Also treated by the Bible as something bad.
Can you point to the verse that condemns that behavior?
There’s no specific verse condemning it explicitly, but the overall arc of Abraham’s story is that whenever he tries to be “clever” and fulfill God’s promise on his own there are bad consequences, in this case the soured relationship between Hagar and Sarah, the need of God’s intervention to save his son from death in the desert, and the origin of yet another people that would later antagonize the Israelites, the Arabs.
So, like, it’s just your interpretation?
Not just mine, AFAIK it’s the most common one.
I think you’re missing the point of this conversation a little bit buddy. Go back and read all of the comments you’ve replied to and see if you can figure out what you’re missing from the commentary.
I missed the context of banning books?
Not that I think anything in the Bible can be taken at face value, but especially numbers and doubly so, the number 7.
World created in 7 days. Forgive others 7 times or 70*7. Etc etc. There’s no reason to believe the law of the land was literally a 7 year limit on slavery.
Still bad, but servitude =/= slavery.
7 in the Bible is usually a symbol for completeness. The 70*7 specifically is meant to be “unending”.
It is very likely to really be a 7 years limit to debts.
And I would love if the Bible-thumping politicians proposed this debt limit for modern times, but they are all just hypocrites.
Is it just me, or these don’t seem to jive with each other.
Lol, bud… Just Google “slavery in the Bible”
You’re in denial.
Where do we think those ideas come from? The way you say that makes it sound like you don’t believe anyone could come to that idea without that specific religion’s religious text. That projection is, by far, probably the most frightening thing in this thread.
People are fully capable of being good without being forced to. Yea, most are stupid and plenty are nasty but to act like the ideas of baseline human freedoms must have come from the bible is so weird.
I’m not saying it’s not possible, but that’s how it happened in the Western world.
Would it later on happen “naturally” without it? Maybe; hard to say, we can only speculate since it’s not how it went.
But even from a “Christian” perspective, I would agree, yes it would; these values align with God’s will and He would have put these ideas in peoples’ heads even if the Bible didn’t exist.
Geez, so much for getting free will, eh?
There were scores of Christians who thought slavery was great. If the bible was really the ticket into being against it then it wouldn’t have happened in the first place. Instead we get The Americas™, a collection of stolen lands turned into a mire of plantations and now into prisons built on making said the prisoners work for pennies to prop up the rest of the country while many more “free” people are below the poverty line despite putting in their 40+ hours of hard, often physical, labour. Even people that are “paid decently” aren’t getting their fair share. Slavery coexists with the bible just fine, and in fact thrives more in more religious regions.
so, debt slavery?
Technically servitude is not the same as slavery, but still bad.
Considering that until 300 years ago most people considered slavery to be a natural right, a 3000 years old law limiting it to at most 7 years was VERY progressive.
but its practically the same thing. how progressive of the bible.
In that temporal and geographic context, yes, very much.