Be that as it may – where does it say that the woman has to consent or that, if she doesn't, her decision is to be respected? Because anything less than that is rape, however you dress it up. And even if one says that this was because of the times, then we come back to a situation where the
Bible stories show women as generally being of less value than men (as a slight aside, my father used to make sure that he'd lecture his wife and two daughters often on how women were made from Adam's rib and were, therefore, less important than men, since Adam was made directly by God etc etc). Now times have changed and either modern western attitudes of equality are right or the
Bible is right. If it's the former, then the
Bible is of its time, but not of this time. And thus we return to the question of how an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent god could be involved in such a situation, because if times have changed, that suggests that we have improved on the original and, if God created the original, then we have improved on God.
I don't believe the Bible teaches the inferiority of women at all..just that we have different roles and responsibilties than men. One is not better or less than the other. I'm sorry your dad pulled that line on the women in your family. He was wrong.
So what of Lot's story and Job's and Abraham and Issac? You haven't commented on those.
Didn't know I was supposed to
But here you're just perfectly illustrated another issue – there are as many different interpretations of the
Bible and as many different theologies as there are Christian churches, denominations, sects and probably even preachers (or adherents). It's quite likely that no two people in the world believe exactly the same thing, even within a single Christian group. Who is right? They can't all be right. And why, if the god of Judeo-Christian tradition is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent, did he create a situation that would create such confusion? Since god is all-seeing and all-knowing, he not only knows everything that has happened but everything that will happen. So God did what God did in the full and certain knowledge that we would be where we are today. Similarly, God created sin and set up the Eden situation, knowing what would occur. Before that (according to the
Bible) God created the world – that's a world with earthquakes and volcanoes and hurricanes and tsunamis etc. In other words, God created a world that He knew would would kill millions of people, including tiny children. If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then He created the world knowing that, at one point, for instance, the Asian tsunami would occur, killing hundreds of thousands of people, including tiny children. Now why would people want to worship a being who has behaved in such a way?
And that's without even asking the question on the wider scale of all religions (all of which than have the same situation of their own sub-groups).