The Logical Atheist

The Jewish festival of Passover starts at sundown today. Is this the holiday that praises Yahweh for repeatedly "harden[ing] Pharaoh's heart" in order to change his mind about freeing the enslaved Israelites?  Or is it the holiday that praises Yahweh for inflicting collective punishment on all  Egyptians through the horrible ten plagues, culminating in the smiting of every firstborn Egyptian? ( Exodus 11:4-7  - "And Moses said: 'Thus saith HaShem [The Name; that is, Yahweh, which you're not supposed to say]: About midnight will I go out into the midst of Egypt; and all the first-born in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first-born of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the first-born of the maid-servant that is behind the mill; and all the first-born of cattle. And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there hath been none like it, nor shall be like it any more.    But against any of the children of Israel shal...

Would it have been so difficult for Yahweh to have squeezed an 11th commandment onto those tablets? He's omnipotent, right? Did He have a decimal or even-number compulsion or something? "Thou shalt not enslave" would have been a good one -- not to mention truly pathbreaking. Slavery, after all, has existed throughout history and still does exist in Africa and the Middle East. It was in the modern West that abolitionism arose and achieved its goal.   The only reference to slavery in the Decalogue is in the 10th commandment, where we're ordered not to covet our neighbor's stuff, including his servants. In other words, if you want slaves, go get your own! Don't even yearn for your neighbor's! If it had to be 10, Yahweh could have eliminated one of the existing commands, such as the prohibition against taking His name in vain (whatever that means) or the order not to work on Saturday. (What if you enjoy working?) We could have managed without those, considerin...

Why didn't "Thou shalt not buy and sell human beings" make the ten commandments?

Why did Yahweh not forbid slavery? Did "the Eleven Commandments" not have the same ring? He must not have foreseen This Is Spinal Tap .

Would a good and just God countenance and even authorize slavery, sex slavery, genocide, and conquest?

Before anyone will be able to convince me that "Judeo-Christian" morality has been a great contribution to the world, he'll first have to explain why the Ten Commandments order us to keep the Sabbath and honor our parents, but don't prohibit us from keeping slaves or dishonoring our children.  He might also explain why we don't find this: "Thou shalt presume innocent those accused of an offense until proved guilty," seeing as how something like that appeared in the 18th-century BCE Code of Hammurabi hundreds of years before the Ten Commandments were said to have been given to Moses at Mount Sinai perhaps in the 13th century BCE: "If any one bring an accusation of any crime before the elders, and does not prove what he has charged, he shall, if it be a capital offense charged, be put to death." (For the record, the Israelites were not slaves in Egypt and did not escape to Canaan through the desert, stopping at Sinai to pick up the two tablets. ...