Perception for Today...Biblical Difficulties-Slavery

Hello everybody!

I'd like to continue on the Biblical difficulties topic today.  Last time, I talked about polygamy and how some people think that the Bible endorses it.  One idea that is more widely thought to be endorsed by the Bible than polygamy, however, is slavery.  This can sometimes be a hangup for some people in believing that the God of the Bible is good.  They think of how horrible it was when people in United States would abuse their slaves or how families would be torn apart as white men came and kidnapped people in Africa, and then they see that many people in the Bible had slaves and that Jesus commanded slaves to be obedient to their masters.  Seeing those things in the Bible, they then assume that the Bible endorses the kind of slavery that was rampant in the 1600s-1800s.  Is this really the case though?  Would a good God endorse taking a man from his family and cruelly force him into hard labor without compensation and without hope?  My thoughts after the jump.