When you talk about the Church Fathers and early editors of the Bible as being the greatest sources of ethical solutions ever since: well, most influential, perhaps.  (But how much blood was spilled for that influence?)  If you mean the most intellectually satisfying… naaaaah.
As for Singer’s list: so what?  nullius in verba, and all that.But let’s get to the more substantive point.  Noone sane would claim that being a product of your time makes your claims irrelevant.  We do – as you hint – still take (say) Aristotle seriously as a political thinker, despite his beliefs about slavery.  (I’ll use Aristotle to stand for other comparable thinkers for the moment.)  But there’s an important further point.  Noone quotes lines from Aristotle and thinks that that’s sufficient: even avowed Aristotelians prod and poke and reconstruct the texts, and quite often disavow particular bits.  What’s valuable about him, and others, whether or not they’re fuzzy of face, is a methodology, rather than the exact words.  Ditto Kant, Mill, Hobbes, Hart, Arendt… anyone else you care to mention – up to and including saints and prophets.  A quotation might be the start of an inquiry, or it might be scaffolding in support of a claim – but it’s never a substitute for argument.  And if the argument is good, then it’s good without the backing of authorities.  It doesn’t matter that Aristotle took slavery for granted; we don’t have to, and there’s enough left over for The Politics still to be worth reading, and still to lead us down interesting intellectual routes.

Further, suppose someone wondered what an Aristotelian approach to politics might teach us about industrial relations.  (Odd, but you never know.)  Wouldn’t it be strange to go to the bits about slavery and decide that they’d fit the bill?  Wouldn’t that show a bit of a moral tin ear?  I think so.  In fact, it’d be perfectly coherent for a person to quote those bits in order to show where Aristotle went wrong.  But it’d be more likely that they’d just decide that Aristotle himself said nothing useful on the matter, just as he said nothing useful about the best way to treat psoriasis, and said nothing useful about how to rewire a house.  Sometimes, canonical texts are just useless.  Or maybe anything useful he did have to say is to be found in other parts.

And yet what Fouchs did was deliberately pick out those verses – out of 31000-odd in the Bible – that are mainly concerned about managing slaves.  That could mean one – or both – of two things.  The first is that those’re the best the Bible has to offer on the matter – which is as much as to say it has nothing to offer.  The second is that Fouchs genuinely thinks that they apply.  Noone – I assume – forced him to write the post he did; noone forced him to write on those verses in particular.  Yet he did.  And that’s quite perplexing.

Two other things.  One: the lack of comments doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means.  Most posts here get few or no comments, and it’s marking season anyway, so people might well have other things to do.  And generally, people are more likely to comment if they disagree – so it’s possible that a lack of comments means that people have just nodded in agreement and wandered off.  I have no direct evidence for the truth of these claims, but neither do you have for yours, so we call call it quits there.

Two: Using Churchill’s name would have diluted the rhetorical point because he does have a bit of a personality cult.  I could have chosen Enoch Powell, or any number of others, but Smuts was the first person to pop into my foetid lefty little head.  Infer about me from that what you will.

Crikey.  That went on for longer than I thought it would…

When Peter Singer went
in search of the origins of ethics, 11 of his 12 sources were men
with beards, three of whom died 2300 years ago and only one of whom
was alive in the last 100 years1. If living in a time
when slavery was considered morally supportable makes their opinions
irrelevant, then seven of his sources are ruled out. I wondered why
he mentioned them?

If learning from
ancient men with beards is like taking lessons in community relations
from Jan Smuts, perhaps that’s no bad thing. Smuts led a nation who,
in 1902, considered Britain to be a vicious, immoral enemy and turned
the majority of them into supporters of the British cause in WWII.
If you’re talking about his attitude to race, you could have picked
on Winston Churchill, but we don’t reject his wisdom because he was a
child of his age.

Reproducing the bible
verses from Fouch’s blog without mentioning his comments, are an
exercise in what I call the “Ricky Gervais school of exegesis.”
In this profound technique, one puts out a bible verse without
context or comment, and hopes that an audience who know little
history and less theology will look at it through 21st
century lenses and dismiss it as ridiculous. The low number of
responses to your post suggests that your audience are indeed better
educated than that!

As we’re only dealing
here with what people see as self evident, I’ll just offer this: the
writings of these men with beards from 1900 years ago, have been the
greatest source of solutions to ethical problems ever since. While
some think their opinions are no longer valid, no-one has so far come
up with a better system.

1 Peter Singer, Ethics,
1994.