If anyone is looking for a Good Book that endorses and promotes human slavery, Ebonmuse has a recommendation for you.
No cheating by skipping around, now. Just read the passages he presents and then heed the conclusions of Ebonmuse.
A Good Book that defends slavery
- Post author:Erich Vieth
- Post published:June 16, 2007
- Post category:Bigotry / Good and Evil / Religion
- Post comments:6 Comments
Erich Vieth
Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.
I've always found it more than a bit odd that Rev. King and many other important civil rights figures were Christians. How can you believe in equality among races and believe slavery is wrong if you believe in the bible? As Ebonmuse indicates, (to paraphrase), if the bible is God's words, and God is the true author, if slavery were wrong, he wouldn't have put in these verses. Ergo, God says slavery is a good thing, and slaves should bend do the will of their masters.
It leaves me with the same question: Why are so many African-Americans christian? Don't they read their bible that says they (or anybody else) should be happy as slaves?
You can be a Christian without accepting the rules of the Old Testament. Most denominations insist on it. E.G:
Crucifix: A graven image
(Although some denominations say that only the addition of a representation of Jesus makes it a graven image)"Jesus": Worshiping God by another name? Another God? Read the first commandment (or second, in some versions)Exodus 21: The second tablet Moses brought down from the mountain. Little in there that a modern Christian would want to obey!
I think it was here at DI that somebody pointed out that the African American culture (was forced to) relied primarily on "word of mouth" to teach. There is some sort of connection with preaching and word of mouth, I think was the rationale, and the bible gets mixed in pretty easily, especially in those days.
And now that I think about it, black atheists in slave times would not have fared well under the laws of the land, not to mention the laws of "natural selection".
A fun read, also, if you have a few minutes browse the 1000 comments there. Click here.
Hey Dan, add to that list:
"There Shall be no other gods before me." Yet Catholics the world over pray to a battalion of saints for various specialized tasks. They also fetish the graven images of these saints in statues and medallions and little sticky figurines that stand on your car dashboard and watch over you as you drive.
Devi writes:
"I’ve always found it more than a bit odd that Rev. King and many other important civil rights figures were Christians"
Well, probably they were just stupid and deluded.
Or maybe they read different verses. The ones about not returning escaped slaves to their masters, about there being neither slave nor free in Christ, the ones calling slave traders evil-doers. Or maybe they were able to resolve the tensions inherent in any literary text with a new interpretation, without proof-texting of individual verses out of context.
But no, they were probably just deluded, and despite all the sermons and bible-quoting and hymn singing, their real inspiration in the struggle for civil rights came from somewhere else, because they were just too dumb to realize what the Bible "really meant."