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The most religious area of the country is the south and that is the same area where slavery was most abundant. I'm not religious, but from what I understand, being a christian is support to drive your morals, behavior, your entire cultural outlook.
The entire country used to be very religious. The driving force behind the abolitionist movement was also religion. So there is no tie between being prejudiced and being religious.
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How do you reconcile that with the rampant slavery and jim crow era all the way up until it was legally struck down? The whole thing doesn't make sense and makes me understand religion, or the role religion plays in peoples lives even less.
I don't need to "reconcile" that because I don't have a vested interest in slamming religion the way many liberals do. There is nothing to reconcile. It's simple human nature. People in smaller communities tend to be more conservative. People in bigger cities tend to be more liberal. People in smaller communities tend to be more religious. People in urban areas tend to be more secular. All people the world over tend to be hypocritical.
It's like how do you reconcile the fact that the liberal universities who pride themselves on being intellectual and open minded are also the #1 place in the country where free speech is specifically outlawed?
The most religious area of the country is the south and that is the same area where slavery was most abundant. I'm not religious, but from what I understand, being a christian is support to drive your morals, behavior, your entire cultural outlook.
How do you reconcile that with the rampant slavery and jim crow era all the way up until it was legally struck down? The whole thing doesn't make sense and makes me understand religion, or the role religion plays in peoples lives even less.
Those were Democrats who supported that, and yes some where Christians.
The question should be, were they Christians first, and Democrats second? Or were they like modern day democrats, who are Democrats first, and Christians second?
Those were Democrats who supported that, and yes some where Christians.
The question should be, were they Christians first, and Democrats second? Or were they like modern day democrats, who are Democrats first, and Christians second?
Actually, they were greedy first, democrats second, and religion was just a way to justify the first two.
Let's not forget that the DNC had to vote on whether or not they could even acknowledge God in their 2012 convention.
And the vote to remove God actually won, but it would have had huge repercussions by the country.
I'm sure that in 2016 God will be removed by the progressives (the hijackers of the Democratic Party), who cannot tolerate a belief in a higher being, other than themselves.
The most religious area of the country is the south and that is the same area where slavery was most abundant. I'm not religious, but from what I understand, being a christian is support to drive your morals, behavior, your entire cultural outlook.
How do you reconcile that with the rampant slavery and jim crow era all the way up until it was legally struck down? The whole thing doesn't make sense and makes me understand religion, or the role religion plays in peoples lives even less.
Jim Crow was partly (not entirely) driven by non-religious science. The science of eugenics.
In Latin America some nations took the reverse of Anglo societies that promoted racial segregation, and promoted instead a "whitening" of their societies through increased European immigration combined with miscegenation.
Many early anthropological views of evolution had white people sitting at the top of the pyramid. Anthropological and religious views about race has since changed. Early Christians (before the United States was ever discovered by Europeans) adopted Aristotle's view of racial heirachy where some people were born to serve others.
In understanding either science or religion it is better to think of its as a continuing building of understanding rather than thinking of it as a big bang explosion in which all knowledge is had at once, all and forever, never undergoing revision.
Slavery itself predates Christianity. Actually, slavery only ended (though still exists in some parts of Africa) relatively recently in human history. The credit to its demise is in no small part to Christianity. From Popes to Protestants like William Wilberforce.
But slavery was acknowledged even in the New Testament by Jesus.
But we must distinguish between "doctrines" and "dogmas." Doctrines can evolve whereas dogmas are pretty much set in place. There are very few Christian dogmas. The Trinity is a dogma but the doctrine of priestly celibacy is not neither was slavery.
In science dogmas do not exist. Scientific theories may be more closely related to religious doctrines than to religious dogmas. In this sense science does not view theories being shown years later to be wrong a bad thing. This is how knowledge evolves science would say. Science objects to dogmas which are beliefs that can not change and must only be believed per the "wise men" of the past telling you it is so.
Christians were at odds with one another over how to interpret Scripture in either support of slavery or in support of abolition. But I would suggest to you that you can find agnostic and atheist scientists at odds with one another over how to correctly interpret certain evolutionary changes or processes to changes.
If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilization, it is that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery, including in some cases armed resistance.
Only the fact that the West had more firepower than others put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. Yet today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery - on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment.
It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who go back to mine history, in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization, have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire or similar atrocities in other times and places.
Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.
An ancient adage says: "Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof." But apparently that is not sufficient for many among our educators, the intelligentsia or the media. They are busy poisoning the present by the way they present the past.
Let me add that the abolitionist movement in the US was led mostly by Christians, from Thomas Parker, the Quakers, John Brown and many black and white preachers whose names are not familiar to us and in some cases lost to history.
Maybe the question should be why did the Enlightenment come to predominately Christian nations?
I have noticed just about everyone finds a way to defend something that benefits them personally.
The most religious area of the country is the south and that is the same area where slavery was most abundant. I'm not religious, but from what I understand, being a christian is support to drive your morals, behavior, your entire cultural outlook.
How do you reconcile that with the rampant slavery and jim crow era all the way up until it was legally struck down? The whole thing doesn't make sense and makes me understand religion, or the role religion plays in peoples lives even less.
Most american christians dont like to see the "icky" stuff that was done in the name of their religion. they simply say...those christians were not "real" christians. Only perfect Christians are real christians.
Christianity is a religion written by white folks FOR white folks. In other words, it's a white man's faith. Always was, always will be.
They didn't speak out against slavery because you can easily justify slavery with the Bible...even NOW. The Bible gives you all the liberty in the world to not only practice slavery, but to subjugate and mistreat your fellow man.
Christians know I'm right.
It's a sad thing that so many black people haven't come to the realization that they're Christians because their ancestral slavemasters were Christians. Otherwise, they'd still be believing in the typical African animist faiths, or some other ridiculous belief (that are btw, no more ridiculous than Christian beliefs).
We are free people in this country DESPITE the Christian faith, not because of it. The Bible said the same things it said in 1765 as it did in 1865...so you can't give the Bible any credibility on the topic of human rights and progress. We were freed only because it was strategically important to do so, and because Mr. Lincoln was an enlightened man.
And his enlightenment has NOTHING to do with his faith. In fact, the more devoutly religious one was back then, the more likely they were to support slavery.
During that time it was thought that blacks were sub-human, and to primitive a race to be able to learn.
Some effort was given to breeding as well as is done for horses and dogs. This wasn't any American thing as slavery under any idea of American rule lasted just 76 years.
This idea persisted from time of antiquity in Europe, the Middle East and any places black slave ended up. Blacks fought wars and the slaves were just the spoils of war.l So slavery began by blacks selling other blacks to the Muslims and slavery of blacks is alive and well in the Middle East today.
Of course today it is the USA that is to be blamed a country that didn't even exist at the dawn of slavery. blacks have been enslaved for more than 4,000 years. I have no idea when slavery first began, but can find evidence at 4,000 years with no problem.
Blacks were not and are not the only race to be enslaved either.
Slavery pre-dates Christianity.
The Irish were the first slaves in the New World. As time went on they sold at a discount to African slaves. Then the Brits had the brilliant idea of mating Irish children with African slaves to create higher value mulatto slaves.
Slavery is as old as mankind and predates all organized religion. Treating other humans as livestock has been rationalized by slave owners throughout history. Organized religions were built on the platform of superiority and inferiority.
Let me add that the abolitionist movement in the US was led mostly by Christians, from Thomas Parker, the Quakers, John Brown and many black and white preachers whose names are not familiar to us and in some cases lost to history.
Maybe the question should be why did the Enlightenment come to predominately Christian nations?
I have noticed just about everyone finds a way to defend something that benefits them personally.
Education and widespread literacy are the reasons for Western Enlightenment. Up until the 19th century, the church was still a yoke and a HUGE barrier to enlightenment.
It was only after many western nations divorced the church from their governments and forced religion to compete in the free market of ideas did the church become somewhat more open to enlightenment in the form or science, art, philosophy, etc...
When the church had ALL the power, they abused it. And we have a duty to remember how they behaved when they didn't have to compete in the free market of ideas.
My family on my dads mothers side were abolitionists and fought for the Union . They were Christians too helping others when they could your point is lost on me when so much was sacrificed to right a wrong? Remember slavery was a southern Democrat institution Republicans are the party of Lincoln liberators of oppression .
Remember too, that it was the Republican Party who developed the " Southern Strategy" to pander to Southern Democrats racism to win elections and turned the South.
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