Slavery: How Christianity Makes Us Worse

 It has been argued that Christianity makes us better more "moral" human beings. But does it? It may make some people better in some ways, but it at times provides the sheepskin that allows better than anything else "man" to be a wolf to his fellow man, all while justifying the worst we can do to each other as being necessary to show our love for a God - a God that threatens to torture us for all eternity if we don't prove our devotion to Him by defending our brand of religion by killing anyone who doubts our commitment to our "faith" if need be. 

While many people like to believe that Christianity is a religion that spreads peace and love like a hippy movement from ancient Rome, it is also a powerful lens for distorting moral truth for whole cultures and societies. Just consider how it justified the brutality of slavery for centuries, even as people around the world had been outlawing it as immoral six centuries before Jesus arrived. 

 First, to see how Christianity can make the greatest sins look perfectly moral, we need a primer for how genocide is so often justified as perfectly moral in the Bible by how we began to personify "good" and "evil" in the characters of God and the devil. 

In the Ancient Mesopotamian religions, there was a war between the gods of chaos and the gods of order. Used as the glue that held societies together, religions championed themselves as the way of honoring the one to "stay with us," and fighting the other, banishing it from their midst. These opposing forces were seen as working in tandem. Human sacrifice was used to keep the gods of order appeased. If upset, the gods of order had an army of troublemakers that they would send to wreak havoc.

 Our penchant for single answers over many funneled the human mind into monotheism. When it did, these opposing forces, which had previously been seen as groups of competing gods, were turned into the devil and God, both of which are mere anthropomorphic versions of the words “evil” (d-evil) and “good” (Go-o-d). The chaos of Evil and the goodness of Order (or the devil and God) are like the two wolves that are said to inhabit each of us, and all of us collectively. 

In the European version of the story of our human and spiritual experience here on Earth, our bodies are like the cells of one body, with all homo sapiens forming the seamless garment of our human (i.e., Catholic - which means "universal") flesh. Using the Bible as our looking glass, our different skin colors constitute the “many colored coat” of Joseph that clothes our naked souls in the flesh curtain we call our bodies. 

And, using a Native American perspective, our mind constitutes the two wolves that are always fighting each other inside of us. One wolf is darkness and despair, or what the Christian calls the devil and thinks of as hell, and the other is light and hope, or what the Christian calls God and feels like heaven. The former is a form of slavery and death, while the latter is sold like freedom and eternal life. And the one that wins is the one we feed. But notice how Christianity can feed one on an individual level even as it feeds the other on a cultural level.

Some who believe in God see science as the devil, and unbelievers as his minions (except when science is used to support racist ideas found in the Bible and practiced by Christians). And some who do not believe in a God or gods see religion as the devil, whose followers drink blood and worship a dead man whose story only came to life nearly a century after he had been executed as a heretic and a criminal, by the leading priests and politicians of his own day.  Christians claim this story is the source of all moral absolutes, even though it was the foundation for justifying slavery for four hundred years before it was used to condemn it (and then used to support racism). But if Christianity is a valid cure for the sins of humanity, for helping humans to see the error of their ways better, then why does all of its supernatural vaccines fail to show us the error of our ways, and bring us together in one happy harmonious family?

 In the antebellum South, rather than unmasking slavery for the evil it was, as Harriet Beecher Stowe finally did by writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, Christians used their own supernatural story book, the Christian Bible, as the corner stone upon which slavery was accepted as moral and just.  Here, we see clearly how the claim that Christianity offers a humanity a divine glimpse into knowing what is right from what is wrong, is actually practiced in a way that is indistinguishable from what the serpent in the Garden of Eden was doing with Adam & Eve: deceiving them! Christianity, more than any other source of "moral truth," allowed for the transubstantiation of the pure evil of slavery to appear perfectly moral, and even a necessary part of God's divine and always moral "will" - for it was teaching Christianity to heathens and savages who needed to be saved. Saved from what? The fires of hell! Praise Jesus! 

In Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind, the Wilkes family of Clayton County, Georgia, are wealthy, extremely well educated and cultured, and both white and extremely Roman Catholic. At one point, they pray the "Our Father" and the line "forgive us our sins." Yet they never notice that the affluence they enjoy as southern plantation owners is the direct result of the "sin" of slavery they practice as something justified by their Bible and their Catholic Church. If anyone had pointed out that their greatest "sin" is the slavery they depend on, they would've been considered insane or in league with Lucifer.

Of course people claim "we can't judge those in the past by the standards of today." But this is pure horse crap, for two reasons. The first is that, since Christians claim their religion reveals moral absolutes for the purpose of making us more moral in our daily lives, they are thus claiming their religion was given to humanity by God for the express purpose of teaching us right from wrong. But with slavery, it did exactly the opposite! Rather than seeing the naked face of slavery for the evil it is, their religion merely masked slavery to justify it as not only moral, but offensive to their God to consider it otherwise! 

And any attempts to claim that we shouldn't judge people from a different era using a moral standard different from the one they were using to justify committing the greatest immoralities imaginable is simply an attempt to deflect attention away from the fact that Christianity not only failed miserably in doing what Christians claim it alone can do - that is, make us more morally enlightened - but did the very opposite, and made us far worse, by providing a moral justification for slavery. 

The second reason is because there were plenty of people who were condemning slavery as evil and immoral, even in America at the time of the signing of the US Constitution, yet Christian preachers across the country either refrained from adding their voices to the condemnation of slavery, or mostly defended the institution as being morally justified because it was practiced in the Bible. And since Jesus never expressly condemned it, he must therefore have supported it!

 Then comes the line "AS WE FORGIVE THOSE WHO SIN AGAINST US." And how did they "forgive" their slaves for the "sin" of failing to work as hard as they required? Brutally! They just never realized how their God was answering their prayer with the coming Civil War, forgiving those slave owners with the same brutality with which they "forgave" their own slaves. Or as Lincoln would declare, for every drop of blood drawn by the lash,  God would require atonement with an equal one spilled by the sword. 

But why did all of the supernatural sacraments that Catholics ingest, including what they believe to be the actual flesh and blood of their own omnipotent God at least once a week, fail to reveal the true "evil" of slavery, when revealing true evil is what Christians claim their religion is for, and can do better than any other religion in history? Why did Christianity fail to reveal how truly evil slavery was that enriched plantation owners for four centuries in America before some Christians, mostly in the North, began to finally ignore those passages in the Bible that explicitly support slavery, and reinterpreting the Bible in the same way slaves had begun interpreting the Bible - as condemning it?

It is not as if there weren't plenty of non-Christians who knew fully well just how evil slavery really was. A quick look at Wikipedia shows a while bunch of times and places where slavery was condemned as evil. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom) The Persian emperor Cyrus the Great established the first record of human rights in the history of mankind in what is known as the Cyrus Cylinder, for example, freeing approximately 50,000 Jewish slaves upon his conquest of Babylon in 539 BC. During the Holy Roman Empire, the Sachsenspiegel, the most influential German code of law from the Middle Ages, condemns slavery as a violation of man's likeness to God in 1220.

Even Catholic popes had a sense that slavery was evil, but not necessarily so evil that it couldn't be practiced by Christians of non Christians. Pope Gregory I (590-604)bans Jews from owning Christian slaves but not the other way around. Pope Zachary (741-752)bans the sale of Christian slaves to Muslims, purchases all slaves acquired in the city by Venetian traders, and sets them free.In 873, Pope John VIII declares the enslavement of fellow Christians a sin and commands their release.  In 1080, William the Conqueror prohibits the sale of any person to "heathens" (non-Christians) as slaves, but not to Christians. In 1245, James I banned Jews from owning Christian slaves, but allows them to own Muslims and Pagans. 

Why were Christians allowed to own slaves, as far as popes were concerned? Well, for the same reason so many parents trusted their children with priests who later raped them - because Christians are a better sort of slave owner, because they have the moral "truth" straight from the horse's mouth (the horse in this case being God). 

(In the Catholic Church, by the way, the percentage of pedophiles is the same as the general population. While this means that Catholic Church isn't any worse than any other institution when it comes to having pedophiles within its ranks, it also means that leading parents to trust priests more than public school teachers (especially by hiding its own pedophiles and failing to throw them out of the priesthood) makes their children easier targets.)

In America as well, long before the Civil War, there were people who understood slavery to be evil, but they weren't Catholic or even Christians. Africans and Native Americans certainly did NOT need Christianity to see how evil slavery was, they needed Christianity to NOT see how evil slavery was. In a message to Congress, Thomas Jefferson called for criminalizing the international slave trade, asking Congress to "withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights ... which the morality, the reputation, and the best of our country have long been eager to proscribe." Importation and exportation of slaves was made a crime in 1808 under the US Constitution with the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves^[93]

Despite clear awareness of how evil slavery was, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was passed, which required the return of escaped slaves to their owners regardless of the state they are in. That same year, the US Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford  that black slaves and their descendants cannot gain American citizenship and are not entitled to freedom even if they live in a free state for years. 

But again - why did all of the supernatural sacraments that Catholics and Christians in general claim to ingest, including what Catholics believe to be the actual flesh and blood of their own omnipotent God at least once a week, fail to reveal the true "evil" of slavery, when revealing true evil is what Christians claim their religion can do better than any other religion in history? Why did Christianity fail to reveal how truly evil the slavery was that enriched plantation owners for four centuries in America before some Christians, mostly in the North, began to finally ignore those passages in the Bible that explicitly support slavery, and reinterpreting the Bible in the same way slaves had begun interpreting the Bible - as condemning it? 

  In the same way, Christians see that their God is justified in treating humans on the whole no better than Southern Christian plantation owners treated their African slaves, from his willingness to punish us brutally to killing us all, and even raping a virgin and brutally torturing and killing her son.

But what kind of parent would do such a thing? And what kind of parent would watch another parent do such a thing, and then tell their own child it was their fault, and the murder was for their benefit, to ensure they obey, or else they’ll be hell to pay?