Posted on 02/08/2015 7:41:51 PM PST by SkyPilot
People who wonder why the president does not talk more about race would do well to examine the recent blow-up over his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. Inveighing against the barbarism of ISIS, the president pointed out that it would be foolish to blame Islam, at large, for its atrocities. To make this point he noted that using religion to brutalize other people is neither a Muslim invention nor, in America, a foreign one:
Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
The "all too often" could just as well be "almost always." There were a fair number of pretexts given for slavery and Jim Crow, but Christianity provided the moral justification. On the cusp of plunging his country into a war that would cost some 750,000 lives, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens paused to offer some explanation. His justification was not secular. The Confederacy was to be:
[T]he first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society ... With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Maybe Ta-Nehisi Coates should go down to the Atlantic office and see if 'throwing gays off roofs' is a ‘high horse’ offense. A 'moral equivalent... a 'everybody does it'... type of pass giving.
I suspect killing men because they're gay won't be quickly excused as ‘all religions do it’...
Besides for all the pity party stuff here - it was Christians who stopped the slave trades.. well, not everywhere - it still goes on in the middle east. But Christians stopped the practice.
And it was Christians and Jews - blacks and whites - who stood the barricades in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s.
So yeah, when children are buried alive, Christians crucified, men burned to death while still alive, gays thrown off buildings, and women sold into slavery - I'm on my high horse - objecting. As we all should be - even Obama. Even so called 'liberals'.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has forgotten the war that killed the most Americans was the Civil War - a war fought by people like my family - to end slavery and preserve the Union. (Sadly, my family fought on both sides of that war - so I lack total purity - but you get the idea...) What Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote is thoughtful... he's making an effort - it's not as bad as I originally thought.
I think the author would find a way to defend odinga no matter what he said or did.
What astonishes me is the ignorance revealed by the comments. They seem totally ignorant of the differences in theology. It must be what they are taught in their colleges. To compare the KKK with the likes of ISIS, is like comparing the KKK with the Nazi movement. The KKK was, in fact, different things are different times. After the Civil War it was a resistance group fighting against the US army forces who occupied the South. It was suppressed but the need for it ended as more white sootherners gained political power through reclaiming the ballot. The Klan of the 20s was a largely middle-class movements centered more than Indiana than in the South, and was probably more anti-Catholic than anti-black. It broke-up because of factionalism and the decline in anti-immigrants sentiment after immigration restriction stopped the flow of immigrants from Europe. In general, its was more nativist than anything else.
Without William Wilberforce, no Lincoln. If anyone had asked Lincoln or anyone in his circle about Wilberforce, his name would have resonated like Ghandis did to the men of the Civl Rights Movement. Wilberforce, like Washingtons was the great name in the Anglo-Saxon world.
The British Empire was a paradox. In the 18th century, they made a fortune in the slave trade. Then in the 19th century they spent much of that fortune trying to end the slave trade, an institution join back —probably—to the stone age. The Arabs and the Bantu could never figure out what all the fuss was about. To them it was as natural as pornography is to Americans today.
Fooking stoopit and looking backward for relativism and justification for today’s barbarism or as a device to deflect from tue horror.
Obama fooked up in his conflation and apples aren’t hemlock plants.
The total existence of is-lame, since its inception, has been one of barbarism, slavery, subjugation, death worship and idiotic costumes like making women walk around in cadaver bags.
Their hatred of the other white meat is unholy as well.
To even bring Nazis into the conversation is hateful.
They at least tried to unite with their Persian brethern, lost through the centuries...
Edelweiss, Edelweiss. ...Edelweiss. ..
It’s a mistake to get bogged down in the historical stuff.
The REAL story is that Hussein reacted to the burning of a man alive by making EXCUSES and pointing the finger at others.
His “fellow” Christians.
Who would that be?
Seriously, the clown and his cohorts never shut up about it.
i think the author is a liar. first he quotes politicians of these several era’s, not christian ministers or theologians. I hear Imams all day everyday preach violent Jihad. Big difference. Also, the excerpt below from Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America Cornerstone Speech Savannah, Georgia March 21, 1861. The author doesn’t site the speech. nothing he states in the speech is christian. he invokes the creator which deists and other non Christians have done since the beginning of Jesus life. and no where in that speech is there any mention of Christianizing slaves. that wasn’t even in George Wallace’s (D) Speech. which yes he believed in segregation as most all southern democrats did. Again, not a minister.
excerpt:
It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made “one star to differ from another star in glory.” The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws.
Stephens went on to argue that the “Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa” could only be accomplished through enslavement.
Pointing out that Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something similar to what ISIS is doing now does not make ISIS any less barbaric, or any more correct.
Really? Why point it out then?
For the record, the south was Democrat, and these southerners were talking about democrat beliefs about blacks and not about Christian beliefs about blacks.
On the day of atonement slaves would be freed and debts be forgiven.
Leviticus 25:8-13 states:
"And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years.
Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.
A jubile shall that fiftieth year be unto you: ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of thy vine undressed.
For it is the jubile; it shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field. In the year of this jubile ye shall return every man unto his possession."
Liberals tell the same lie every day, hoping everyone will believe the lie. White Christian people did NOT introduce slavery; Mohammedan traders sold Africans as slaves.
And still the blacks adopt Mohammedan names, religion and dress. Talk about Stockholm syndrome.
Definitely one of obamas’ brothers-—a huge LIAR. It runs in the family.
Actually, the Year of Jubilee only applied to Israelites who had sold themselves into servitude because they had no other recourse in paying their debts or taking care of themselves financially. It did not apply to foreign born slaves.
Most slaves were people taken in warfare, and, slaves did have some rights to protect them from gross mistreatment. Slavery was a common part of the ancient world. I don’t totally understand why God allowed the practice in Isreal, but I do get that it was a practical reality. Also, there was no racial inferiority implied toward those who were slaves.
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