Defending Slavery With Jesus

LEST WE FORGET, Many slave owners in pre-Civil War America vigorously defended the institution of slavery by using the Christian faith to do it. It was a controversial issue for decades leading up to the war between the states, with attacks against slavery and defenses of it appearing everywhere. By transporting Africans to America, so the amazing argument often went, Americans were actually doing the Africans the greatest service, the ultimate kindness. Americans, heroically removing millions of poor benighted dark skinned creatures from the savage wildness of Africa, and bringing them to God's country, and giving them a productive life, and salvation through Christ. Who could ask for a better fate? Southern plantation owners were saving the poor darkies. Besides, slavery is condoned in the Bible, both in the Old and the New Testaments. Christ himself condoned slavery. Pre civil War conservatives were evidently as batty as they are today. Today Republican conservatives are fond of reminding us that many Democrats fought against civil rights for blacks. Indeed they did. Very conservative southern Democrats. Conservatism always is opposed to change, change such as gay marriage, and the Affordable Health Care Act. (Change happens anyway). Conservatives, both democrat and republican, fought tooth and nail the civil rights movement in the nineteen sixties, and today's conservatives deny that racism exists at all, except when Obama creates it,by talking about it, and therefore we shouldn't talk about it, or do anything at all about it. Another example of amazingly delusional thinking. It is sometimes nice to imagine a more intellectual future world in which primitive religions thousands of years old do not linger, insinuated, as they now are, much too deeply into human affairs for our own good.