(urth) Oannes

[James Wynn]

> On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com 
> <mailto:danldo at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     The fact that we in the Western World do not take slavery, the murder
>     and rape of peasants by nobles, and so on as just "the way things are"
>     is due to the civilizing influence of Christianity.
>
>
> Thomas Bitterman wrote:
> You typed "Christianity" when you probably meant "the Enlightenment".
>
> On 3/21/2012 12:14 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
>> Indeed, no. I regard the so-called Enlightenment as a fundamentally 
>> Christian phenomenon -- admittedly in part a reaction against 
>> problems in the implementation of Christianity, its values were 
>> nonetheless fundamentally Christian. 

Whether or not the Enlightenment was powered by Christian ethics and 
world-view, I seriously doubt that the Enlightenment movement itself was 
the primary source behind the abolition of slavery.  As de Tocqueville 
pointed out in "Democracy In America", Christian principles had 
effectively abolished the unvarnished ownership of other humans for a 
thousand years until the 1440s when Portuguese traders discovered the 
slave markets of West Africa and imported them to Europe.  African slave 
trade was like a mutated virus that is reintroduced to a population that 
had lost the ability to resist it. It was treated as a special case. 
Even after its introduction, Europeans did not enslave each other during 
wars. European Christian ethics and world-view had abolished slavery 
before and it was inevitable that they would do it again unless the 
institution was permitted to constantly flee to new colonies of European 
powers.

Additionally, economics (not Enlightenment theory but mundane example) 
meant this relatively new and unique version of slavery was doomed. The 
enclosed experiment of the United States was proving that slavery 
impoverished the states that permitted it (De Toqueville offered the 
comparison of the affluence of Ohio to the poverty of Kentucky on either 
side of the Ohio River). Unfortunately, since slavery in Europe had 
become confabulated with skin color, it marked whole populations as 
former and potential slaves--as inferior by birth. And since the 
Southern states no longer had the option of selling their slaves away 
(as England and the northern states did), ending slavery in the American 
south would mean the masters would have to live with their former slaves 
as equals (something that Christian charity could have addressed, but 
which the Christian canon itself had no specific doctrine to deal with 
it). And that's why the last bastion of slavery required a very bloody 
civil war to be eradicated.

"When I see the order of nature overturned and hear mankind cry out and 
struggle in vain against the law, I confess that my indignation is not 
directed at my contemporaries, the authors of these outrages; all my 
hatred is reservered for those who, after more than a thousand years of 
equality, introduced servitude into the world once more." ~ De Tocqueville

J

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