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<blockquote
cite="mid:CA+Z2yj1zP+GA=go2Tod+sUoBSQeLR+Sep16NMokPLA2iez-qiw@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 5:17 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <span
dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:danldo@gmail.com">danldo@gmail.com</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
The fact that we in the Western World do not take slavery, the
murder<br>
and rape of peasants by nobles, and so on as just "the way
things are"<br>
is due to the civilizing influence of Christianity.</blockquote>
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<br>
Thomas Bitterman wrote:<br>
You typed "Christianity" when you probably meant "the
Enlightenment". <br>
<br>
On 3/21/2012 12:14 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAJ8=rtg8S06uRz61D_9tUpmUUG3xnCyyGOhPzS_w6OzHBURpkw@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">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.
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
"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<br>
<br>
J<br>
<br>
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