When civil war was brewing in the US, both sides made their arguments for and against slavery, and both sides used a book that they believed supported their position. One side used , On the Origin of Species the other used the Bible.
Can you guess which is which?
Abolition
The abolitionists used Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species to argue that slavery was wrong.
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species sent shock waves around the world when it was published in 1859. The suggestion that all human beings, of whatever race or color, share a common ancestry, had an especially seismic impact on a country teetering on the brink of civil war, as Randall Fuller shows in The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation.
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A number of prominent American scientists at the time argued that God had created black people, brown skinned and white people separately, and each of them were different, had different capacities, and there was a hierarchy. Some went so far as to suggest that black people were a different species, and that they were not only different, but inferior. These scientists were praised in the South and provided the perfect rationalization for slavery. Darwin’s argument that all living things shared a common ancestor provided the abolitionists with a great rebuttal of the dominant, American science of the time.
And here:
What is the relevance of all this to abolitionism? At the time, it was debated whether humans had a single origin or several, with each race being separately created. The multiple-creation school, polygenism, was popular with apologists for slavery. If, as they supposed, the Adam-and-Eve creation produced whites, but other races derived from earlier and inferior acts of creation, then whites were justified in applying a different moral standard to people of nonwhite race, who were not created in God’s image. Polygenists sometimes saw blacks as subhuman intermediates or even as members of a different species, justifying their subjugation and enslavement.
But if humans had a single origin (monogenism), as Darwin proposed for other species, then all human races were genealogically connected: Blacks were every bit as human as whites — equivalent to distant cousins — and slavery became morally untenable.
Pro-Slavery
Meanwhile, the white Christians of the Bible Belt used the Bible to argue that slavery is moral.
From Alexander Stephen's Cornerstone speech:
They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.
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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.
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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. This stone which was rejected by the first builders “is become the chief of the corner” the real “corner-stone” in our new edifice.
That last bit references this Psalm, leaving us in no doubt of the man's religious position. Psalm 188:22 The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.
James Thornwell was an American Presbyterian preacher and another man who spoke on how slavery was good.
The parties in the conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders. They are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground – Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity at stake.
He saw the fight of slaver owners against abolitionists as that of Christians against atheists - and the Christians were the slave owners.
A couple more quotes:
[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God ... it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation ... it has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts.
— Jefferson Davis, President, Confederate States of America
... the right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example.
— Richard Furman, President, South Carolina Baptist Convention
How Christianity Wants To Repaint History
Christians have decided to exactly flip reality through 180 degrees, and want to pretend Christian was on the side of the abolitionists, and Darwin supported the slave owners.
The protests and riots that erupted across the United States following the death of George Floyd started a new chapter in the long history of racial discrimination and reconciliation. One chapter often goes unnoticed in that history: the racism of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Race-based discrimination has multiple sources, many of which preceded Darwin, but evolutionary theory gave “a powerful push to a scientific version of racism that still impacts us today,” said John West, vice president and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.
It is not true, but that does not matter. They have an agenda, and the truth is quickly thrown aside in the promotion of that agenda.
The Implications
Think about what this means in the wider context of Christianity...
If Christianity is willing to play fast and lose with the facts - to re-write history to what it wants to be true, and just ignore what really happened, what doers that tell us about the Easter story?
Sure the gospels tell us there was an empty tomb, but is it true? Or is this just the version that Christians back then wanted to be true, so that was the one they wrote down? How much of the gospels is just Christians writing what they wanted to be true, regardless of whether it really is? All of it?
We have no way to tell. We know for sure that Christians will ignore facts as and when convenient, as ferengi has proved on this thread, and that means we cannot trust anything in the gospels. For all we know it was all made up.
If you want two great reasons to reject Christianity, here you go:
- Christianity supported slavery
- Christianity pretends it did not
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