Christianity's Relationship To Slavery And Racism

[First Draft] 

Yesterday, Michael Beverly posted this:

"@InspiringPhilosophy‬ says, "Christianity ended slavery." This is like a man who's quit beating his wife saying, "I quit beating me wife."

Mike and Than's argument is like if this same man, after he stopped beating his wife, declared, "I ended wife beating in the whole world!" Mike and Than are racist bigots -- for those who say I'm too harsh or "can't read their minds" I say this: "They can read books and history and refuse to do so or worse, refuse to be honest about this issue." THAT is what makes them racists." ----- In reply, an "alt" account for an anonymous Christian asked this:

"Where's the study that shows it was the intrinsic christianity that is directly responsible? He certainly wouldn't accept this weak correlation for any negative consequence of Christian behavior." 
- @goldenalt3166

  ==== In reply, I offer this: "The intrinsic Christianity"?

"weak correlation"? Let's really think about this. "Christianity" is many things. Among those many things, ... It's a category of religious clubs operating on a common theme. It's predicated on the claim that the Biblical Hebrew religion, as defined by Hebrew religious texts, ... was the foundation upon which Christianity was built. From the Hebrews, the "Jesus" of Christian legends... inherited his views. From "Him", Paul inherited his views. From Paul and Jesus (and various other men) Christians inherited their views. The Hebrew religion taught that it was perfectly A-OK with "God" to actively participate in chattel slavery, just so long as those slaves were the sub-human-humans known as "foreigners". Jesus, in the so-called "Christian" texts, agreed. He endorsed it. Paul never bothered to refute it. As later expressions of "Christianity" developed, ... They DIRECTLY inherited those views from that clearly documented transmission of pro-slavery ideology. We don't need to speculate or draw strained and nebulous lines of transmission. Even the Christians who participated in the Transatlantic slave trade admitted it. In fact, not only did they get those concepts and "moral values" directly from the pages of their cult manual texts and traditions, ... Those cultural values were heavily reinforced (made to be deep and durable) by the MAGICAL THINKING inherent to Christian culture. This is how that works: "I feel it in my heart ... that this is the will of God". "I feel the Holy Spirit guiding me in this". They reasoned that way because Christianity trains people to reason that way. They train people to SUBMIT to the "moral authority" of their collective. They train people to BELIEVE that the influence of religious culture (which is influencing their EMOTIONS, and shaping HOW they think, in order to help religious leaders dictate WHAT to think) ... is "The Holy Spirit" ... "indwelling" and "guiding" them. When someone thinks that an infallible and HOLY "Spirit" is "revealing" perfect truths to them, ... This automatically means they have a BOX inside their HEAD. That box is created by those very same religions. It's labeled "never question or criticize anything in this box" ... "under penalty of death or worse". Additional warning label, on that same box? " ... also, doubting, criticizing, or rejecting this stuff would mean you are a bad person". This allows HUMANS to insert perceptions of "truth" and "values" into vulnerable people's heads. Christian sects psychologically engineer a powerful and benevolent voice delivering "truth" to willing recipients.

This prevents "righteous minds" from preventing, discovering, and overcoming the mental programming that is going into that box. It wasn't "atheists", or "progressives", or "satanists" that created that system of insidiously unethical and powerfully effective thought control. That system traces directly back to the texts that all Christians ADMIT it traces back to. But where did those "bible" writers get it from? And WHY is it an ironically NATURAL development? Human neurophysiology, psychology, and sociology. It's all just humans ... behaving entirely per the laws of physics. -The very same "laws" Christians credit to an "intelligent" designer and "law giver".

Let's gain further perspective on how this happened. The reason why various "Conservative" Christianities push HARD on the disgusting "lowly sinner" propaganda ... is because they want people to accept abuse as "grace". "Grace", in Christrian bibles, is a word translated from an ancient word that meant "undeserved kindness".

People beg for scraps from "the master's table", when they feel unworthy to eat, but are still compelled to eat. "Master"-minds only feed those scraps to people who accept their role as unworthy "dogs". -Thus solidifying the master's power, in the master-slave paradigm, because "grateful slaves" never outgrow their chains. Instead, they learn to celebrate their chains as "the ultimate freedom", because it frees them from the social, ethical, and personal responsibilities that come with someone (anyone) owning their own life. It works the same for Muslims and other similar religions. In fact, just the other day, a Muslim bragged to me about how "free" this has made him. This is why Christians (and people in similar religions) accept zero responsibility for any harm their religiosity causes others. For them, the responsibility is "God's", because they see themselves as his willing puppets. "Through me, God speaks". "Through me, God acts". "Don't blame me. In matters of faith, I only say and do what the Father tells me". This is the essential Stockholm of Religious Syndrome. Dependent minds identify with their captors to such an extent that they lose all other sense of self. This is the natural consequence of having an "external locus of identity" ... and being born into (or lured into) a system built to seek, foster, and exploit that vulnerability. Now, let's take a look at that same system from another vantage point. Traditionally, within that social construct, ingroup members' worthiness of respect, love, health, and existence ... are valued much greater than anyone else's.

THIS is the very spirit of racism.

None of its iterations are intrinsic to anyone or anything, unless we only mean that literally all manifestations of physics are deterministic. Such religions spread as complex viral memetics that adapt to each culture and brain they infect, and then alter the brains (thus altering the minds that emerge from them) to create a more durable and intractable symbiosis between the virus and host. As an ever-mutating and highly contagious mind-virus, the manifestations *of* said strain (of the Abrahamic genotype of mind-virus) ... have very often manifested in human populations with various forms of bigotry, irrationality, and violence. These have included the creation of the concept of skin-color-based othering. Christianity created this concept of "race". And honestly, this should not surprise us. In part, it traces back to the mantra "all men were created in the image of God" and that "our worth comes from this". "Image" is an appeal to what we see. It's an appeal to aesthetics.

This common form of human moral intuition is the point of this rather clever comedy skit:

This traces to the idea that the emotional highs (and lows) people experience due to sensory stimuli are "spiritual" and morally significant. When someone is white and they were raised in a white-only or white-predominant society, ... Such cultural experience will (for most people) foster an aesthetic reflex that causes their brains to release more feel-good neurochemicals for their ingroup, including the superficial "beauty" of their ingroup. -Inversely, they would experience more feel-bad neurochemicals towards anyone else. This reveals the danger inherent in the mantra of "created in the image of God" combined with the idea that people get their worth from that image. Some faces will be seen as more "divine" than others. The concept of "image" is, in a sense, very polemic. It is as much "black and white" as our positive and negative feelings. This also manifests as a spectrum, as some people's perceived image will be greater than others. Extra-pretty faces will evoke a stronger surge of neurochemicals than mildly pretty faces.

This will engender greater "intuitive" regard, which religious cultures train people to think of as "spiritual". People are being trained to regard their emotional experiences as moral intuition. This is a problem worsened by scientific illiteracy about Evolution. When we understand how evolution caused this problem in the first place, we can become mindful and clear about this reflex within ourselves.

This point of knowledge can empower us to rise above that reflex. - At least, to some significant extent. However, religious minds are trained to mistake those sensations as "spiritual" and "spiritually significant". Thus, this forms the basis for their "moral intuitions,"; which Christian religions say are the morals that their "God" wrote on their hearts, and then reaffirmed via "the Holy Spirit". In reality, they are under the influence of powerful neurochemical responses. These responses are (to a large extent) written, directed, and exaggerated by religious cultural conductors.

This is a great example of what it means to say "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Such control systems have had thousands of years to hone their powers of manipulation. You see what they want you to see. And you will feel about it ... however they want you to feel about it. When it came to seeing outsiders as worthless, ... This was absolutely core to Hebrew Biblical religious culture. In this respect, the Christian apple did not fall far from the Hebrew tree. As is commonly known, the "Biblical" Hebrew texts reveal a deeply xenophobic, ethnically racist, religion-based racist, and national-identity-based racist *cult*ure of Master-Race-ists. They were religious extremists. They took "identity politics" to violent extremes, while imagining that an invisible Spirit-Daddy wanted them to think and behave in those ways. These elements were core to Biblical Hebrew culture and theology. That psychosocial phenomenon mutated into sectarian variations, until one particular mutated version instigated a rapidly changing branch of divergent mutations. That new chain of mutations was expressed by the various (mostly anonymous) writers in the late-first and mid-second century. That process continued on through the 4th century of our backdated calendar; gradually morphing into something crudely approximate to what we call "Christianity"(ies) today. Eventually, the dawn of "modernity" rose to shine on humanity's horizon. An amassing number of humans were finally reaching past our species' barbaric infancy. Thus began the age of the Secular Enlightenment. Secular just means "humans thinking independently from the pressures of religious (aka "magical") authority"] Secular humanism combines that freedom with *compassion, * inclusivity, * and personal accountability. These traits were significant departures from traditional Christianity, which historically restricted social and emotional investments to their ingroup. Under the influence of this powerful shift in societal paradigm, ... Infected hosts began to express a new set of attitudes and behaviors The human body was finally maturing past vulnerability to the most adverse effects of the disease. However, religious minds, by nature, need "permission" to mature. Thus, it was a necessary mutation for host minds to retcon religious history. They needed to reinterpret their ideological texts. They needed RetCon "God", "Faith", and "Bibles". They needed to imagine that these new moral ideals were their religious culture's original moral ideals. They need to "believe" they inherited these ideals from an ancient and mystical source. Today, we can see this playing out in real time, as we observe "Conservative" Christians repeatedly losing Civil Rights battles in America. After each loss, ... Most of the losers4Jesus quickly: * jump into the winner's circle (where a mix of progressive deists, theists, and atheists stand), * pat the actual winners on the back, * smile BIGly, * and then point at the few diehard Losers4Jesus who remained standing in the losers' circle, * to proudly exclaim "We Winners4Jesus sure taught them a lesson!". -As if they weren't among the losers progressive minds just finished trouncing; each and every time. Although currently, America is in our "Empire Strikes Back" episode, due to a resurgence of aggressively cancerous versions of "Christianity"; codenamed "MAGA".

If that version wins via hijacking the American political and economic system, The human body will not recover. It would quickly lead to WWIII. From there? The end of all sentient life on Earth. It would be the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. It would be "The End OF Days" that rabid, authoritarian *CULT* has been foaming and salivating about for thousands of years.

The stakes could not be higher. And I can't think of a more poignant moment to illustrate the problem, than when Michael Jones himself said (roughly two years ago), "The Holocaust was actually a good thing, because it resulted in (some) people coming to Christ". "Progressives" are the Resistance. They are the manifestation of natural antibodies against The Disease. This is why The Disease keeps railing against "naturalism". Because RATIONALITY is a direct threat to any disease predicated on supernaturalism (aka "magical thinking"). This is why I keep asking every "Righteous Mind", ... "Do you really understand which side of the war you're fighting for? Are you really sure you want this to be your legacy? Are you really so sure you're ok with all the suffering and death you're helping to cause, in nonconcenting people's lives? Do you understand how much more suffering it will take to bring about the End of Days? Are you really so sure that's what "love" looks like?