Confederate Symbols

I like the idea of leaving the statues but including a real narrative in re to the person and the period.

I’d say yeah…keep the statues. But instead of putting them on pedestals and shining an light on them place them in a pit so they only half stand out of the ground. It’s one thing to remember them. It’s another thing to exemplify and venerate them.

Indigenous Americans may feel a little overlooked in that assessment, Unseen.

But it makes me ponder the issue of moral relativism. Do we forgive the contemporaries of the age on the basis of being the same as every other asshole?

jakelafort wrote:

Indigenous Americans may feel a little overlooked in that assessment, Unseen.

That, too.

But it makes me ponder the issue of moral relativism. Do we forgive the contemporaries of the age on the basis of being the same as every other asshole?

It’s not like nobody was pointing out the inhumanity of slavery at the time.

Yeah i have no clue what percentage were abolitionists but am guessing it was 5 or so. Fewer? With such a horrific albeit peculiar institution ya gotta conclude the zeitgeist was solidly pro slavery. And what does that say about human nature? Perhaps if civilization somehow survives our era will be looked at askance for having so little opposition to butchering animals and treating em like slaves. And the apologists for both eras are essentially the same. Blacks and animals are unthinking unfeeling and less valuable. Maybe i mentioned it here but i read a long biography bout Jefferson and one of the stories that stuck was how shocked the man of letters was to have received a well written and reasoned letter of science from a black man. Jefferson looked down on blacks as inferior. But i am guessing he wrote it off as an aberration of nature instead of questioning his fundamental assumptions.

It has been estimated that the members and ministers of the Orthodox churches in the South owned no less than 660,000 slaves.

Thomas Paine, in 1775, when he wrote his article on “Justice and Humanity,” was the first to demand emancipation in a lucid manner. The campaign for liberation of the slaves was therefore inaugurated by a freethinker, and triumphantly closed by another freethinker, Abraham Lincoln. In this manner did the Church abolish slavery. With characteristic disregard for the truth, the religionists have laid claim to Lincoln, which claim has been amply refuted; but we are still awaiting the Church’s claim to Paine as one of her devotees.

“And, truly, the case against Christianity is plain and damning. Never, during the whole of its history has it spoken in a clear voice against slavery; always, as we have seen, its chief supporters have been pronounced believers. They have cited religious teaching in its defence, they have used all the power of the Church for its maintenance. Naturally, in a world in which the vast majority are professing Christians, believers are to be found on the side of humanity and justice. But to that the reply is plain. Men are human before they are Christians; both history and experience point to the constant lesson of the many cases in which the claims of a developing humanity override those of an inculcated religious teaching.

“But the damning fact against Christianity is, not that it found slavery here when it arrived, and accepted it as a settled institution, not even that it is plainly taught in its ‘sacred’ books, but, that it deliberately created a new form of slavery, and for hundreds of years invested it with a brutality greater than that which existed centuries before. A religion which could tolerate this slavery, argue for it, and fight for it, cannot by any stretch of reasoning be credited with an influence in forwarding emancipation. Christianity no more abolished slavery than it abolished witchcraft, the belief in demonism, or punishment for heresy. It was the growing moral and social sense of mankind that compelled Christians and Christianity to give up these and other things.”

(C. Cohen: “Christianity, Slavery, and Labor.”)

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

It has been estimated that the members and ministers of the Orthodox churches in the South owned no less than 660,000 slaves.

What? Here in the United States when you invoke “Orthodox Churches,” you mean Eastern Orthodox or Asian Orthodox churches pretty much, as distinguished from the Roman Catholic Church.

Knowing that, what did you mean in referring to “Orthodox churches”?