Friday, June 12, 2009

The Great Christian effort to abolish slavery was slow, imperfect, and fraught with danger

The problem posed by slavery, according to many Northern politicians, was not so much the mistreatment of slaves (a theme that abolitionists emphasized), but rather the political threat to American republicanism, especially as embraced in Northern free states.

The Free Soil Party first raised this warning in 1848, arguing that the annexation of Texas as a slave state was a terrible mistake.


The Free Soilers rhetoric was taken up by the Republican party as it emerged in 1854.


The Republicans also argued that slavery was economically inefficient, compared to free labor, and was a deterrent to the long-term modernization of America.

Worse, said the Republicans, the Slave Power, deeply entrenched in the "Solid South" (i.e.,democrat), was systematically seizing control of the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. Senator and governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio was an articulate enemy of the Slave Power, as was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts.

In his celebrated "House Divided" speech of June 1858, Abraham Lincoln charged that Senator Stephen A. Douglas, President James Buchanan, his predecessor, Franklin Pierce, and Chief Justice Roger Taney were (i.e.,democrat party plot) to nationalize slavery, as proven by the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857.

Other Republicans pointed to the violence in Kansas, the brutal (democrat) assault on Senator Sumner, attacks upon the abolitionist press, and efforts to take over Cuba (Ostend Manifesto) as evidence that the Slave Power was violent, aggressive, and expansive.

The only solution, Republicans insisted, was a new commitment to free labor, and a deliberate effort to stop any more territorial expansion of slavery.

Northern Democrats answered that it was all an exaggeration and that the Republicans were paranoid.

Their Southern (democrat) colleagues spoke of secession, arguing that the John Brown raid of 1859 proved that the Republicans were ready to attack their region and destroy their way of life.

In congratulating President-elect Lincoln in 1860, Salmon P. Chase exclaimed, "The object of my wishes and labors for nineteen years is accomplished in the overthrow of the Slave Power", adding that the way was now clear "for the establishment of the policy of Freedom" — something that would come only after four destructive years of Civil War.

IF THE NORTHERN DEMOCRAT PARTY HAD PROVIDED LEADERSHIP INSTEAD OF EXPLOITATION OF THE VULNERABLE, THE CIVIL WAR WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED, AND THE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF LIVES WOULD HAVE BEEN SAVED

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Abolishing slavery - an enormous accomplishment (undercut by democrats both north and south at every step)

the Republicans (and cultural Christianity) abolished slavery

On this day in 1864, the Chairman of the Republican National Convention, Senator Edwin Morgan, opened the national convention. At the suggestion of President Abraham Lincoln (R-IL), he did so with a brief statement:

"The party of which you, gentlemen, are the delegated and honored representatives, will fall far short of accomplishing its great mission, unless among its other resolves it shall declare for such an amendment of the Constitution as will positively prohibit African slavery in the United States."

Inspired by Chairman Morgan's leadership, delegates made abolishing slavery part of the platform. And so, Republicans entered the 1864 presidential campaign determined to defeat the Democrats' pro-slavery policies once and for all. The 13th Amendment was passed by congressional Republicans seven months later and ratified within the year.

Friday, June 5, 2009

Islam and slavery in Medieval Europe

Muslim slave traders


The Islamic World was also a main factor in Medieval European slavery. From the early 700s until the early Modern time period (rough the 18th or 19th centuries) Muslims consistently took European slaves.
This slavery began during the Muslim Conquest of Visigothic Spain and Portugal in the 8th century.
The Muslim powers of Iberia both raided for slaves and purchased slaves from European merchants, often the Jewish Radhanites, one of the few groups that could easily move between the Christian and Islamic worlds.
As the Muslims failed to conquer Europe in the 8th century they took to pirate raids against the shores of Spain, southern Portugal and France, and Italy, that would last roughly from the 9th century until the 12th century, when the Italian city-states of Genoa, Venice, and Pisa, along with the Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, as well as the Sicilian Normans, began to dominate the Mediterranean.
The Middle Ages from 1100 to 1500 saw a continuation of the European slave trade, though with a shift from the Western Mediterranean Islamic nations to the Eastern, as Venice and Genoa, in firm control of the Eastern Mediterranean from the 12th century and the Black Sea from the 13th century sold both Slavic and Baltic slaves, as well as Georgians, Turks, and other ethnic groups of the Black Sea and Caucasus, to the Muslim nations of the Middle East.

The sale of European slaves by Europeans slowly ended as the Slavic and Baltic ethnic groups Christianized by the Late Middle Ages.

European slaves in the Islamic World would, however, continue into the Modern time period as Muslim pirates, primarily Algerians, with the support of the Ottoman Empire, raided European coasts and shipping from the 16th to the 19th centuries, ending their attacks with the naval decline of the Ottoman Empire in the late 16th and 17th centuries, as well as the European conquest of North Africa throughout the 19th century.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Many of the great Christian accomplishments have been plagarized by others

The idea that Islamic culture was once a beacon of learning and enlightenment is a commonly held myth. In fact, much of this has been exaggerated, often for quite transparent apologetic motives. The astrolabe was developed, if not perfected, long before Muhammad was born. The zero, which is often attributed to Muslims, and what we know today as “Arabic numerals” did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India. Aristotle’s work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims at all, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. Another Christian, Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873), translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac. His son then translated them into Arabic. The Syrian Christian Yahya ibn ‘Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one of his own, The Reformation of Morals. His student, another Christian named Abu ‘Ali ‘Isa ibn Zur’a (943-1008), also translated Aristotle and others from Syriac into Arabic. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate -- not by a Muslim, but a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia — by Assyrian Christians.

In sum, there was a time when it was indeed true that Islamic culture was more advanced than that of Europeans, but that superiority corresponds exactly to the period when Muslims were able to draw on and advance the achievements of Byzantine and other civilizations. But when the Muslim overlords had taken what they could from their subject peoples, and the Jewish and Christian communities had been stripped of their material and intellectual wealth and thoroughly subdued, Islam went into a period of intellectual decline from which it has not yet recovered.

Slavery in prechristian Rome - until the miraculous advance of Christianity


Romans inherited the institution of slavery from the Greeks and the Phoenicians [11].

As the Roman Republic expanded outward, entire populations were enslaved, thus creating an ample supply.

The people subjected to Roman slavery came from all over Europe and the Mediterranean.

Such oppression by an elite minority eventually led to slave revolts (see Roman Servile Wars); the Third Servile War led by Spartacus was the most famous and severe.

Greeks, Berbers, Germans, Britons, Thracians, Gauls (or Celts), Jews, Arabs, and many more were slaves used not only for labor, but also for amusement (e.g. gladiators and sex slaves).

If a slave ran away, he was liable to be crucified. ...............

Wednesday, June 3, 2009


11,000,000 Black Africans were seized in slavery by the West. Most survived and have a much better life than those in Africa.

14,000,000 Black Africans were seized in slavery by Muslims and the males were castrated, while black babies were murdered upon birth.

Ancestors of today's black Africans sold their neighbors into slavery, and many still do so today - Niger slave flees castration in the 21st century in Africa!!!

Black muslim Africa is still involved in slavery today.

Wake up, Black America!

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Christianity and the horrific failed states of Africa - wherever Christianity has gone in Africa, the best of societies have followed

The crocodile must not be fed with do-nothingism and denial
Failed states index

Christianity has led in the struggle up and out of the abyss of failed states

Monday, June 1, 2009

The great Christian abolitionists of the 18th and 19th centuries led a world of darkness up out of the abyss


Abolitionists repeatedly invoked the Golden Rule: ‘All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them' (Matthew 7:12).

Obeying this ‘Royal Law of Christ' involved looking at the world from the Other's point of view.

Abolitionist preachers urged their listeners to imagine themselves being enslaved.

The Baptist preacher, Abraham Booth, visualised himself, his family and thousands of his fellow countrymen ‘kidnapped, bought, and sold into a state of cruel slavery'. He was left with a sense of outrage. [33]

The maverick Quaker, Benjamin Lay, even kidnapped a child (temporarily) from its slaving-owning parents to help them see the distress their practice caused!

Thinking about the Golden Rule required people to consider how their actions impacted others, including African slaves on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Methodist, Samuel Bradburn, observed to his horror that though he had ‘always abhorred slavery in every shape', he had been ‘in some degree accessory to the Bondage, Torture and Death of myriads of human beings by assisting to consume the produce of their labour, their tears, and their blood!'

He asked God's pardon, and hoped that by boycotting sugar he could ‘make some restitution for my former want of attention to my duty in this respect'. [34]