It's simple. If you want to present the history of abolitionism as not being a product of religious thought based on The Bible, come up with an alternative literature of an age and demonstrated influence to have produced the abolition of slavery written on another basis.
I haven't found anything except the opposite.
That the history of Christianity also contains defenses of slavery, all of those I've read based, primarily in classical Greek philosophy, Aquinas' confusing and baroque Aristotelian categorization and justification of some, not all, slavery, especially. If he had stuck to the scriptures, he'd have had a far harder time justifying it, especially the words of Jesus.
Or there is the justification of slavery based on an incomplete reading of scriptures, such as Paul sending Onesimus back to Philemon*, doesn't change the fact that what abolitionist literature there was, not to mention the movements to end slavery, are almost exclusively the work of Christians who cited their religion as their motivation. I have yet to find anyone in the relevant period which led to abolition who based their arguments on materialism.
If you want that to be an atheist abolitionist movement, that will have to be written by atheists based on some other foundation. I will note that no one has come up with a single thing since I offered to promote an atheist abolitionist literature, yesterday. Go ahead, put up your citations and links.
* I am sending him back to you: will you receive him as my son, part of me? I should have dearly loved to have kept him with me: he could have done what you would have done - looked after me here in prison for the Gospel's sake. But I would do nothing without consulting you first, for if you have a favour to give me, let it be spontaneous and not forced from you by circumstances!
It occurs to me that there has been a purpose in your losing him. You lost him, a slave, for a time; now you are having him back for good, not merely as a slave, but as a brother-Christian. He is already especially loved by me - how much more will you be able to love him, both as a man and as a fellow-Christian! You and I have so much in common haven't we? Then do welcome him as you would welcome me. If you feel he has wronged or cheated you put it down to my account. I've written this with my own hand: I, Paul, hereby promise to repay you. (Of course I'm not stressing the fact that you might be said to owe me your very soul!) Now do grant me this favour, my brother - such an act of love will do my old heart good. As I send you this letter I know you'll do what I ask - I believe, in fact, you'll do more.Philemon 12-21
Not the same thing at all. Considering the world into which Onesimus would be escaping, in which there were no free states or Canada to flee to, it might have been the best chance the guy had. Which is another problem. As some have pointed out, slavery in the First Testament under The Law was different from Greek or Roman slavery, which was different from the serfdom that Aquinas was almost certainly talking about, and which was far different from the later slavery in Europe, the British Empire and North America. Using the same translations of words for different things, some much worse than others. Which isn't true of the language of abolitionism, which simply calls for freedom and in which everyone was talking about the same thing.
Just so long as they don't try to claim deists and transcendentalists in the process...
ReplyDeleteI've always found the assertion of deism rather odd as an atheist phenomenon, as if a deists wouldn't believe in a deity, a Creator, even. To cite a hands-off God as forbidding enslaving other people, that's an interesting idea I don't quite see but I'd have to see a "deist" write it out. I've never encountered an actual "deist" and no one whose beliefs fit the definition of that word.
DeleteTranscendentalists were hardly materialists. The closest I know of a prominent atheist who had any involvement with abolition is Monure Conway, except he became an atheist late in the Civil War,after he made a rather bizarre and pudding headed muddle of an overture to the Confederate states, for them to maintain their independence in exchange for abolition of slavery. He would seem to have lost much of his former support in the abolitionist community, as it were. That his son also died and he obviously became angry about that might have been the thing that motivated his hostility to religion after that. Before that he was more in line with Emersonian transcendentalism than the more interesting lines of Thoreau or Emily Dickinson, who I think was the most successful of all of them. I've tried over and over to warm up to Emerson and I just can't do it.
He's best known today for claiming to have read letters from Jefferson to Thomas Paine, letters which no one else seems to have ever seen, in which he makes all kinds of anti-Christian and anti-religious statements which are at odds with his many, many other letters and unlike any of the extant letters to Paine, in which he doesn't seem to be very interested in discussing religion with him. Frankly, I think either someone duped Conway with forgeries or Conway made them up. It doesn't keep people from "citing" them afterwards and up till today. In almost every such use of Jefferson I looked into, he's misrepresented.
I have tried to look for materialist advocacy for abolitionism and am coming up with nothing. The real hotbed of Abolitionism in that period was populated with Quakers and Congregationalists and Presbyterians among white people, but even more so black people, both free and former slaves who, in every case I've read, used religion as their justification, the words of The Declaration that The Creator made them free and equal, included in their arguments.
Yeah, it's funny though, if you look at the atheist sites, the only examples they bring up are people like Emerson, Garrison, et al. None were atheists, so they twist a lot of stuff around to make them into some sort of secular, non-religious persons. QED!
ReplyDeleteI couldn't refrain from commenting. Perfectly written!
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