I guess Dawkins is winning if they're having to pull out this to attack him.

I think most rational people know that there is a huge difference between quite normally feeling simply sorry about what has happened to some group in the past, and instead being somehow made to feel as if you are equally responsible for what has happened to some group in the past as the people who did whatever it was ...

Most white people probably have at least one ancestor who owned slaves or was involved in something we would now consider morally wrong

Could be right in my case.I only found out recently about great great uncle Mick. Apparently Mick became hanged in Ballarat in about 1875.Seems there was some misunderstanding over the ownership of a horse.

So it's technically true there are no convicts in my family history.Mick was only in gaol for a few weeks,then he was released so they could hang him.


Far more shameful to learn was that a nineteenth century ancestor in county Clare was a bishop.

The whole thing is a nonsense of course, but I wonder if Richard Dawkins realizes that it was only in religion, that same religion he so despises, that his ancestors’ slaves eventually found relief in their shackled misery, a unique voice of their own, and a sense of shared community.

Or even how in Britain particularly, the industrial revolution inflicted immense distress and social upheaval, and that it was only the second half of the nineteenth century that saw a gradual return to stability and normality, almost wholly through a re-emergence of Christian values and morality, to such a successful degree in fact that Churches overflowed by the early 1900s, with news papers faithfully recording and reporting every word of its ministers.

British or English society always also maintained a fairly rigid class system, and I wonder how this may influence his conclusions. Before the industrial revolution it mainly comprised landlords, professionals, small independent farmers and merchants-entrepreneurs together with their financiers-bankers, with the remainder, the majority by far, and throughout well aloof from slavery, the rural and artisan poor.

And the planters, first primarily part of the merchant-entrepreneur class and later the bourgeoisie or landlords, most of which became fabulously rich, were of course the only elite small group to actually own slaves, with many remaining in the colonies permanently.

DaveD wrote:Are you sure about that? If any of your female ancestors were in service, there's a chance that some rich bastard made her pregnant, then had her married off to avoid scandal. All you (and I) can say is that we're unaware of any money in our families.

None of us was good-looking enough.

Mazille wrote:Must make for a weird gait when running away, though.

My family was too poor to have a gate.

Rick wrote:The whole thing is a nonsense of course, but I wonder if Richard Dawkins realizes that it was only in religion, that same religion he so despises, that his ancestors’ slaves eventually found relief in their shackled misery, a unique voice of their own, and a sense of shared community.

Fuck. Fuck a fucking shitfuck.

Owning Christian slaves was outlawed within Christendom in the Middle Ages. The original rationale for the moral and legal validity of the transatlantic slave trade was that West Africans were not Christian, so it was OK to own them.

That is, the justification for the transatlantic slave trade was a religious justification. There was initially no argument that Africans were "inferior" as - at the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade - West Africans had a number of strong states down to the Ivory Coast and beyond. We know these states were the equals of European civilisation at the time because Christians traded for slaves instead of taking what they wanted by force, as was the norm for the vanguard of the One True Faith whenever they could get away with it.

As for the alleged "relief in their shackled misery, a unique voice of their own, and a sense of shared community" that Christianity supposedly imparted to these poor ignorant little children of the jungle, they were already provided these things by their own religion, from which they were forcibly converted.

This conversion, forcible though it was, should have had the result of freeing Christian slaves. In a display of staggering hypocrisy that will be all-too familiar to most of those reading this thread, the original justification was changed to another religious justification, the "Curse of Ham".

The economics of the transatlantic slave trade consisted of bartering European manufactured goods and refined metals for human life. Over the course of several centuries, this had the effect of causing development in coastal African nations to stall in favor of predation on neighbouring states. Eventually, the technological prowess of Christian Europe had advanced far enough beyond that of the African States to make plausible another justification for the transatlantic slave trade and maintenance of a generational slave class in the Americas.

Any guesses what that was? Yes, that's right mate. Racism.

And to counter this history of cruelty, exploitation, rape, hypocrisy, misery and pseudoscience, you tell us that Christianity gave the slaves someting that they already had before Christianity took it away?

Fuck. Fuck a fucking shitfuck.

my great-great-grandfather was an engineman in a linoleum factory, by all accounts an intelligent scientific minded man. The whole family lived in the worst poverty. He was an atheist and was majorly annoyed that he couldn't work on a Sunday. Religion didn't help relieve his sufferings, alcohol did.

Fallible wrote:

DaveD wrote:Are you sure about that? If any of your female ancestors were in service, there's a chance that some rich bastard made her pregnant, then had her married off to avoid scandal. All you (and I) can say is that we're unaware of any money in our families.

None of us was good-looking enough.

Fallible wrote:

Mazille wrote:Must make for a weird gait when running away, though.

My family was too poor to have a gate.

Aye, but try telling that to the younger generation today. would they believe you? Nah!

Any guesses what that was? Yes, that's right mate. Racism.

May not be true. Initially black slaves were unpopular and white indentured servants were far more common. Blacks only started started becoming popular when a white labor force started drying up. Its not well established whether racism caused the slave trade or that racism developed as an easy way to justify having slaves. There was a point in the Americas where blacks had essentially the same level of rights as whites. They could vote, own land, and were essentially indentured servants who could eventually earn their freedom rather than being slaves. Over time the degradation of black rights became more and more prominent. Around 1660 I believe was when things started going very badly for the blacks. Laws were passed that made it very difficult to get free, blacks are born slaves, no interracial marrying (due to the issues this might cause with being born a slave).

Ultimate wrote:Around 1660 I believe was when things started going very badly for the blacks. Laws were passed that made it very difficult to get free, blacks are born slaves, no interracial marrying (due to the issues this might cause with being born a slave).

This coincided with changing justifications for slavery.

And yes, my account was extremely simplified due to the need to cover a lot of ground quickly. Nor do I think that Christianity caused the transatlantic slave trade, merely provided moral cover for it. In religion's favor, most of the abolitionists were Christians. But then again, so were most of slavery's apologists.

My essential point is that every good religion did in this situation can be balanced by a bad, but there are bad things religion did in relation to slavery that have no balancing good.

Thanks for your comments, Nicko, expletives and all, but I can’t see any real relevance. Quite obviously, I merely tried to put Britain’s colonial slave trade, the African slave trade, including the roles played by the planters and Christianity, into some kind of historical perspective.

I don’t think the British African slave trade was abolished until the early 1800s, much later in parts of the Caribbean, South America and the US South of course. As you say, it formed a crucial cog in transatlantic trade, with textiles, unlike “refined metals”, predominant, first those gotten from India, later those produced by Britain itself. By “original rationale” you may possibly mean the Church’s pronouncement very early in the piece concerning the slaves (initially natives) forced to labour on Spain’s Cuban sugar plantations.

The suggestion that America’s slaves were “forcibly converted” into Christianity displays some historical ignorance on your part. Similarly where literacy was concerned, the whites were horrified at the idea that their black slaves should make the white man’s religion their own! (Not particularly relevant, but even the Arabs discovered very early on – once Islam had started to make inroads into the African hinterland – that black Muslims made troublesome slaves, later bypassing these groups altogether.)

And as it turned out, the white slave owners had good reason to fear Christianity. Once the ‘word of God’ had started to spread with greater force, especially that rapid movement out from Savannah in America’s South, and with the blacks coming into their own by way through their own unique, shared form of Christianity, the message became one of: Don’t wait for deliverance! Take you fate into your own hands! As one American black churchman put it not so many years ago: The black church was born out of fighting for freedom – “the black church’s gift to America”.

In fact, I can’t recall referring to morality, “justification”, religious or otherwise, or of anyone being “inferior”. The fact that America’s black slaves found alleviation in their misery through Christianity, a unique voice of their own and a sense of community, as for the early and strenuous white opposition, is a simple matter of historical record.

I’d meant to show that British society shouldn’t be treated as if it had always consisted of one intermingling homogeneous bloc, but doubt there’s any point.