Yes, I’m using the “r” word.
Racism has been a plague to western culture from its very beginning: The Romans against the Goths, the Europeans against the Gypsies, the whites against the blacks, the Arians against the Jews, etc.
Now Christians certainly were, embarrassingly, involved in some of this. Christians held slaves. But if you look at the accounts, true Christians treated their servants with kindness. There were books written by godly people, which told about how to treat a slave in terms of family life. Selling slaves, and splitting up families was strictly despised in the Christian community in the South. There has come to be a common stereotype, which depicts the entire South as beating their slaves and killing them. This was true in some cases, with some non-Christians; but on the whole, it was atypical. George Washington Carver is a good example of this. He kept up correspondence with his master’s family long after his release. Slavery is of course very wrong, and the Christian slaveholders were wrong, but they still condemned the atrocities of brutality. Other Christians were heavily involved in getting slavery abolished in England, for instance.
But one thing that’s interesting, and that no one admits; is that Darwinian evolution was the precedent and excuse for much of the abuse that followed the Civil War. Darwinian evolution teaches that a species develops by acquiring and keeping those characteristics that elevate it above the other species and enable it to survive. (aka survival of the fittest) In the human sector, this can be applied to races. One race is “superior” to another, and therefore must either subject or kill off the other races in order to purify, and thus advance the human race. Most people don’t know that the complete title of Darwin’s book is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of the Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.
This led to all kinds of injustices. People took aborigines and Negroes and put them in cages beside monkeys and apes with signs in front of them that said, in effect, “Here is the missing link between the apes and us.” Aborigines in Australia, especially were subject to heinous crimes. Hitler, when he implemented the Holocaust, was cleansing the human race of inferior beings. There are many more examples, but I’ll stop here.
By the way, how did races come about from an evolutionary perspective? Oh yeah, and please don’t say that they were different monkeys.
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