Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
And it was Christians who tortured and executed women for "witchcraft" based on unsupported claims by their neighbors in order to grab their property, Christians who slaughtered the residents of this land with warfare and disease, stole their homes, desecrated their holy sites, Christians who enslaved the residents of Africa and brought them here to treat like animals, Christians who insisted that a husband can't possibly rape his wife, Christians who declared that skin color decided who you could marry (and later, that gender decided it), and Christians who created Sundown Towns.
By all means, let's make sure Western Civ covers the impact of Christianity on history.
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1. Witchcraft: I think most of that violence was popular, meaning that the Church didn't go looking for witches, but the local yahoos who thought people were weird. Like in Africa today, it's the Church protecting people so accused. Like you said, much of it was for ulterior motives.
2. America. Disease happens. I don't think you're going to hold a grudge against Mongolians for bringing the plague. Some Americans were slaughtered, but it was the Church who prevented their enslavement. People get conquered all the time, from the very first people, far before Christianity.
3. Slavery. Yes. I agree that slavery as practiced in the US was especially bad because it was of the chattel type, meaning that they had no human rights.
Slavery was a universal condition. You know that a healthy percentage (maybe the majority) of ancient Greeks were slaves. It was Christians since the earliest times who advocated for the slaves, eventually eliminating it in Europe and, later on, here in the US. Slavery still exists in communist countries. Communists are usually atheists.
4. Racism is definitely against Christianity and from the earliest times, even examples in the Bible (Moses married an African woman), racism is condemned. However, the kind of scientific racism which saw some races as naturally superior is an Enlightenment invention, where people sought to classify people according to perceived abilities and advancement rather than by the fact that they had a soul (read Voltaire, Linnaeus, Kant, and, later, Darwin's views on race). American racism is kind of unique, tied up as it was with the Enlightenment idea, Southern economics, and slavery. I wouldn't use it as an example of the Christian view of race. Or, I don't know of any miscegenation laws in Europe.