I happened to flip on the local Christian talk radio briefly during my commute home last night, and heard an interesting conversation. They were talking about South Carolina taking down the Confederate flag from the state capitol, and how goose-bumpy they felt to see history in the making. And then one of the 2 co-hosts made a statement that really caught my attention. It was rush hour, so I didn’t have the opportunity to write it down, but as best I can recall, she said something like this.
“And of course the real shame of the Confederacy was that they used the Bible to justify slavery. God is not mocked.”
My mouth kind of dropped open. Yeah, they bought and sold people, and that was bad. They bred them like farm animals and sold their children, and that was bad. They beat some of them so viciously and frequently that their backs looked like alligator hide from all the criss-crossing scars, and that was bad. But the real shame was that they made my personal religious beliefs look bad, by quoting the scriptures that openly condone slavery as though they openly condoned slavery. I can forgive everything else, but not that.
Hopefully that was just a thoughtless, insensitive remark, and she didn’t really mean that. But still, yikes.
i dont get your point. Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and a passage in the New Testament DO condone slavery.
Exactly. She was claiming that it was a shame the Confederates were using the Bible to condone slavery, when it was the Bible itself that condoned slavery first. There may be good reasons to say shame on the Confederacy, but that’s not one of them.
Christians talk in cliches. They just string them together, one after the other. It makes no sense to outsiders but true believers think it sounds fantastic.
The idea that saying slavery was okay because of the bible is more shameful than the slavery itself? Somehow I disagree.