Tag: slavery

Ban the Bible!

 

My name is Veritas Honesto, PhD. I am the leader of W.A.T.E.R which stands for We Are The Ever Righteous.

Our goal is to eliminate all evidence of slavery in the world since the dawn of humanity. We believe all Confederate statues and pictures should be removed from public displays and that private displays of such statues and pictures should be cause for the elimination of public funds for the private institutions (such as private schools and private museums) showing such statues and pictures.

We also believe that statues of anyone who had slaves in the past such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and famous people such as Teddy Roosevelt who made indigenous peoples feel bad and Franklin Roosevelt who enslaved Japanese Americans during World War II  (I could add many more!) should never have any statues or pictures celebrating them in public places and that private showing of such statues and pictures would mean the cutting off of any public funds for those private institutions. We would recommend strong protests of such institutions, perhaps even ones where we wear our ski masks.

***Christopher Columbus should never have his name said even at Italian functions.

But these sanctions do not go far enough in W.A.T.E.R’s view. There are so many incidents of slavery among different types of people, yes, even here in the Americas.

Let us examine a specific book and the movement based on that awful book. I am speaking about the bible, a book that not only condones slavery but even has laws for such abuse of human beings—a book that must be destroyed. The Jewish Torah contains laws regarding how to handle slaves; some stayed in slavery for about seven years (usually Hebrew slaves) but non-Hebrew slaves were slaves for life.

Christians believe in what they call the Old Testament books, which are essentially the Torah and the Jewish scriptures (with some minor changes here and there), which, as I already stated, contains guidelines for slavery. Nowhere in the New Testament is slavery condemned by Jesus Christ, who many Christians believe is God, or by any of the Gospel writers. Slavery was acceptable to those Christians. It was acceptable to Jews. It was acceptable to Muslims too. 

Do not be fooled by biblical apologists who claim that “servant” and “slave” have different meanings in the bible. There are no nuances to those two words; they are synonyms. Slavery flourishes in the bible. In fact, in many passages God condemns people into slavery.

So what should we do to those who use this book as the bedrock of their belief system?

Ÿ ***No churches or temples that owe their allegiance to the bible (in any of its forms) should receive tax exemptions unless they publically renounce the book and to show their love of non-slavery, they must have mass burnings of bibles

Ÿ ***Catholic, Protestant and Jewish hospitals should receive no public funds

Ÿ ***The bible should be banned in all public libraries and public schools

Ÿ ***Any statues, symbols or quotes from the bible should be outlawed on public property

Ÿ ***Christmas should no longer be celebrated as a national holiday

Ÿ ***No schools or public libraries should be closed for any religious holiday

Ÿ ***Revoke tax exemption status to all religious institutions that rely on the bible

And what about areas still practicing slavery? There are now about 25 to 40 million slaves in the world; although just about every country claims they no longer use the practice. Any area that still allows slavery should be punished.

W.A.T.E.R would be happy to send our ski masked legions to such countries to teach them in a non-violent way about human rights, although violence might break out.

But slavery goes even deeper than this. Too many Americans celebrate the people they call “Native Americans” who were immigrants who came to the north and south continents earlier than the Europeans. Such foolishness! Such ignorance!

Native North and South Americans used to enslave each other; some slaves would work, some would be sacrificed to the gods after being viciously tortured. Some of the slaves would be eaten during religious rituals.

When black slavery was brought to the continent by Europeans, Native Americans happily owned black slaves and participated in the black slave trade. They even sold other Native Americans not of their particular tribe into slavery!

What should be done with these people?

Ÿ ***No tribes who participated in the slave trade should be given public funds or public schools or hospitals, etc., unless they renounce their slave trading heritage

Ÿ ***No statues of prominent Native Americans of the slave era should be allowed on public property.

Ÿ ***Native Americans must condemn their slave-owning pasts.

The African slave trade went on for centuries, long before any Europeans set foot on the continent. Many African kingdoms sold members of other tribes to the Europeans to be brought to “civilization.” Those kingdoms must renounce their slave trade and ask for forgiveness. No aid should be given to these countries unless they destroy all vestiges of their slave-trading past. Those areas still practicing slavery should be protested.

What else should be done?

Ÿ ***African-Americans must renounce all areas of Africa that engaged in slavery.

Ÿ ***African-Americans must find another name to call themselves since most of them came from slave owning and selling countries.

Now what about Europeans who may be the biggest villains in history? What about the Asians? What about every single human being on planet Earth that came from cultures that practiced slavery – which means probably every single human being?

W.A.T.E.R will happily picket all of them! Our ski masks are ready! We are ready, willing and able to protest all of this everywhere. Down with statues! Down with offending pictures! Down with the bible! Down with religion! Down with all cultures that practiced slavery!

Frank Scoblete’s latest books are I Am a Dice Controller: Inside the World of Advantage-Play Craps, Confessions of a Wayward Catholic and I Am a Card Counter: Inside the World of Advantage-Play Blackjack. Available from Amazon.com, Kindle, Barnes and Noble, and at bookstores.

Slavery, England & the Noble Savage

Slavery is a somewhat delicate topic if someone wants to tell the truth about it. The United States would not have been the “united” states had the non-slave states stood up and said to the slave-owning states, “Buzz off; all men are created equal so we will not have any slave states in our new country.”

Inevitably the slave-states would have walked out (as they ultimately did in January 1861); the colonies would have remained the colonies of England and that would be that. Slavery ended in England around 1834-38 (without a Civil War – just think of the song “Amazing Grace” written by one of the leaders of the anti-slave movement ) and the British Empire went about its empire-ish ways right up until that skinny Gandhi sat on the railroad tracks (so to speak) to demand human rights or get hit by a train.

The “united” states (that were not to be) would become (a kind of) Canada today but there would not have been a bloody Civil War (I’m guessing here).

So you, my Facebook friend, are at the Continental Congress and the Southern colonies are saying, “We keep slavery or we walk,” what would you do?

England is a great country (in my opinion). Still, it did build an empire through war and intimidation. Would you stay as an English colony way back when in order to not have slavery in your new country? Or would you bite the bullet and go for it knowing that slavery was a great evil?

In the United States the religious excuse for slavery was that the Negro was black because he was the offspring of Ham, one of the sons of Noah who removed Noah’s blanket exposing his father’s nakedness. (Actually the better version of the story has Ham cutting off Noah’s dick after Noah got sotted one night.)

Since Ham was dark-skinned and God’s punishment was for Ham’s offspring to be the slaves of his brothers — well, you get the picture. Black people were born to be slaves. This is, of course, total bullshit but those good old religious folks needed some religious excuse for keeping slaves. (Many of you might not know this but there were some white slaves too — evidently not enough to matter.)

THE NON-NOBLE SAVAGE

Today we have movements that try to mush white people’s faces in the fact that blacks were slaves in our country; as if to say that this is the only time and place where slavery existed or to make the existence of slavery elsewhere not as rife. (One of the biggest slave owners in America was a black man.)

Historically slavery was everywhere in every time of which we know; in every tribe and civilization.

I find it funny (actually snickeringly funny) that so many of my Facebook friends will put up pictures of the American Indian (often calling such people Native Americans as if those of us born in the Americas are not “native” to it) saying something to the effect that “it was their country and the Europeans and Americans” took such a country away from them, never noting that tribes often took other tribes’ land from them as well.

These postings often refer to the whites as immigrants to the Americas as if the American Indian was always here and did not themselves migrate to the Americas.

The American Indian is often portrayed as the “noble savage,” a phrase incorrectly attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This noble savage could be found wherever savages existed (savages being those primitive tribes). These tribes were innocent and pure and lived much like Adam and Eve in a garden of earthly delights. Certainly this is a total B.M.

Even a superficial reading of research books shows the American Indians to be no more peaceful or noble than any other tribes anywhere else in the world. Brutal wars were fought among amongst them and genocide, rape and slavery were not unheard of or unpracticed or rare. These things were par for the course.

(An interesting aside here: Those tribes that gave out identity based on being born to a mother of that tribe as opposed to the father did so because they were constantly being invaded and enslaved, with their men killed and the women raped. To continue their culture, the woman had to be the port of ethnic call for them regardless of who the father happened to be.)

Go to the tribes of Africa who enslaved their enemy tribesmen and raped and pillaged and also sold their hated enemies into slavery to the Europeans and Asians countries. Go to Asia and…you are beginning to get the picture, yes? — I don’t want to list every place on Earth.

Take a time-travel trip to ancient Greece and Rome. Everyone knows that the Romans had slaves aplenty. But so did Greece. Beloved Athens, the lauded “golden civilization” of true democratic ideals, was composed of 10 percent citizens and 90 percent slaves. Ouch!

Certainly slavery is an abomination and we are well rid of it. Slavery (from the word “Slav”) is still practiced in a couple of countries but it has seen the last of its days. Good riddance.

Should those whose ancestors were enslaved be given reparations for such enslavement? No. You can’t move forward if you are constantly looking backwards. The slaves of the United States had ancestors who enslaved others; the slave owners of the United States probably had relations who had been enslaved sometime in the distant past as well.

The horrors of mankind can be found in every nook and cranny of human experience.