Sunday, January 13, 2008

D'Souza and the Model of Immorality

Denish D'Souza is a piece of work without, it seems, a fiber of moral conscience in his body.

His recent treatise is on how Christians ended slavery.

Let's see . . . up to the civil war Christians had 1,860 years to end slavery. During much of that time, Christianity was the dominant culture. Rulers declared their nations Christian nations by force of arms and threatened to kill anybody who questioned the Christian faith.

During all of that time, Christianity not only failed to end slavery. Slavery existed without a word of protest from the Church. Indeed, the Church held its own slaves.

What happened to bring about the end of slavery?

It was The Enlightenment - a period of reason where the chains of religious dogma suddenly loosened, and people began to think of morality in rational terms, rather than in terms of scripture. They derived nature from the concept of man in a state of nature in treatises that made no reference to scripture. When they did this . . . when they replaced reason with scripture . . . they discovered that no reason could be found in nature for holding that one person had a right to rule and another had a duty to obey.

D'Souza, of course, lies about the history of slavery. Bearing false witness, to him, is as natural as breathing. So, he 'bears false witness' to his readers every time he sits at his keyboard.

The historic fact of the matter is this:

Christianity had 1860 years to end slavery and did nothing to stop it.

The Enlightenment took 200 years to do what Christianity failed to do in nearly 2000 years.

Think of a co-worker who accepts an award for a program that he took off of somebody else's computer, or a sibling beeming in pride after claiming to have done the work that you had spent all day doing. Think of somebody like that, and you know somebody who merely aspires to the level of immorality of somebody like Danish D'Souza.

3 comments:

Divided By Zer0 said...

I also like to add that slavery needed a catalyst to be abolished due to the strong competitive advantage it granted to its perpetuators. That catalyst was the Industrial revolution.
This is a prime example of what I mean when I say that it is irrelevant what we think about a moral practice if in the end it grants a competitive advantage to the society that considers it acceptable (and thus brings that society to the top of the pile, so to speak). Not irrelevant because morality is subjective and any value is as good at the other, but irrelevant because no matter what our belief are, we cannot compete.

Hume's Ghost said...

"Christians ended slavery" is a sophistic statement. Yes, it is true that Christians played a significant role in the abolition movement. But "Christians" aren't a monolithic group. Quaker abolitionists aren't the same thing as Southern Baptists who considered slavery a Biblically sanctioned institution.

The writings of Frederick Douglas give proof to the lie that is D'Souza.

Chris Aable said...

Don't expect Dinesh D'Souza to get history correct, much less anything else. After all, he appears frequently on Fox Fixed and Fake "news" where their daily abominations of "baring false witness" begin with their serial lies of "fair and balanced". No person is perfectly fair and balanced, much less an entire news organization headed by Richard Nixon's former press secretary, Roger Ailes. Besides, real news should never be a balancing act. For every lie "Christians" claim are in the alleged "liberal Media" it's easy to cite three times more from Fox "news", quoted in their own lying words.