How We Learned That Slavery is Wrong - Professor Alec Ryrie
Professor Ryrie explains how Christian involvement in the Atlantic Slave trade caused a profound crisis for followers and how it has shaped the Protestant Faith: www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
It seems obvious now, but it hasn’t always. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the old consensus that slavery was a mere fact of life, a tolerable evil, broke down, as Protestant activists opposed slavery ever more forcefully - and as other Protestants defended it ever more idealistically.
As this lecture will explore, the result was not only the end of legal slavery but profound changes in Protestant Christianity which resonate to the present.
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
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What a wonderful, passionate voice. I hope you put it to many uses.
When I write a tract to convince others to change their behaviour, I include motives I think my audience may have. They do not necessarily have any hold on me. The same could be true of the early anti-slave tract writers.
Benjamin Lay sounds like a great character. We could do with a few more like him today.
Great lecture - thank you!
Superb! Thank you Professor!
Great lecture
Interesting lecture, thanks for uploading
Very interesting lecture.
"Approximately 12 million Africans," That's *about one fourth* of the amount of slaves in the world *today.* Let that sink in.
Too few , too late !
Brilliant lecture. Many Christians believe that the abolitionists had Biblical justification for their antislavery beliefs. Rather, the truth is those that were Christians had to ignore the Biblical justification for slavery. So today Christians who believe, and rightly so, that slavery is an evil must ignore those passages of their holy books that describe God commanding slavery, or they must make futile and ineffective excuses to explain away those passages. The fact that the god of the Hebrews commanded the enslavement of non-Hebrew peoples for perpetuity, the fact that Jesus believed that those laws were given by the god that he believed in, and the fact that St. Paul did not consider slavery an evil to be abolished, these facts stand as an indictment against the holy scriptures of Jews and Christians. That the god of the Christian Bible was more concerned that his people avoided eating shellfish rather than proclaiming the evil of chattel slavery demonstrates that the Bible was the invention and work of humans with their limited imaginations and their prejudices of the times.
Really... How about the Jews who ran the slave trade or the Muslims that sold slaves or the Atheistic Communists of the 20th Century who killed over 100 million people. I don't think there's a single section of humanity that doesn't have it's hands dirty. So... Maybe you should take a little closer look at history. And be glad you live in an era as privileged as ours.
If you bother to read the bible more carefully, you will find far more anti-slavery statements than there are pro-slavery statements. And there is also a vast difference between slavery as it was in Rome and slavery as it was in American, wherein the latter it far more resembled the way Romans treated prisoners of war than the way they treated slaves. Roman slaves had many rights that American slaves were never allowed.
Curiously enough, the Mosaic Law seems rather ambivalent about slavery, even going so far as to forbid the return of escaped slaves and to make kidnapping for the purpose of enslavement a capital offense.
You're absolutely right. Religion is a social scam.
@@rosemaryphorson8064 But it still seems to be true that it was the religious people who opposed slavery most actively. Quote the Bible to the contrary, there is a lot in the spirit of Jesus' teaching that inspired the freedom fighters, including even the terroristJohn Brown.
So in many cases they knew it was wrong, and nonetheless explicitly went against their own religion in order to serve the god of Mammon.
Slavery was considered normal, acceptable, a 'necessary evil' throughout human history. The fact that our civilisation actually reached a point where it recognised, and acted upon, the realisation of the evil of slavery is something I am very proud of. So many people are trying to take Britain and the West down, as if we invented slavery, when in fact to make the moral leap that we did is perhaps the most profoundly moral act in the whole of human history. People who try to pin it all on Britain should be ASHAMED of themselves
Slavery before the African slave trade was different, it wasn't the enforced enslavement of the innocent. At the very beginning of the African slave trade, the Pope condemned it as an unjust new type of slavery. And subsequent Popes repeatedly condemned the African slave trade.
If Professor Ryrie thinks that all American Protestants are against slavery he really needs to take look at modern preachers in the USA.
Interesting. What modern protestant preachers do you know of that are NOT against slavery...Not arguing just asking for facts
Do not forget, the transatlantic slave trade did not enslave Africans. The kingdoms of Sonhali and Benin enslaved those people's it subdued in war, and sold them to the Europeans. Furthermore, the words "Britons never never never shall be slaves" was a celebration of the fact that Berbers and Arabs from the North African Barberry coast could no longer capture entire English fishing villages into slavery around the south and west coast of England. For many hundreds of years living near the coastline of England was a very risky business.
only 12 million?
LOL....Christians and their selective morality, gotta love'm.
God, this sounds so much like being a vegan talking to non-vegan "animal-lovers" today.
Anti-abortionism has no textual basis???
Scripture can be used as a basis for about anything you want to justify or forbid.
appatently by listening to god lives underwater if the thumbnail is to be beleived!
Opponents of abortion lack explicit biblical grounding? Have you ever heard Tho shalt not kill ?
Did you read Numbers 5:11-31? While that describes a procedure that may well be ineffective, it's certainly intended to be abortion.
The Islamic/Arab slave trade was a bigger crime in time, numbers, and fatality.
You still haven't learned it. You've just accepted it under another name, Authority.
A biased account lacking context and depth in its early tracts.
a lecture on slavery sponsored by the city of london corp. -no comment-
Slavery is not wrong. American and European slavery is.
How are you enjoying your slave life these days?
Lincoln wanted to ship blanks back to Africa. Blacks were indigenous to America before Columbus. See "Black Foot" tribe.