"they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . ." (I make no argument that Jefferson was personally religious--from what little I know about him, he seems to have been an agnostic, and certainly not a believer in a personal, interventionist god--but even enlightenment discourse about rights tends to be framed in religious terms.)
But religious support for slavery shouldn't give it a special mark of badness, either.
And I never said it did. Slavery, like most large-scale institutionalized evils, tends to be justified by whatever ideology is dominant.
Arguments that religion is innately bad because of slavery, or the crusades, or whatever are specious; so are arguments that religion is innately good because of the abolition movement or the religious opposition to Nazism.
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Date: 2008-07-15 05:37 pm (UTC)"they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . ." (I make no argument that Jefferson was personally religious--from what little I know about him, he seems to have been an agnostic, and certainly not a believer in a personal, interventionist god--but even enlightenment discourse about rights tends to be framed in religious terms.)
But religious support for slavery shouldn't give it a special mark of badness, either.
And I never said it did. Slavery, like most large-scale institutionalized evils, tends to be justified by whatever ideology is dominant.
Arguments that religion is innately bad because of slavery, or the crusades, or whatever are specious; so are arguments that religion is innately good because of the abolition movement or the religious opposition to Nazism.