South Carolina Slaveholder Arrested. Yes, You Read That Correctly (via Liberaland)
… and your jaw is going to hit the floor when you read what he does for a living: The president of a South Carolina Bible college was charged last week with essentially treating foreign students as slaves by forcing them to perform work for little…
This post was republished using Repost. Please read it on Informed Comment directly: https://www.juancole.com/2014/05/carolina-slaveholder-correctly.html
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This guy makes bad Christians look better.
His defense may be….The bible condones slavery even to the point of advising slave owners how and when they may dole out beatings of their slaves.
Can you name one civilization 2000 years ago where slavery wasn’t part of the economic system? If the the Bible sought to abolish slavery, then you’re describing a revolutionary movement that aims to overthrow all governments and civilizations worldwide. It’s like expecting the American government to embrace gay marriage in the 1950s; it just wasn’t going to happen.
Ah, but isn’t that the problem with Biblical (and Koranic) inerrancy? The religion is nothing without the dead hand of its past. To adapt it to changing times is to throw everything open to question, including why we should even continue to worship a God who was wrong about something big.
The juxtaposition of the story about Miller with the RT piece from 2011 is confusing. Miller was apparently not involved with a scheme like that described in the RT piece, in which workers were “outsourced” to companies like Hershey’s. But from the link to the TV news segment, it appears that Miller’s crimes were entirely within the bible college. Not that either case is trivial.
If it wasn’t for RT and Democracy Now we would all be in the dark about these things.
We would be fools to think that slavery can’t be made to pay again. Or that it’s okay to dismantle civil rights laws or the Federal government because the racism of the old South was a fluke or misunderstanding instead of a rational business decision that could be made again.
“Entrepreneurs” will always be scheming to find new ways to make money, and reviving atrocities from the past is always worth a look. Which is what happened when slavery was revived in British colonies after it had died out in Britain proper. Or when it was saved again when the invention of the cotton gin was used by greedy slaveowners to expand slavery instead of replacing it with wage labor. Or when Hitler introduced it on a vast scale in the 3rd Reich to replace the men at the front.
Humans are tool users. There is not a damn thing in the bibles of capitalism that says the tool can’t be another human.