|
A Religious Excuse for Slavery |
|
|
|
|
To this day, Black people and females of all colors can trace much of being oppressed, rejected, and belittled to Renaissance European "gentlemen" who ignorantly or conveniently assumed love and hate to be opposites as well as assumed "dark" to be the same as "black".
This story starts with the Persian prophet Mani (Manichaeus) in the 3rd century AD. Determined to found a universal religion, he took partial truths or religious revelations -- especially those of Ancient Egyptians, Zoroaster, Buddha, and Jesus -- and integrated them into his misguided version of "The Truth." In the end, he wound up using predominantly Egyptian religion concepts.
Recall Diop (African Origin of Civilization, p. 287) saying Buddha and other Egyptian priests were chased from Memphis (Egypt) by the persecutions of Cambyses (the 6th century Persian king) in 525 BC. Those dispersed priests stimulated whole religious and philosophical movements in Asia, as with Confucius in China and Zoroaster in Iran.
Based upon the Egyptian Myth of Creation (i.e. God emerged from the chaos of darkness and created things), Mani's misinterpretation was of goodness being equated to light and evilness to darkness. Since the materials God brought out of the darkness produced the earth and dust from that earth gave rise to humans, both the earth and humans were said to lack goodness.
Thus, the job of men was to aid the light and conquer and control the dark (Hodge, Cultural Bases of Racism, p. 160, 129, 136, 206, 214). Mani was heavily influenced by the Ancient Persian doctrine of incessant warfare between light (good) and dark (evil), as supposedly occurred in one's soul.
However, the dark part of the soul could only be saved through the Egyptians' "Man, Know Thyself" admonishment. This meant having a "rebirth" -- i.e. being saved by recovering one's soul from the earth world's cloud of ignorance and lack of self-consciousness through special knowledge of spiritual truth.
Another problem was in Mani wrongly assuming the Sublime Good (QIII) generated from God's love (QI) was opposite to hate and evil (QIV). From having entirely different natures, love and evil operate under different laws and cannot be a blending of the two sides of a coin, as occurs in Yin/Yang. Nevertheless, these confused concepts of the Manichean Church were exactly what Renaissance European "gentlemen" needed for viewing the world as one of conflicting forces -- one good (as they declared themselves to be) and the other evil (like anyone not like them).
Since evil must be fought and conquered, they grabbed this as an excuse for their greedy self-interest in dominating females and in enslaving Black Africans -- neither of whom were like European males. In using this destructively selfish and rebellious teenager-type thinking, they applied the term "the White man's burden" -- the burden of attempting to brainwash Africans into ideal slaves. Up to this point, they and Africans had been friendly and Africans gave them no cause for justifying enslavement.
No doubt Europeans recognized their own evilness -- their own "dark shadow side." However, to acknowledge it would mean they would have to destroy themselves. Instead, they Projected their own evilness (i.e. the throwing forth of their denied bad character) onto the Africans. Both greed and cruelty separate one from love and that separation is associated with Spiritual Pain.
Spiritual pain is so overwhelming as to cause desperation by generating self-interest evil deeds in hopes of gaining a few moments of relief. This helps account for their unspeakable cruelties used on the slaves. Furthermore, by dishonorably acquiring more and more money and power only worsened their pain. The Western world continues to be driven by the Manichaean dualism notion of conflict and victory. The correction of this affliction is the African Tradition's focus on balancing and harmonizing differences present in God's creatures.
website: jablifeskills.com
Joseph A. Bailey, II, M.D.
|
