Where Slavery is Not a Metaphor (Sudan)

realclearpolitics.com/ ^ | Apr 2, 2010 | M. Gerson

[Milagros]

Where Slavery is Not a Metaphor By Michael Gerson

ROUM ROL, South Sudan -- For those used to seeing the faces of slaves in Civil War-era tintypes -- staring at the camera in posed, formal judgment -- it is a shock to see the face of slavery in a shy, adolescent boy.

Majok Majok Dhal, 14 or 15 years old (many former slaves have no idea of their exact age), dimly remembers his capture in the village of Mareng at about age 5. "I ran a little and was taken. I was carried on horseback." He recalls seeing other captives shot and killed after refusing to march north with the raiders into Sudan proper. His master, Atheib, was "not a good person." He forced the boy to tend goats and live with them in a stable. Majok was beaten regularly with a bamboo stick, "if I was not quick and fast." He recalls once being feverish and unable to work. The master "stabbed my leg with a knife. He said, 'I will cut your throat.'" Majok shows me his poorly healed wound. He was forced to address Atheib as "father."

[240B]

Africa, India, China, Indonesia, some areas of South America, and Thailand all have open institutionalized slavery.

But, of course, you will not hear about this bacause it is not PC. Only Jews and White Christians are guilty of slavery.

[luvbach1]

These slavers are possibly descendants of the slavers who captured and sold blacks to slave merchants headed for the new world for over 300 years.

[Tupelo]

I remember back in the early 1990s, TOM TANCREDO was all over this like ugly on a an ape. He and a middle school in the Denver area exposed this and worked with several groups to free some of the SLAVES in east Africa. This was just before or just after Tancredo was elected to congress. Jesse, Al and the other race hustlers in this country have NEVER spoke out or done a single thing to help these poor people, but Tom Tancredo did. Of course you do not hear anything about this when the MSM talks about Tancredo. All you hear is that he is a racist who does not like people of color.

yes I am huge fan of Tom Tancredo.

[eleni121]

Imam Sharpton and the rest of the race hustlers cannot speak out against real slavery because it is perpetrated by Muslims...and we can’t offend Calypso Louis farrakhan can we?

[HighlyOpinionated]

I have come to the conclusion that the USofA made a grave error in trying to secularize our form of Government to the point that we do not admit that the Founding Fathers based our Declaration and Constitution on the 10 Commandments.

Ben Franklin, among others, stated that every child should be taught from the Bible. What does the Bible have that other books don't? The 10 Commandments, for one thing. Set in stone. They are the "rule" of law. We talk about the "rule of law" but who has stopped to determine what that "rule" is?

James Madison, John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, John Jay, George Washington, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and every other person who signed either of our "rule of law" Documents believed fervently that the only way this Republic would survive was if each person lived according to the 10 Commandments.

Americans must return to the Rule of Law in the 10 Commandments. Lack of adherence to the Founding Fathers directions caused the USofA to lose its way and has corroded the Republic.

A person doesn't have to be "religious" to adhere to the 10 Commandments. What they are is just good old "common sense" ethics.

[HighlyOpinionated]

I got distracted and forgot my main thought.

The USofA has failed the world by not exporting our ethical code and our Representative form of Government.

What’s wrong in this world right now is that Izlam has not failed to export its ‘business-cult’ and We The People have a lot of catching up to do to thwart the spread of Izlam’s destructive beliefs.

[Hank Kerchief]

The Ten Commandments

Except for two of the ten commandments, all are prohibitions, that is, "thou shalt nots." Of the two that are not prohibitions, almost no one keeps the first, "remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy," and the second, "honour thy father and thy mother," while loosely observed, is not even possible to many people, whose parents have passed away or who, for various reasons, have no idea in the world who their mother and father are. It is odd that an absolute moral code would include a requirement, that, at least for some people, is not only impossible to keep, but totally without meaning.

Another odd thing about the ten commandments is that there are not ten. In addition to the two "thou shalts," there are seven "thou shalt nots," summarized as follows: thou shalt not (1) kill, (2) steal, (3) lie, (4) make up your own religion, (5) fornicate, (6) covet, or (7) swear. But seven "thou shalt nots," plus, two, "thou shalts," only add up to nine. To get ten, you must either turn the "make up your own religion" commandment into two, "have no other gods," and, "make no graven images," as the Protestants do, or turn the "covet" commandment into two, "do not covet your neighbors house," and, "do not covet your neighbor's wife," as the Catholics do. There really are only nine commandments, but ten seems much more impressive and significant, so why worry about exact truth when we're talking about God and absolute moral principles?

These nine commandments, passed off as ten, are touted as the source and foundation of all Western civilization and the moral code that made America what it is today. One would expect anything responsible for so much would be very profound. When we examine these "ten" commandments, however, particularly the prohibitive commandments, (you shouldn't kill, steal, lie, make up your own religion, fornicate, covet, or swear), there is not one profound thought among them.

They might seem profound to some aboriginal tribe in some backwater third-world nation, but to those who have spent their lives wrestling with moral issues in a modern advanced country like the United States, the assertion that murder, theft, and promiscuity are wrong are hardly earthshaking revelations. They are such simple concepts they are assumed everywhere there is civilization and intelligence. Even though they are regularly violated, their violation is always, "justified," by some supposed, "political necessity," allowed in the name of some kind of, "rights," or excused as some kind of social or psychological "necessity," (they can't help it), and the justification is always vehemently argued. Even in their violation, their validity is admitted, else there would be no attempt to justify their violation. There is really nothing particularly profound about them.

As for the other two prohibitions, do not covet or swear, far from being profound, they are inane. To covet something only means to desire something which belongs to someone else. A desire itself cannot be immoral, even a desire, that if fulfilled, would be immoral. A wrong desire is only a temptation. What virtue is there in not doing wrong if one is never tempted to do wrong in the first place? So long as one only desires what another has, and neither murders them to get it, or steals it in some other way, there is nothing immoral in the desire. There is frequently a perfectly moral way to acquire the desired object anyway.

Coveting is not only moral, it is an absolute necessity to the economy of a free society. If no one ever "coveted" anything, there could be no economy as we know it, or any other kind of economy, for that matter. The local grocery, hardware, or drug store owners are our neighbors. If none of us ever coveted what is their property, we would never go to their stores to purchase anything. It is only because we covet our neighbor's food (in his grocery store) or our neighbor's lawn mower (in his hardware store) or our neighbor's medicine (in his drug store) that we go to their stores and purchase the things we covet.

Nevertheless, those who accept the ten commandments as an absolute moral code will swear that it is wrong to covet. They will also explain to you that the ten commandments do not prohibit what we normally call, "swearing," only taking God's name in vain is prohibited. What they will not explain is what that means, because they are very likely to have a bumper sticker that reads, "God is my co-pilot," and see nothing vain in that use of God's name. We are left wondering, what in God's name, they mean by swearing.

Some Commandments More Absolute Than Others

Maybe the most peculiar thing of all about the ten commandments is that those who insist most vehemently they are absolute, do not themselves regard them as absolute. If the commandments are absolute, it would be no more immoral to break one of the commandments than another.

In the United States, this was, at one time, taken quite seriously. It was felt the dictum to observe the Sabbath was just as important as the prohibition against stealing. In most places "blue laws" were passed to prevent Sunday (the Christian substitute for the Sabbath) from being desecrated. Today the blue laws are all but gone, and while some Christians do sincerely believe they ought to be brought back, none of them are seeking laws to put people in jail for working on Saturday or Sunday or whatever the latest change to that absolute unchangeable law is.

Missing From the Ten Commandments

The point of ethics is to tell us how we ought to live in this world. One of the first things one notices about the ten commandments is, except for the two mentioned, they are all negative. It's fine to tell us what we should not do, but, the real question of ethics is, what should we do? To that question, the ten commandments provide no answer.

If you tried to live strictly by the ten commandments, the only thing you would be required to do is honor your parents and spend Saturday doing nothing (to keep it holy). The ten commandments do not require you to do anything else, and so long as you never kill anyone, steal, lie, make up your own religion, fornicate, covet, or swear, you are perfectly moral. Of course, you won't be worth a blessed thing to yourself or anyone else in the world and will starve to death if someone else does not undertake to feed you, but, according to the ten commandments, those, apparently, are not moral issues.

Perhaps the most blatant contradiction of the absoluteness of the Ten Commandments is the way Jews and Christians, especially those who truly understand and practice their religions faithfully, live their lives. I do not mean they "break" the commandments, although they observe some more loosely than others, on the contrary, in their day-to-day lives they exhibit a decency, reasonableness, and moral rectitude that is much higher than simply observing the ten commandments would produce. Most are productive, self-supporting, honest, ambitious, responsible, and reasonable people who seek to excel and achieve the highest levels of virtue and accomplishment they are able. In spite of their outward declaration of a belief in an absolute code, they live by an absolute principle, "to do less than your best is a sin."

Religion and Absolute Moral Values

[Milagros]

I saved this on my files, God Bless you! and may God bless the USA!!!

[Red Boots]

One group that actually goes to the Sudan and buys these Christian slaves and returns them to their homes is Christian Solidarity In ternational. They are a Swiss organization, and their website has some of the rescued peoples stories. You won’t leave with dry eyes. Their stories are harrowing.

[HighlyOpinionated]

A few observations:

The Ten Commandments were give to God's Chosen People, a huge family network descended for the most part from Jacob's 12 sons. Look at them from the viewpoint of keeping the Family Unit together and I think they'll make more sense.

This argument is very similar to Obama's argument about the US Constitution. It tells what Congress cannot do, but not the myriad of things the Liberals think it should tell them to do.

Whether there or nine or ten Commandments, there are 10 because it is a "perfect" number according to Hebrew history.

Seems the tangle is not in the understanding of Covet, but in the desire to say "if one word can be shown to be questionable, then the entire doctrine is not valid."

Au Contraire, mon ami.
From The Catholic Encyclopedia we read:
The capital sin of covetousness is in reality rather a vice or inclination to sin, which is sinful only in that it proceeds from the unholy condition of original sin in which we are born, and because it leads us into sin. And so far is the desire--natural in us all--to acquire and hold possessions from being reproved as offensive by God, that, if kept within the bounds of reason and justice and resisted triumphantly in its inordinate cravings, it is positively meritorious. Even when indulged, covetousness is not a grievous sin, except in certain conditions which involve offence of God or the neighbour, e.g. when one is prepared to employ, or does actually employ, illicit or unjust means to satisfy the desire of riches, holds to them in defiance of the strict demands of justice or charity, makes them the end rather than the means of happiness, or suffers them to interfere seriously with one's bounden duty to God or man. Nourished and developed into an unrestricted habit, it becomes the fruitful mother of all manner of perfidy, heartlessness and unrest.

And while we're discussing this, let's recall that the 10 can be reduced to just two:
Matthew 22:37-40 (New International Version)

37Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'[a] 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'[b] 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

Footnotes:

1. Matthew 22:37 Deut. 6:5
2. Matthew 22:39 Lev. 19:18

So the 3 are how a person relates to God and the 7 are how a person relates to his "neighbor." And just who is my neighbor? We all know the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

When I was driving through Atlanta, I took Hwy 400 and passed through the Toll Booth. A fleeting thought came to my mind and when I paid my Toll, I gave the Toll Taker an extra 50 cents and told her it was to pay for the car behind me. Now there's nothing about Tolls or Paying it Forward in the Ten Commandments. But Jesus said that the ENTIRE Law and the Prophets hang on Loving God more than life AND to loving one's neighbor as oneself. Both Positives with Positive results.

1- Relationship to God
2- Relationship with every other human on earth, the yet to be born and the barely hanging onto life.


And a PS about the 4th Commandment: loving mother and father . . . it means loving anyone who will become, could become, has become a parent AND anyone who has a parent. In other words, every other human being, born or dying, on the face of the earth.

Mark 10 (New International Version)
17As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. "Good teacher," he asked, "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

18"Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good—except God alone. 19You know the commandments: 'Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, do not defraud, honor your father and mother.'"

20"Teacher," he declared, "all these I have kept since I was a boy."

21Jesus looked at him and loved him. "One thing you lack," he said. "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

22At this the man's face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.

This man's statement is that it IS possible to keep the 10 Commandments. So what was the ONE thing that kept the man from following Jesus? Was it not Covetousness? The desire to maintain all that he had acquired? He Coveted his possessions more than he loved God. So, he really did not keep those 10 Commandments. In fact, he broke 1st and the 10th.

Most holy Trinity,
Godhead indivisible,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
Our first beginning and our last end,
You have made us
In accord with Your own image and likeness.
Grant that all the thoughts of our minds,
All the words of our tongues,
All the affections of our hearts,
And all the actions of our being
May always be conformed to Your holy Will.
Thus, after we have seen here below in appearances
And in a dark manner by means of faith,
We may come at last to contemplate You face-to-face
In the perfect possession of You
Forever in heaven.
Amen.

O Lord Jesus,
Give us grace to make every effort
to supplement faith with moral courage,
knowledge with self-control,
self-control with patience,
patience with piety,
piety with brotherly affection,
and brotherly affection with love.
May these virtues keep us both active and fruitful
and bring us to the deep knowledge of You,
Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.

[Hank Kerchief]

Here’s a question. If a person never had a desire to do anything wrong, would you regard his virtue as great as someone who was constantly tempted and yet resisted that temptation and did what was right?

Covetousness is only temptation. It’s not a sin to be tempted. It would only be wrong if someone yielded to a desire for something wrong, and did it.

I could not regard a person who never desired anything wrong as particularly virtuous, but I greatly admire the man who recognizes the value of things, and desires them, but refuses to do wrong to acquire them. That’s true virtue.

Hank

[HighlyOpinionated]

Mother Teresa. She never desired anything wrong nor desired to do wrong.

In fact, she desired closeness with God above all things. And she’s quoted as saying she never felt His closeness.

So is her sacrifice of less value to God?

Covetousness IS a sin if you covet your wealth over your soul. If in desiring one thing, you exclude the other.

Can we really know if one person has never been tempted? Or how can we know if another person doesn’t go out of his way to place himself in temptations way so as to show his great “virtue” in the midst of tests and trials?

I admire the Nun in the Monastery more than I admire the Priest in the Parish. Yet from outward appearances, the Nun has placed herself where there are few temptations to covetousness. The Priest is surrounded by sin and sinners and the temptation to covet that which he has vowed not to desire.

[Hank Kerchief]

I’m glad if your opinion satisfies you, and you are fulfilled by it. I’ll not try to dissuade you.

However, I do not agree, but I am also sure you would be offended by my views. I see absolutely no point in offending anyone, so I’ll not offer them.

Thanks for the comments, truly.

Hank