Second, support for slavery's role in heightening racism comes from comparing the different social outcomes in the US and Brazil. In the US during the era of slavery, there was an emphasis that was largely lacking in Brazil: that all people, being descended from Adam, are created in God's image. It means they are all intrinsically equal, one human family, despite all the variety and cultural differences, as the Declaration of Independence said. So in the US, there was a pressure to concoct schemes to make the enslaved group less human-but not in Brazil. This is one important reason why, after slavery was abolished, Brazil had far fewer social problems involving black-white racism than the US.
It also explains why such biblically untenable (though allegedly biblical) notions as 'pre-Adamite races'3, and 'the curse of Ham4 led to black skin' arose and/or were prevalent in the white culture of the USA, yet not that of Brazil5. In a society with more biblical leanings, the anti-racist and anti-slavery implications of the straightforward history of humanity in Genesis had to be neutralized. Like today's theistic evolution compromises, these ideas were not driven by what the Bible said, but by the outside ideas prevalent in the society, which were then read into the Bible.[source]
Footnotes: 3This was to make Adam the progenitor of only the ‘white race’. Thus these alleged pre-Adamites were the ancestors of all other groups, who could then be labelled as subhuman. By not being in the Adamic line, it also precluded the possibility of their salvation through Jesus Christ, the ‘Kinsman Redeemer’ (Isaiah 59:20) and ‘the Last Adam’ (1 Corinthians 15:45). 4There was of course no curse on Ham, and no mention of skin colour associated with the account regarding the curse on Canaan, Ham’s son. For a fascinating explanation/exposition of other aspects of this, see the author’s book One Human Family: The Bible, science, race and culture. 5See also the book by secular researcher Sylvester A. Johnson, The myth of Ham in nineteenth-century American Christianity, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Darwin was from "the more Biblical" i e Anglo-Saxon culture. Let us have a look at the "less Biblical" i e Brazilian culture.
3 - Teilhard de Chardin foi um padre jesuíta, adepto ferrenho da teoria da evolução, de Darwin, que se envolveu numa pesada fraude para fazer passar o esqueleto de um macaco pelo de um homem primitivo, o "homem de Piltdown". Foi advertido pelo Papa Pio XII. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, zeloso católico, era antiteilhardista. Por isso, é criticado por Alceu: "os antiteilhardistas são, por isso mesmo, os da Igreja fechada, cuja expressão máxima é o Plínio" (São Lourenço, 13-5-1965).
4 - Para Alceu, que se havia engajado decididamente na chamada "igreja nova", Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira seria um "reacionário". Entretanto ele reconhece que Plinio se baseava num Papa santo (São Pio X) e em outro bem-aventurado (Pio IX): "Reacionários mil vezes piores do que ele [o escritor Jackson de Figueiredo] - os Plínios e companhia - continuaram a escrever como católicos e apoiando-se em Pio X ou em Pio IX" (Nova York, 19-10-1958). [source]
So in Brazil, you have a reception of Teilhard de Chardin and a denunciation of the same. Reception by Alceu and denunciation by Plinio. By contrast, France at the same time or some twenty - thirty years later has a Teilhard de Chardin reception and hardly any opposition. Father Bryan Houghton - who considered evolutionism a kind of avatar of Buddhism - was Englishman. Crombette - Geocentric and Young Earth Creationist - was a Belgian. Brazil, by closer ties to Catholicism than France, has more of Biblical Genesis teaching. Did it go as far as affirming the brotherhood of all men? Well, if you hear the word "fascist" you usually think of a racialist, right? Hitler was a racialist all through his political carreer after writing Mein Kampf, Mussolini - who started out in a better fashion - became racialist in 1938 by adaptation to Hitler. (Never mind that neither Franco nor Salazar were racialists). In Brazil there was a fascist leader, if you like to call him that, named Plinio Salgado. His movement "integralism" stressed the brotherhood of white, indio and black. And if you look at slavery, Brazil abolished it peacefully in 1888, by imperial decree. Slave owners got a monetary indemnity, it was basically the state buying slaves free, redeeming them.
But even if you go to the US, French and Catholic Louisiana, while having slavery, was the least racialist of the Confederate States. It was one state in which a free black man could own a gun and carry it in town. It was one state - I think I recall - in which freed blacks did not have to carry a document proving they had been freed. Why? Because the Biblical sense of men as brothers, through Adam our father in the flesh and through Christ our redeemer in grace was at least as strong or even stronger among Catholics than among Protestants.
This rule was enshrined in law in Virginia's 1924 Racial Integrity Act, passed on the same day as the state's evolution-inspired eugenics act to sterilize people by force. If a white person married someone who had even 'one drop' of African 'blood' (ancestry), their marriage was a criminal offence.
Given the lack of pressure in Brazil to relegate blacks to an inferior status to justify their enslavement, it's no surprise that in Brazil the one-drop rule does not work that way at all. In fact, it almost applies in reverse.
Anyone who actually read Pope Pius XI's Casti Connubii? It was a scathing chastisement of legislations such as Nuremberg Laws (of, possibly, Rabbinic inspiration) or the Racial Integrity Act of 1926 or - in advance - Mussolini's (alas) Carta della Razza from 1938. And in the 1930's it was not the Protestant Establishment, but the Catholic Hierarchy, that said things like:
8. From this it is clear that legitimately constituted authority has the right and therefore the duty to restrict, to prevent, and to punish those base unions which are opposed to reason and to nature; but since it is a matter which flows from human nature itself, no less certain is the teaching of Our predecessor, Leo XIII of happy memory:[7] "In choosing a state of life there is no doubt but that it is in the power and discretion of each one to prefer one or the other: either to embrace the counsel of virginity given by Jesus Christ, or to bind himself in the bonds of matrimony. To take away from man the natural and primeval right of marriage, to circumscribe in any way the principal ends of marriage laid down in the beginning by God Himself in the words 'Increase and multiply,'[8] is beyond the power of any human law." [source]
By the words "legitimately constituted authority has the right and therefore the duty to restrict, to prevent, and to punish those base unions which are opposed to reason and to nature" Pope Pius XI is of course referring to homosexual partnerships. He also affirms the parental rights as against state schooling and child protective services:
16. The blessing of offspring, however, is not completed by the mere begetting of them, but something else must be added, namely the proper education of the offspring. For the most wise God would have failed to make sufficient provision for children that had been born, and so for the whole human race, if He had not given to those to whom He had entrusted the power and right to beget them, the power also and the right to educate them. For no one can fail to see that children are incapable of providing wholly for themselves, even in matters pertaining to their natural life, and much less in those pertaining to the supernatural, but require for many years to be helped, instructed, and educated by others. Now it is certain that both by the law of nature and of God this right and duty of educating their offspring belongs in the first place to those who began the work of nature by giving them birth, and they are indeed forbidden to leave unfinished this work and so expose it to certain ruin. But in matrimony provision has been made in the best possible way for this education of children that is so necessary, for, since the parents are bound together by an indissoluble bond, the care and mutual help of each is always at hand. [source]
Maybe time for Carl Wieland to consider if Catholic Brazil was not actually rather more Biblical than Protestant and largely Masonic 19th C. US? Otherwise I quite agree with his article. There was slavery. There was a try to motivate it and it resulted in racialism and that in turn fed on Darwinism.
Now, I am also looking at St Thomas Aquinas' reaction on Aritstotle's doctrine of some people being naturally slaves. To Aristotle this meant that some peoples, some ethnicities, are naturally slaves. In Athens back then one would have been looking to Thracia. To St Thomas it means that some persons are that. They show it by mean deeds which is why slavery is all right as a punishment. Even so, the master is neither master of the slave's mind, nor of his body's natural functions - including reproduction. According to St Thomas Aquinas a master cannot forbid his slaves to marry, for instance. Or overwork them so that they cannot live with their wives (but if certain working hours are inconvenient it may be a wife's duty to live with that) or attend Holy Mass at Sunday or other parts of Christian instruction. But Wieland claims the Sepulveda - de las Casas debate introduced Aristotelianism:
Sepulveda was Aristotelian in that debate? As far as I know, the one who took the Aristotelian stance was de las Casas, stating that Indians by reason of their great altruism are natural masters and that the natural slaves are white and black. Sepulveda argued from the human sacrifice, cannibalism, sodomy as an openly accepted practise that Indian peoples had collectively deserved enslavement (much like US thought in 1945 about Germany and Japan) and that civilisation's boons were a just recompensation and more than that than the gold that las Casas considered as stolen. I am not sure, but I do not think he considered them another reason why it was OK for previously sovereign Indian peoples to loose the right to rule themselves. The Soviet style slavery in which Incas and Aztek rulers held their subjects was. However, las Casas got a point insofar as he introduced, briefly, Spain to Black Slavery, replacing the Indians in the mines. Spain like other European powers bought their Black Slaves from Africans who had hunted them among themselves. The Crown had the policy to accept buying slaves "if they had been caught in just wars of defense against their own - the now slaves' own - original agression for enslavement purposes". Spanish Crown was first to see through that African Kingdoms were lying about this to get more merchandise for their slave exports - and dropped the Black Slave importation, but kept the black slaves already in place. Can you point to the original text of the debate (Spanish or correct English translation) if I am wrong?
If Sepulveda really argued that White Technological Supremacy (wheat, grapes of vine - both necessary for Holy Eucharist - pigs, horses, wheels, iron) argued White Social Supremacy, I could not disagree more. Indeed, I differ from Carl Wieland's "No Laptops on the Ark" insofar as I think Nodian technology included some very modern destructive technologies: genetic manipulation (my theory of how T Rex arose from some far smaller lizard or - bird), atomic bombs and technology to fly around dropping such. And I think the post-flood technology arose in part from Noah's decision to avoid such evil things, as a deliberate delimitation of technological advance to what is agriculturally and so useful. If he invented the wine, or even at all consumption of alcohol, there might have been other drugs or hypnosis in the days before him. That does not mean all of modern technology was present. The wheel may indeed be post flood. I wonder if Ham's wife had Nodian ties - explaining thereby Egyptian references to Atlantis and Indian Mahabharata references (Krishna - who was not by any means a real god but who may well have been a man - died before the Flood according to traditional dates) to what now is considered by some Indians as references to Atomic Bombs and even space craft. It would also explain why the Hamitic ruler Nimrod is there when building the tower. And parts of Nodian technology would of course have been offered by demons.
But to return to the article's contrast between US and Brazil. When the Founding Fathers talked about all men being created equal they may very well have conveniently forgotten the Black slaves. You see, and if you had read Boswells life of Dr Johnson you would know it, the Whigs who were for the Colonist Rebels were pro-slavery. The Tories who were for the Loyalists were also against slavery. They maye have been for privilege, for a peasant lifting his hat to a landlord, but not for slavery. Boswell was a Whig, Dr Johnson was a stranded Tory (earlier downright Jacobite) among such.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibl. Château d'eau, Paris
St Gaetan
18-XII-2012
Update following day: After reading first chapters of Antiquitates Iudaeorum, I see a confirmation of my thought that Noah did not bring all preflood technology onto the Arc. Josephus states that after preaching he feared for his life and fled. That is, when building the Arc he was of course a master Carpenter, but he and his family were not masters of all trades in the then human society./HGL
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