Christians also embraced slavery

Re “The faith to end slavery,” Opinion, Feb. 21

Joseph Loconte rightly applauds the moral scruples of William Wilberforce, who worked to outlaw the slave trade in Britain. However, in crediting Wilberforce’s Christian beliefs for this stance, Loconte fails to note that slaveholders used the same Bible to perpetuate the system of slavery. They pointed to numerous passages in both Hebrew and Christian scriptures that enjoin God’s people to keep slaves, sell their daughters into slavery and in which slaves are told to obey their masters. The Southern Confederacy was a hotbed of Christian evangelical fervor, and Southern Methodists and Baptists split from their Northern counterparts over the issue of slavery. By contrast, Thomas Paine was an outspoken opponent of slavery, a deist who held the Bible and Christianity in contempt. Wilberforce’s principled stand against slavery tells us more about his individual conscience than it does about biblical ethics, which are self-contradictory and often contemptible.

WALTER CLARK

Murrieta

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Loconte’s historical overview of the role of Wilberforce in ending Britain’s slave trade is informative. However, taking the opportunity to attack “secularists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris” by implying that atheists are more tolerant of human rights abuses than Christians is simply ridiculous. Most atheists and skeptics are humanists and have never justified their unethical behavior with anonymous ancient writings that endorse a God who is, as Dawkins writes, “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

The last thing we need in a post-9/11 era is more religious fanatics.

JOHN MAHLMANN

Long Beach