Civil War American Slavery

Commentary

The lines of thinking presented here open more questions around the brain and human behaviour than answers. The blaring faults in the arguments that people held for pro-slavery have to have more human “physics” underlying them than what we typically say. Perhaps we need to take into account how the human brain works, how we as people are, how we react and behave, not just the obvious flaws we see in the false justifications described below for slavery, as in the Civil War era.

For example, Covid-19 lock downs and public communications instilled a pattern of fear. That pattern was learnt, via external conditions placed upon us. The pattern was not removed after Covid, because the brain learnt a new pattern that does not by nature simply vanish afterwards, even if what we learnt was considered complex and in sync with some survival requirements, or in other areas, such as later with the Covid variants, completely wrong.

We saw black body bags, but some of our friends said these were not real but fake. We have to start thinking about the way the mind works, which means in this sense, it is not about right or wrong, but what the mind is doing. I know I had to relearn how my mind approached information. I was perhaps thinking within boundaries of ignorance too, but my thinking was reasonable. We knew there were past viruses passed on from animals. But as information entered a more exposed era of deceit and lies, I had to come to terms with the virus being deliberately targeted at human beings from a lab and those involved – even though we probably still know very little.The thing is, I was not confident. I was open to change as information came to hand.

Perhaps those who say slavery is okay reflects a pattern of confidence, that for them feels good, self serving. A pattern that does not open new avenues for new thought or revised thought. If we challenge people like this, we may be greeted with hostility, which is a sure sign that the person is inflexible and not open to change in general. We see this confidence and inflexibility in other areas of people’s lives, and wonder why is that person unable to change, why do they hold strange views that have no sure basis?

How do I handle people who insist the earth was created in seven days and is no older than 10,000 years. Their confidence is absolute, but it is highly flawed. It means people have to invest time in other supposed facts to support that view. It feels good to have a delusion support a delusion. It feels good to have others who “sin” the same as me for my own “sin”. Let’s all sin together. The problem with that is that no two human beings are identical, so this supposed union between people is brittle. If this is where society has come to after all this time, we can’t say we are that advanced because handling truth, valuing truth, seeking truth is somehow still under the water, out there somewhere under the ocean.

It is a natural condition for us to want answers, even when considering global issues that we have not extensive grasp of. When crisis strikes unaware, people search for an answer to find help to the inner being. This may be an answer of partial truth, or completely in error. The physics at play is a need to find an answer and bullet proof it in any way possible.

When a school in Sydney experienced trauma over a murder, people were numbed and stunned. There was no satisfactory answer, but an answer was given. This helped calm the inner trauma. The answer or explanation was that the act of murder was evil, and shows that evil exists. (Yes, there is evil and malice, but the point I make is that without a clear answer, a profound energy was focused on removing the pain and finding an answer that I feel was actually very insufficient. Fortunately one person did provide a way forward – not an answer, but to recognise how we feel in this tragic time.) How do we handle such huge issues. Surely enforcing a human being to labor, to chain them up is huge. One way is to objectify “evil”. The person is evil. Evil takes on a persona, not just an act. I am not being unsympathetic, but looking at what we as a people do. We will find many arguments in each generation as to what is right or wrong. This is the problem we come up against continually.

Some crises do not have an answer. This is hard. Very hard. We do not have an answer to knock over an impenetrable wall. This is perhaps one of our greatest challenges as human beings. Never ending justifications are never ending because they do not work. Peace does not work this way. What we repeat over and over reflects something about who we really are. I would suggest, and as from historic accounts, Thornwell never changed his arguments for slavery and was incapable of doing so due to his human condition. That means answers have to be found another way, and that battle ensued. Today we have church divisions and splits, but what is the foundation of those splits and spin-offs? Clearly Thornwell kept status quo, but sometimes today new churches are founded in ill principles underlying the split, rather than old ones retaining the “illness”. A characteristic of a person who is able to develop is to work with these human conditions even in the life of the church. A shallow response is to reject and learn that impacting pattern. I think that is very dangerous, but during my own life, I look back and see where I did the same thing.

So, how did people in the Civil War respond to change? I fairly assert, there were people who just lied. I assume there were those persuaded by deceit. I assume there were those who questioned. A simpler “mode” of the mind is to accept what is blatantly stupid in some cases, and perhaps a training of the mind to accept what is not real as real. Narcissists and drug addicts do this all the time.

If the mind learnt that slavery was immoral, could one make a jump to some other platform, and equally see that something else was right or wrong? I tend not to think so, due to our own limits or where focus is placed. People seem to choose what suits a narrative amenable to them, what feels safer, regardless of harsh reality. A false view today, that slavery is okay, (which some hold) is a shadow of those in the past who believed it was still okay. This is the great question – what is really going on in the mind? Are facts and clarity given lower standing than delusion, as even delusion carries some kind of emotive backdrop.

We know for example by observation, we only handle so much information, memory capacity and short or long-term capacity also play a role. We know that adults can become highly disturbed and upset in some circumstances if questioned on fundamental life issues that we may think they should have tackled during their life and have some array of answers.

We also know that trust and confidence is a way the brain works too. If we have, say, limited memory and mind skill sets available to us (which is not a judgement) that we can only process information a certain way within such boundaries. Everyone wants to feel trust and confidence. This is not about right or wrong either, but the sense of stability within us, of a need for security, of emotion.

When a person thrives on the feeling of confidence, they statistically have to be making more mistakes than the person with less confidence. 100% confidence is actually a killer. If someone loves teaching, is it the love of teaching, which may be real, or is it the love of feeling right, or not even that, but the love of the feeling for high confidence. As time is invested in feeding this feeling,  time is not spent on understanding a better reality, such as things like outcomes, side-effects, empathy and so on.

We are perhaps familiar with Church leaders going off track, so that at some point later in life, their patterns of behaviour are no longer tolerable, so people are removed from office, corrected, or people leave a congregation. If one person can break the stock market, one person can break a church. This is why excellence of leadership is most important, and raises the question, what is actual human development? Happy, confident people, extroverts, those making the most sound doing all sorts of things for society is not the real gauge for leadership.

I would suggest some aspects of what I’ve mentioned would come into play when congregations were faced with the issue of slavery. But what disturbs me today, is why some still think it is okay. I have not spent enough time on this thought as yet, and am trying to learn more about it.

For now, let’s put this aside, and look at some obvious faults as you read the points below. I notice several areas of concern. See how you go with some blaring flaws in the arguments presented below for pro-slavery. (Information derived from various sources and confirmed by chatGPT.)

It stuns me, that there are still people I know who say slavery is in the bible so it is okay, and slaves were better off. Slavery is forced labor, which is immoral. If we break that clarity for some hazy reason, our minds are not able to grasp clarity on various other issues. The condition of slavery is what a person was in at that time, and to leave would mean being as worse case scenario, killed! It would be stupid to preach under Roman rule that slavery must be abolished. People are not all ignorant of truth, and many would well have known the yoke of slavery as well as persecution.

If we say slavery is okay, we must logically say persecution is okay, because both share pain and suffering, threat to the core of a human being’s freedom and life. We usually do not see such connections, but when we do make connections, they are more real to us. Saying that the Apostle Paul mentions slavery is out of context, because people well knew what their society and government was like in those days, and Paul actually says if you can gain your freedom, do so. Slavery is absolutely unsupported in the Old Testament, as in the case of the Jews leaving Egypt. What could be clearer? And when they wanted to go back into slavery, their hardened hearts led to that older generation dying in the desert so the next generation would not have slavery in their bones and blood.

So here we have an example of a shocking set of facts around slavery being put aside for other views that don’t even hold up. This is a huge concern. Why does the human mind do this? I think people sometimes cannot jump from one reality to another, especially if they have not experienced it. Worse still, is not being aware of what one’s mind is doing. What am I actually thinking? What am I actually doing?

Another concern is that when people see a true moral principle (not a concocted principle that does not hold up) there is an observable inability to apply that principle to other matters requiring the same principle. As an analogy, a person buys chicken at the shop and checks the use-by date, and before cooking the chicken verifies it does not smell off. However, that principle should also be applied to buying salads and greens, but the person fails to make the connection and hence eats bad food. A dumb example, but switching from one situation to another shows an inability to apply a general principle. As a real life example, a person suffers ostracising their whole life for being genuinely obese. After surgery, they are no longer ridiculed in public, yet, the person ridicules, ostracises, and rejects other people with other problems, not wanting to see what the real picture is, some other context. It is like a documentary on TV where an ex-Iranian prisoner after being released form torture then says he will do all he can to torture and kill Americans. The lesson has not been learnt.

There is much not stated in the article below. For example, slaves were barbaric, they were not allowed to read, they could not touch things that white people would touch due to disease. I am confident (ouch – may I have this latitude) Noah was not white. SO, what do people do when their arguments are exposed as flawed? They may want to stick to them, so they could say, well, dark-skinned instead of black. This is pathetic, but happens every day, everywhere, on every issue under the sun. And that means, the things we hear never end, constantly stunning us as we see the next unbelievable thing happen or spoken.

There are known cases of forced labor, modern-day slavery even recently seen in Australia via the Courts. There are overseas scam centers where people are imprisoned at gun point, and various   abuses such as trafficking. We may have to admit a certain naivety and be humble about that truth, but that does not mean our thinking should justify an acceptance of slavery because of that naivety. I think this is a huge problem that crosses over to other matters in life, and without clarity of thinking, a certain malaise for bad outcomes is more likely.