BLACKS AND RELIGION?

Newbie Joined: Sep 02, 2006 Posts: 11

me being black i never understood why blacks are so into religion...the more worst off we are the more we are into religion cant understand that...

Newbie First Class Joined: Apr 13, 2008 Posts: 28

In situation of illiteracy, it is easy to teach,

religion and slavery .

Newbie First Class Joined: Mar 29, 2008 Posts: 48

coeur wrote:

In situation of illiteracy, it is easy to teach,

religion and slavery .

The problem with blaming the problem on slavery is the fact that the same is even truer on the continent of Africa as well. Virtually all Africans (including Arabs) are religious. I think that the main problem is the lack of Africans proclaiming the virtues of no religion.

Grimey, you are a minority religionwise, but be vocal. Lies are easier to believe when nobody speaks the truth. I know you'll alienate many of the people you know, but be the voice of reason that most would otherwise never hear. FYI-I served in the army with a very vocal black atheist...if you knew him you knew he was an atheist. I was a Christian at the time; none-the-less I respected him for the strength of his convictions. He may have played a small role in my conversion from Xtianity.

Master of Logic Joined: Oct 04, 2003 Posts: 9362

Why is anyone religious?

The reasons very, but are very base. Dawkins describes it as a misfire like a moth attracted to a light bulb instead of moonlight.

If one thinks something benefits us, even if it doesn't, we can mistake it as truly being beneficial. I think a lot of god belief is merely a projection of what we want to be. Our genes evolved to replicate and attempt to continue. "God" is everlasting(by definition). It is a psychological attempt at escaping one's own mortality. The species has not outgrown this because of it's own ignorance|(lack of education, and or introspection).

I don't think this is a black or white thing, because ALL cultures in every country have a majority that holds some sort of superstition.

There are less black atheists in America only by ratio, just as there are less blacks, by ratio. But, black or white, the majority of Americans believe, to whatever degree, that a deity(generic, or specific) exists, by some label, be it "higher power" or "entity" or specific label, such as Jesus or Yahwey.

Resident Joined: Mar 26, 2008 Posts: 361

I think one can go as far as saying that the church was beneficial to blacks after slavery. It was the center of black communities. It provided a forum for people. Look at MLK.

Quote:

If one thinks something benefits us, even if it doesn't, we can mistake it as truly being beneficial.

Quote:

the more worst off we are the more we are into religion

People in hard times may be pressed to look for guidance, some spiritual but also from other people. It makes sense that blacks really go to church, seeing as how they have had their share of hard times mostly because of illiteracy from slavery and deprivation of rights by racists. To deal with this, blacks would have looked to the church like everyone else did, but did so even more because of the hardship.

Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 11:48 am

In the specific case of blacks in the US and Christianity, there's a clear history.

Whites used the curse of cain to 'mark' blacks as an inherent evil even greater than original sin. Manifest destiny and the imperative to spread the gospel were other parts.

Blacks took to the notion of Jesus as a symbol of injustice, persecuted and improsoned for no good reason...at least as the orthodoxy portrays it. In this sense, spreading Christianity among slaves backfired. The death and resurrection had a totally different meaning to black Christians. The trial under Pontius was the equivalent of their time in bondage. The resurrection would be the day that 'we shall overcome.' Ironically, there was side-by-side with this a delayed reaction to the injustice. The promise of eventual divine justice softened any resolve to end the persecution NOW. Sofetning it even more was the apprehension of this fact by white Christians, that the false promise of black salvation (false in the sense that the gospel did not truly apply to evil blacks) was next to guns the single most powerful force for keeping them in line.

A full 100 years after the civil war and the veneer of the end of slavery, blacks, sufficiently convinced that the end of slavery was not the divine justice they had hoped for and inextricably indoctrinated in the belief in divine justice, put a new twist on the orthodoxy (god helps those who help themselves)and began to take matters into their own hands.

With the birth of the civil rights movement, the ideas of earthly freedom and cosmic justice combined to become a single entity driving social change. To this day, for a black to denounce the faith of his (or her) fathers is tantamount to turning his back on the struggle. The belief in the inseparability of these ideas is only barely beginning to come under attack in the black community.

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 1:49 am

It just seems ridiculous for blacks to be Christian and outright insane for Native Americans. From a historical simplified view. If they would just ask themselves why they were xian it would seem bizzare. Xians Took their ancestors from Africa to America. The ones who didn't die under Xian care then became slaves to Xians who saw nothing wrong with it as slavery was condoned as long as the slaves were son's of Ham, or beating their slaves as was condoned by Jesus. Then for political reasons they were freed but still suffered severe mistreatment by Xians. And even at this point there was a significant # of Xian blacks. For Native Americans... man, the Xians genocidally wiped most of your people out, force "civilized" most of the rest by sterilizing out any native culture and language from your children. and they still give you the shaft... WTF!?!

Resident Joined: Mar 26, 2008 Posts: 361

That is unless the blacks looked at the whites as being wrong about their interpretation of Xianity and that Xianity did not necessarily belong to the whites, it belonged to everyonre.

Newbie First Class Joined: Oct 01, 2004 Posts: 26

Dawkins is useless for understanding the history of religion, let alone the history of black religion. While an historical perspective from the starting point of slavery is an improvement, what is lacking here is an accounting of the stranglehold of black religion in post-apartheid America.

The current tempest in a teapot over Jeremiah Wright illustrates the problem. The real issue here is not specific political statements about this or that injustice, but the conversion of secular political ratiocination into theocratic metaphysics. That and Wright's racial provincialism embodied in his idiotic defense of the fascist Farrakhan is the problem. Theology is inherently demagogic and authoritarian.

Everyone wants to invoke MLK to defend theological discourse, but this overlooks the amalgam of influences that went into MLK's approach, the fact that few preachers are of MLK's caliber, and that MLK was not a free man but a product of a very constricted society.

And yet this jackass in a dashiki prances around unashamed to show his face in the 21st century. We can't do better than this today?

Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 10:39 pm

Ralph,

Wright does typify the problems of seeing solutions to social issues through the lens of religion.

In a recent speech he was talking about coming from a "religious tradition" that values difference and freedom and equality. The problem is that this "tradition" did not exist prior to his own generation (MLK essentially invented it) except as wishing for a miracle which in itself slowed appropriate reactions to Jim Crow and the de facto slavery of sharecropping. The tradition is no tradition. It's new!

Christianity can do no better than Wright, as Christianity has little to offer but martyrdom after the pattern of Jesus. MLK served in this respect. The problem with martyrdom, even though it can be a powerful motivator, is that...you're dead! Not much you can do after that. But while he was alive was effective largely by employing Mahatma Ghandi's strategy of active non-violent resistance. And Ghandi was not Christian.

Newbie First Class Joined: Oct 01, 2004 Posts: 26

You are incorrect. Wright represents a tradition that did not come into being until AFTER King's assassination. "Black liberation theology" as a recognized category was a creation of the black power movement. In one way or another liberation and theology have interpenetrated since slavery days, but MLK had nothing to do with any category known as "black liberation theology".

Wright is dishonest in claiming that an attack on him is an attack on the black church. This tactic is a typically dishonest tactic that black demagogues use, first of all to manipulate their own people, secondly to snow white people with. Wright shows the all-too-characteristic lust for power of the black nationalist, no matter how many hungry people he feeds. His defenders among the black clergy, journalists, and pop intellectuals are even more dishonest in attempting to link him to MLK. It's disgusting!

MLK was an advance over the ascetic crackpot Gandhi, who was also no friend of black people in South Africa where he began organizing. In India Gandhi appealed to people who were more backward and ignorant than sharecroppers in the U.S. South. The secularist Nehru could not reach the Indian masses like Gandhi did, who appealed to superstitious ignorance inter alia to reform the barbaric practices of Hinduism.

Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 5:25 am

Cygnus wrote:

That is unless the blacks looked at the whites as being wrong about their interpretation of Xianity and that Xianity did not necessarily belong to the whites, it belonged to everyonre.

How is a group of people that doesn't even have the ability to read the bible going to be able to interpret anything about Xianity? They're only exposure to the religion was pretty negative. That's why I'm saying it seems odd that some of them picked it up. Aside from some cultural version of Stockholm syndrome...

Resident Joined: Mar 26, 2008 Posts: 361

Actually some slaves who had more benevolent masters (even though those were few and far between) sometimes did learn how to read. Those slaves picked up the bible and some even became preachers to the other slaves on their plantations (Nat Turner). Slaves would get moved around, so knowlege of reading and the knowlege of the bible would get spread around, as well. I wasn't entirely impossible for some slaves to learn to read.

Newbie First Class Joined: Oct 01, 2004 Posts: 26

There is a more general question as to why various peoples subject to imperialism willingly and not always by coercion adopt the religion of their conquerors, and even hang on to it once their conquerors are gone. The enslavement of Africans in the western hemisphere, and especially in the USA where in most places African culture was completely stripped away, presents a unique case. In the Caribbean and Latin America, native religions often were fused syncretically into the imposed Catholicism by the enslaved Africans. One doesn't find this in the USA: except in a few places, African survivals are stylistic rather than content-based. For a religiously oriented uprooted and imported population with nothing else to hang on to, the adoption of Christianity is not terribly far-fetched.

As for illiteracy, European populations were also illiterate, and the Catholic Church persecuted people who would translate the Bible into vernacular languages, English for instance.

It's hard to put oneself into the frame of mind of the people of earlier eras.

The question for today is: why do people hang on to belief systems long after they are obsolete? The religion of MLK and of other heroic participants in the Civil Rights movement represents an adaptation in a particular historical setting. MLK was a product of the South before he went to university and expanded his horizons to a certain degree. But Fannie Lou Hamer was a sharecropper with umpteen children. For these people, their version of Christianity was their metaphysical basis for human dignity.

But what we now see is a tradition gone rotten. Highflown elevated oratory becomes clownish pompous demagogy. Ideological rot sets in, as a complement of political stagnation.

The atheist movement has to do a much better job of analyzing these things. Dawkins, Harris, Shermer, and the rest of the kaboodle are worse than useless.

Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 1:05 am

Welcome to you as well Ralphellectual.

I think worse than useless might be a little harsh. If anything they have made Atheism a much needed topic of conversation. You seem well spoken enough yourself maybe you should write a better book.


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