[Vision2020] Re: Courage

[Andreas Schou]

> Visionaries
> 
> Just a brief response to Andreas:
> 
> I actually do think that R.L. Dabney had racist assumptions, and 
> these 
> assumptions sometimes came out in truly odd ways. My favorite is 
> found in 
> his Systematic Theology, where he takes on red-heads who do not 
> know that 
> they are inferior. These racist assumptions of his are the result 
> of 
> accounting for discrepancies in cultural advancement by pointing 
> to nature, 
> or, as we would say, genetics.

The story of Ham, Shem and Japheth provided ample justification for racial hatred by Christians, and, indeed, was largely the Southern justification for racial slavery. The first formulations of this sort of racism predate Darwin by centuries. It seems to me that racism, whether Christian or scientific, arises out of a xenophobia deeper than the silly justifications that people use to explain it.

Besides, modern lunatics like Hernnstein and Murray notwithstanding, evolutionists have come to the conciousion that if skin colour is at all correlated with intelligence, it's correlated at such a low level as to be undetectable. Darwin is not dogma, and Darwin's racist heirs are /especially/ not dogma.

> But the real reason for the 
> advancement of 
> "the West" was the influence of the gospel. For whites to preen 
> themselves 
> on their native genius is downright silly. Not very many centuries 
> ago, my 
> ancestors were probably painting themselves blue in order to run 
> naked into 
> battle. 

This sounds like fun. Don't knock it -- the last time they painted themselves blue was in the mid-1700s, long after the advent of Presbyterianism. ;)

> The savagery and primitivism of northern Europe (bastion 
> of all 
> those "good genes"!) matched anything you could find anywhere 
> else. Left to 
> their own devices, the white race is just like every other race of 
> men -- 
> all screwed up. Thank God for forgiveness of sin. And thank God 
> that this 
> forgiveness is extended to all of us, (as I was taught to sing as 
> a child), 
> "red or yellow, black or white, they are precious in his sight."
> 
> In response to any Internet racists or racialists that you all 
> might google 
> up , let me just say this. Please be tolerant of their mistakes 
> because it 
> is the same mistake being made by so-called progressives 
> throughout this 
> flap. They think this is about race, and it is not. It is about 
> the 
> Christian faith, and the holiness of all the requirements of the 
> Bible.

I mentioned this in my original post. Yes, this is about the Christina faith, and no, this doesn't excuse it at all. Like all other utopians, whether medieval or pro-Soviet or pro-Catalonian, you're repeating tired propaganda churned out by the official policy organs of a corrupt system. 

If you'd like a Christian utopia on Earth, I suggest you have it in the future, rather than in the past. You'll be more likely to enjoy it that way.

> One 
> letter writer to the Daily News this morning had this point just 
> right. A 
> Wesley someone (forgot his last name, sorry) identified the crux 
> of the 
> issue. I do have a dog in this fight, but it is not defending the 
> white 
> race, or the old South, considered as such. I am a Christian, 
> beginning to 
> end. That is where my allegiance is. This is a much more insidious 
> form of 
> chauvinism, in Wesley's view. Be that as it may, it is much more 
> potent 
> than any racial pride hooey.

One last thing. Sorry -- I'm not giving this whole Dabney thing up. Frankly, paging through some of his essays (particularly, his letters on public schooling, of which "The Negro and the Common School" was a part) made me vaguely ill.

Given Dabney's views on race, and his justification of slavery as the only fit destiny for either Africans or African-Americans, why in God's name do you think it would've ended peacefully, without either Northern intervention, divine intervention, or Northern divine intervention, as a lot of proponents of the theory seem to argue? And why take his word as a Southern partisan on the issue of slavery, rather than that of abolitionists, or, preferably, numerical primary data? Is it just a presumption of innocence based on your acceptance of Dabney's theological works?

--ACS