Themanwho said:
hammycheesyeggy said:
I was reading the
Independent of Sunday yesterday and struck by the irony that in this, the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery by Parliament, had there been an Equalities Minister back then and had she been Ruth Kelly,
would she have succumbed to lobbying by the Church of England (who owned the Codrington Plantation) to give faith communities an opt out from the anti-slavery legislation in order to comply with the deeply held doctrinal beliefs of those Christians who still felt slavery was hunky dory (and there were still a good many of them in 1707).
I believe that
she would and that the Church of England would to this day still own people and not see anything wrong with it.
Incidentally
when I was at school historical Christian anti-Semitism was "justified" on the basis that "the Jews" had committed Deicide!!! Has Christianity really progressed?
Ah, the old "You killed Jesus" argument.
Rather a pointless question, IMHO. Ruth Kelly is a product of the 20th/21st Century, so to ask whether she would have condoned continuation of slavery considering the views of the time is stretching the point somewhat. It's like asking if Tony Blair would have fought the American War of Independence if he'd been PM at the time. Who cares?
Surely we should celebrate the fact that our antecedends abolished slavery in this country and its dependencies two hundred years ago, rather than trying to score points off present-day politicos with this line of questioning. Personally, I'm more interested in Ruth Kelly's present day religion based bigotries than some unlikely "what-if" theory.
Here is a good current day what-if then. Islam holds the words and actions of its Prophet Mohammed dear. Sharia Law is the embodiment of Islam and should be followed (according to Muslims) to the letter. The Prophet Mohammed married (and I presume slept with) a 9 year old girl. Should she allow this as a Muslim expression of religion?
More to the point, should the stoning or beating of women be allowed as it is part of Islam faith?
The thread does not seem unrealistic in my mind. At what point does the law and customs of the land take a higher priority than the tenets of a religion?
If a Muslim woman has the right to refuse to shake hands, is allowed to wear the hijab and we must respect her religious freedoms in the UK, then mustn't we also allow the other 'freedoms'?