Religion and Slavery

Religion and Slavery

In this article three of the most popular religions are being critiqued on their stand on slavery.  Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have a controversial history from their founders for not having a clear standing on objecting slavery.  Jesus never expressed his opinion about slavery but most Christians would say that he didn’t have to because the rest of his actions showed that he would never be for such an idea.  Now when it comes to Judaism, in Moses time there were many of God’s people in the Bible that had slaves but they were instructed to not mistreat them.  Did slaves back than mean the same thing as they do now; is it still the same context?  Probably not, I hope this article is not on a outsiders perspective because if one does not study the scriptures in a hermeneutics fashion they might misinterpret what is actually being said.  Same with Muhammad’s teaching, I do not know much about it but can we assume that Muhammad had slaves, not unless we have proof.  Muhammad did say that freeing slaves was an act of piety.

            Maybe the history of slavery was a very rocky slope at the time and maybe it was a symbol back then, a symbol for our slave to sin.  I mean God did say that after we disobeyed him in the Bible that life would get harder and maybe slavery was a part of that.  I do think that God knew that we could get out of it, that with his help we can learn to not be a slave to sin.  All these religion figures that we looked at had one thing for sure in common, they followed God.  So I do believe that Moses and Muhammad tried to follow God and maybe at the time slavery was not ready to be abolished yet.  Jesus on the other had since Christians consider him to be perfect in his deity then he knew exactly what he was doing when he did not say anything about slavery at least in scripture.