Black Spirituality Religion : Black Christian People

Sister Destee, first off I want to thank you for taking the time to comment.
Secondly, I want folks to know that I was brought up in a so-called Christian household.
Thirdly, with all due respect sister, some of your comments are somewhat naive.

Let me begin by saying that our ancestors who were slaves in America did at one time practice their own form of worship and spirituality. That form of ritual which was through chanting, song, drum and dance but was taken from them because it kept them strong and in touch with their ancestors and homeland. The white enslavers knew this and forbade them to participate in anything that kept them spiritually connected to Africa and their ancestors. They had to continue these practices in secret for fear of punishment.. The African spirit had to be completely broken and this was realized through various methods of humility and torture. They were primed to suck up anything that would allow them to endure the suffering.
Christianity was then spoon fed to them in place of those practices them to make them docile and harmless. It taught them to love the the very same wicked people that had enslaved them and not to rise up against them mainly out of fear! They were denied the ability to outwardly embrace the very essence of who they were and where they had come from!!
The only difference between then and now is that they pretty much were forced to convert to this contrived, hypocritical, pseudo religion. Folks today when knowing of the savagery that was inflicted on our ancestors by these white Christians, choose to embrace the very same corrupt and tainted religious practices of their oppressors.
My dear sister,you are very much mistaken when you say that Christianity was all that they had, because they also had each other, memories of their families and the spiritual connection to their ancestral homeland and teachings.
Christianity eventually replaced all of that and as a result, has led to the docility of a great many African Americans. Most of us today still want to love and be accepted by these heathens, who by the way are also Christians and continue to discriminate, denigrate, murder and oppress a lot of our people.. When a people have a difficult time extricating themselves from something that is known to be corrupt and try to excuse it by saying it has some good points, something is psychologically wrong.

You say that it was good for our ancestors and it is good enough for you and I say it has destroyed our people and our sense self, worth and spirituality. Religion is a method of indoctrination and brainwashing and there is absolutely nothing spiritual about it. It's dogma is intended to mentally incapacitate people and hold them as slaves.

You also say that the N-word and Christianity are the same and I say that they are not. The N-word is just a tool of the so-called Christian oppressors that was used to denigrate us and some folks have decided to flip it to express something else. Personally, Some of our people have this tendency to refer each other as dogs and ni--gers and bi-ches but personally I don't ascribe to that and I don't endorse it either.
Whatever the case may be as it pertains to the N-word with folks proclaiming that it belongs to us and that it is a term of endearment and so forth that's their prerogative. Personally, I think it's ridiculous and all I can say is that I don't believe that they call each other N---gers or Kaffir in Africa.
Everything that our Ancestors were and what we could have been has been lost and we will not find it in the so-called religion of Christianity!! A great number of us have become the darker shade of our colonizers.

So sister Destee, the question still stands, after all that we know:
Why do black folks continue to embrace this so-called Christian religion and continue to worship and praise it's so-called God? Both of which are the handiwork of white people who had enslaved our ancestors. A religion that has established it's prominence and dominance using torture, exploitation, destruction, lies, murder, superstitions, fear and guilt?

What do you need religion for anyway, when everything that you could possibly need is inside of you?
Once again, thank you for your comments sister Destee.

Freedom.jpg
 
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When Africans were brought to America, we could not speak nor read the language of the slave drivers or the oppressors. They didn't want us to learn how to read their language, and for good reason, because understanding their written language would help us to understand them. Teaching slaves how to read became illegal so as not to risk running into an African who acted uppity because s/he could read and could then organize a revolt.

Comprehension of the oppressor's written language, would give Africans a certain amount of power that lifted them higher than the four legged beasts they also referred to as chattel. But a certain amount of advanced knowledge could be made to work to their advantage even still. The way to do that is to use the Bible as their first primary lesson. I don't care so much about who wrote the books of the Bible as I care about who commanded that it be put together and why. The Bible became an excellent tool to control the masses--to create laws and judge the behavior of society's people who fell under a certain autocrats rule. It justified the behavior of the people in control who were unapologetic for the violence committed in the name of the God who the people were forced to serve.

Voluntarily learning vs. being forced to learn are two different things. Ask Native Americans about their ancestors who were forced to construct a huge cross on their native land by Christopher Columbus and to learn the Lord's prayer en route to see the Queen of Spain, and kneel before her when they got there to show her favor, and signing the cross on their chest before her. The method used to strike fear in the Natives, forcing them to turn their backs on their religious beliefs was when they observed the damage that a bullet could do when fired at them.

After being preached at over and over again, being reminded of the severe punishment they would receive if they didn't comply could be the reason African Americans eventually embraced the teachings of a white Jesus. It made many of them docile in the process.

I understand that Christianity works for a lot of African Americans and Africans alike, especially in Nigeria. For those that find comfort in it is understandable given how we came to learn about it. But even as a little girl, I wondered how it could be that Black people and white people could subscribe to the same religion.
 
I just had a thought.
I guess one can say that Christianity is just like the institution of law enforcement. It is an institution whose primary purpose was to keep the peace, protest and serve and establish and maintain law and order, but somewhere along the way became very corrupt because they saw a way to capitalize on their positions and power by way of bribes, deception, exploitation, extortion, oppression and murder. We have come to place our trust and faith in them, only to have that faith and trust betrayed. Betrayal is a hard thing to overcome, so we don't trust law enforcement anymore but continue to trust the ministers. priests and most clergymen. Go figure!!
But hey there are some good cops and some folks who join the force with the hopes of doing some good and making a difference, but eventually just get overshadowed or swallowed up in all of the corruption. However, the only way to correct this flawed system of government and law enforcement is to tear it down and start all over again but you and I both know that, that is not likely to happen. Same thing with the so-called religion of Christianity. It's a money making driven machine that is deeply immersed in control and corruption and that's not about to change anytime soon.
I understand completely how some folks have been indoctrinated into certain dogma or systems of belief and find it difficult to pull away from it and how some may find comfort in it. I get it because I was there but after much reflection and reading I had begun to see just how much I had been mislead and lied to and decided to extricate myself (still believing in a greater source) from the lies and deception that I had been fed and began making every effort to gain a better understanding of myself, other people and the world that we have created.

I have come to develop this philosophy;
One can not free ones self from the oppressor if one continues to lay in bed with the oppressor.

If one endorses and embraces the religion of that oppressor then one endorses and embraces the oppressor.
 
I'm not used to defending christianity but it actually makes a lot of sense.

Christianity is not a white religion and has never been. It's teachings are incompatible with slavery and it's no coincidence it were people from European christian culture that had slavery abolished, against their self interest.

If we compare that to islam for example, Arabs did trade and use much significantly more slaves than the Europeans and Americans, they also enslaved people themselves while the Europeans preferred to buy them from African slavetraders. The muslim world was forced by the West to abolish slavery and they did but not from their own free will and only officially. There's still a lot of modern slavery in the Gulf area and in Libya and countries like Mauretania there's still old fashioned slavery. Almost all chocolate you eat will partly be the product of African child slavery.

The idea that non-islamic African peoples without a humanist and christian tradition would have abolished slavery by themselves seems a bit optimistic. They had the chance before the Europeans came, but they didn't. Slavery is normal in history, the European stance against slavery is the exception, first for Europeans, later for the whole world. What's special about the Europeans is that they put racism into slavery, but really not that special because muslims have done that too, and I'm not sure African slavery was entirely without racism either. The problem now is that racism has not gone with slavery, especially in America.
 

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