Project 5782 | Day 22

Not as it Seems

Scripture Portion

Psalm 82

¹ God has taken his place in the divine council;
   in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:
² “How long will you judge unjustly
   and show partiality to the wicked? Selah
³ Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;
   maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.
⁴ Rescue the weak and the needy;
   deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”
⁵ They have neither knowledge nor understanding,
   they walk about in darkness;
   all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
⁶ I said, “You are gods,
   sons of the Most High, all of you;
⁷ nevertheless, like men you shall die,
   and fall like any prince.”
⁸ Arise, O God, judge the earth;
   for you shall inherit all the nations!

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®) Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved.

Quote from Reading

“On the issue of slavery, it was essentially Western civilization against the world. At the time, Western civilization had the power to prevail against all other civilizations. That is how and why slavery was destroyed as an institution in almost the whole world. But it did not happen all at once or even within a few decades. When the British finally stamped out slavery in Tanganyika in 1922 it was more than half a century after the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, and vestiges of slavery still survived in parts of Africa into the twenty-first century.
“The unique position of the Western world in the history – and especially the destruction – of slavery need not imply that there was unanimity within the West on this institution. In addition to whites who defended the enslavement of Africans on racial grounds, or who opposed general emancipation on social grounds, there were many whites – and even blacks – who defended slavery as a matter of self-interest as slaveowners. Although most black owners of slaves in the United States were only nominal owners of members of their own families, there were thousands of other blacks in the antebellum South who were commercial slaveowners, just like their white counterparts. An estimated one-third of the ‘free persons of color’ in New Orleans were slaveowners and thousands of these slaveowners volunteered to fight for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Black slaveowners were even more common in the Caribbean. In short, there were many defenders of slavery in the West, even in the nineteenth century – and, outside the West, slavery was too widely accepted to require defense.”

Sowell, Thomas, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Encounter Books: New York, 2005, pg. 126-127

Provocative Language

from “Alone”

Have you ever
Sat in a room
Full of people
Yet never felt
So alone…

…

No acknowledgement
No conversation
No nothing.
My company,
My phone.

Bhathal, Ritu, Poetic RITUals, 2016, pg.

Project 5782 | Day 16

Depravity!

Scripture Portion

Job 34.21-22

²¹ For his eyes are on the ways of a man,
and he sees all his steps.
²² There is no gloom or deep darkness
where evildoers may hide themselves.

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®) Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved.

Quote from Reading

“Contrary to the ‘myths to live by’ created by Alex Haley and others, Africans were by no means the innocents portrayed in Roots, baffled as to why white men were coming in and taking their people way in chains. On the contrary, the region of West Africa from which Kunte Kinte supposedly came was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent – before, during, and after the white man arrived. It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere.
“This pattern was not confined to West Africa, from which most slaves were sent to the Western Hemisphere. In East Africa, the Masai were feared slave raiders and other African tribes – either alone or in conjunction with Arabs – enslaved their more vulnerable neighbors. As late as 1891, it was reported that ‘Manyuema slavers had demoralized surrounding tribes, destroying crops, and famine reigned everywhere.’ Even in the early twentieth century, Abyssinians were still raiding other Africans and carrying off slaves. It was 1922 before the British had gained sufficient control in Tanganyika to stamp out slavery there. Arabs were the leading slave raiders in East Africa, ranging over an area larger than all of Europe. The total number of slaves exported from East Africa during the nineteenth century has been estimated to be at least two million.”

Sowell, Thomas, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Encounter Books: New York, 2005, pgs. 120-121

Provocative Language

“We all at times feel somewhat painfully our human isolation from the subhuman world – the atrophy of instinct which our intelligence entails, our excessive self-consciousness, the innumerable complexities of our situation, our inability to live in the present. If only we could shuffle it all off! We must not – and incidentally we can’t – become beasts.”

Lewis, C.S., The Four Loves: An Exploration of the Nature of Love, Mariner Books: New York, 2012 edition, pg. 52