The abolition of slavery was driven by the King James Bible. It gave slaves a common language and purpose.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Slavery was regarded by Aristotle as an ordinance of nature, and so probably was it by the slaves themselves in olden time.
Women were once considered chattel, and slavery was regarded as sanctioned in the Bible. However, western society grew to recognize that neither was just.
As the Bible inculcates upon man but one duty in respect to sin, and that is immediate repentance, abolitionists believe that all who hold slaves, or who approve the practice in others, should immediately cease to do so.
Slavery can only be abolished by raising the character of the people who compose the nation; and that can be done only by showing them a higher one.
Slavery in West Africa, and in Rome and in the Mediterranean, was something different than slavery in America.
I didn't know anything about '12 Years a Slave.' Not the book, not Solomon Northup, which I was quite shocked by, once I'd read it, that it wasn't a seminal text. I think it deserves to be.
The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.
The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.
Wherever we've gone around the world, we've found quite significant gaps: the holy texts, no matter which one you turn to, has ambiguity in it around slavery. That, we knew, was being used as justification by slavers all over the world.
However, I am willing to hear what you can produce from Scripture in favor of any kind of slavery.