Sunday 11 July 2010

Christianity, Slavery and bastard love children

Reading Christopher Hitchens' memoir, Hitch-22, and was startled by his obvious admiration of Edward Said (having recently said some horrid things about Said, I was surprised that Hitchens, a fellow of refulgent intelligence, should have been conned by said Said....), so I did some roaming round and was led to a 2007 essay titled  "Hitchens simply cannot be this stupid", which turns out to be an essay on slavery, the role of Christianity in abolishing it, and thence to a comment about the benefits, or lack thereof, of Christianity itself.  A brief exchange in the comments section ending with this from a rather sharp and tart "Fanusi Khiyal":
Some of this anti-Christian sentiment is absolutely ridiculous. Can any of you Athiests [sic] honestly say that the world would have been better off without it? [from GuitarBob]
Are you serious?
Without Christianity, we would not have had to deal with the sweltering horror of the Dark Ages, and nor would we have now to contend with the bastard offspring of Christianity and Judeism - Islam. And given that "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" comes straight out of the Acts of the Apostles, we would have been spared the nightmare of Communism too.
The whole article on the history of slavery, called "Hitchens simply cannot be this stupid" [!] is here.
But Islam is not the "bastard child" of Christianity and Judaism alone, even if it drew deeply on both of them.  Allah was one of the pre-existing Arabic names for one of the 365 gods worshipped by the polytheists in Arabia at the time, those who worshipped the Kaaba -- that great black cube that was also overtaken and monopolised by Mohammed's new Muslim troops -- and faced Mecca when doing so, for that was where the Kaaba was located.  Allah was a male moon god, worshipped by the Moon cultists, hence the contumely commonly hurled at Islam, that it's really just a Moon Cult.  In any case, Islam had many parents, just like anything successful -- if it had failed, it would have been an orphan....
(and surely we must acknowledge its success, if only as a meme, even as we decry its supremacist, sectarian, misogynist  character)