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I am curious: Why do most people embrace the religion of their oppressors? I was asking because I am black, and most black people (as well as Hispanics, Native Americans,and other minorities) embrace Christianity. If something helps a person live right, then I have no problem with it (more power to them). The question is this: Why would they embrace the religion of the people who oppressed them (The Caucasians)? As far as I can tell, there is no historical evidence that Muslims, Buddhists, Shintoists, etc. have ever oppressed Black people (or other minorities). What religion were most (if not all) slave owners/slave buyers, and those who killed Negro slave men and raped Negro slave women? Not Muslim! Not Shinto! And certainly not Buddhist... (I am sure that there were very few, if any at all, Atheist slave owners as well) It was mainly Bible-believing, (Holy) Spirit-filled Christians. I could be wrong

Muslims are still involved with the buying and selling of black slaves in Norther Africa to this day...

Dogboy86 wrote:Muslims are still involved with the buying and selling of black slaves in Norther Africa to this day...

You are right- I am well aware of what you say. I don't suppose the Darfur genocide by Arab Muslim on Christian blacks in the south that is just now
coming to a close would count. Muslims have been the slave traders of north Africa for some time and were also so in the Southern Philippines.
As Osama Bin Laden himself observed, Islam has always spread through conflict and war..., though I think there are exceptions to that.
If you have lived within a Muslim dominated society, well, it speaks for itself. Terror is required to maintain the obedience of the population...

I am not aware of any Baptist groups for example, that have ever practiced imposing the death penalty on those who want to leave the church.
This is widely practiced in Islamic societies to this day. I am well aware of such, having friends who are former Muslims who fled for their lives
to a non Muslim country to avoid being killed, and even have to have no contact with family members, as even their own family will kill them
if they can find them. Ah yes, the religion of peace....

I live around many Muslims in the Philippines and most there are relatively mild compared to the middle east and Africa. Its seems in many cases that
they are "cultural Muslims", not very hard core. Even still, within the more pure Muslim areas of Mindanao, there have been beheadings carried out
by kangaroo Sharia law courts withing the last couple of years. These kinds of things of course are used to terrorize the population into
submission to Islamic leaders in the area...and in fact it works. I saw a cell phone video of one of the beheadings- the guy was not very good- it took him three chops to totally severe the head, with a geyser of blood, as the cowed villagers stood and watched. This is not ancient history, it was less then three years ago- and this year there have been yet many more beheadings in Mindanao. This is not some kind of war, it is actions within a culture...


outwest

Dogboy86 wrote:Muslims are still involved with the buying and selling of black slaves in Norther Africa to this day...

I do not doubt that, but even though this might be immaterial to what you're trying to say, I was referring to the pre-Civil War era. It is possible that Muslims were selling and using black slaves parallel to the American slavery era...

My parents embraced Christianity when they were in Thailand, so I was born in a Christian household. My parents don't know anything about religion oppressors, but maybe others felt oppressed by those missionaries? I don't know the history of their Christianity conversion. I know in America that many parents and young people feel insulted and oppress when Christians try to share something with them.

This has little to nothing to do with Christianity, so that's a real non sequitur. People choose their faith because of how it touches their soul, not because someone imposes it on them. Faith and force are contradictory notions. Many African slaves rejected Christianity or merged it with their tribal believes, from which we got things like Voodoo and Santeria.

For the record, it's true that in the Muslim world blacks (and whites) were and have been sold into slavery to Muslims since the beginning of Islam and until today. This is well-known but generally ignored by the media.

Africans sold each other into slavery, but so have cultures around the world, since the beginning of time. It's an unfortunate part of the human experience that continues today under different guises (e.g. human trafficking, white slavery, child slavery, etc.)

Read and be enlightened:

"Domestic slavery was common in Africa and well before European slave buyers arrived, there was trading in humans. Black slaves were captured or bought by Arabs and exported across the Saharan desert to the Mediterranean and Near East."

"The vast majority of slaves taken out of Africa were sold by African rulers, traders and a military aristocracy who all grew wealthy from the business. Most slaves were acquired through wars or by kidnapping."

etc. etc. etc.....

Source:

http://www.afbis.com/analysis/slave.htm