Quote:
Originally Posted by Brother Tim
"Speculation" about silent places in the Scriptures is to be done very cautiously and a set of doctrines or beliefs should never be based on those speculations. I believe that a subtle attempt has been made in this thread to introduce the idea that somehow those of black African decent are inferior based on the curse of Cainaan. It has been tried elsewhere. That is an example of the danger of speculation.
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1) Africans are descended from Cush, Canaan's
brother, not Canaan himself, so saying that Canaan's curse was blackness is ridiculous. As far as we know, the Canaanites were white-skinned!
2) God never cursed anyone in Genesis 9. He blessed Noah and told him to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth:
NOAH did the cursing. Noah did not have the power to cause one person or line of descendants to be "inferior" to another. God may just have honored Noah's curse, but He didn't change the DNA of those people just because.
3) From that, there are two explanations for the black-colored skin of the African race (and Australian Aboriginals, not to mention Micronesians!): either, like had been taught for years, Cain's curse was blackness, and his dark-skinned line was continued through Ham's line because he married a Cainite wife; or the skin change is completely due to the natural affects of melanin and the sun's rays because of the geographical location.
Also note that Ishmael was half Hamite because of Abraham's relationship with Hagar, an Egyptian; therefore the Middle Eastern people are more Hamite than Shemite (excluding Iran: they are Aryan/Caucasian)!
That's what it boils down to: God never
blessed slavery, He simply
allowed it. I don't think God looked kindly upon American slavery (though, truth be told, only 1% of slaves in the New World even came to the US!!) because under the New Covenant, God largely did away with the things that people used to justify slavery. All humans are equal in Christ; I don't believe that we are
created equal (socially-speaking, not genetics), but we all have equal opportunity in this life to make something of ourselves.