Amazing Grace

Now my taste in movies is not complex. Just off the bat, here is a list of some movies I have liked:
* The Simpson's Movie
* Napoleon Dynamite
* Mars Attacks
* The Stupids
* The Shawshank Redemption
* The Green Mile
* The Shining
* The Wizard of Oz
* Psycho (the original Alfred Hitchcock Version)
* North by Northwest
* The Birds

I guess I show a proclivity towards stupidly funny movies, Steven King movies, and Alfred Hitchcock. Nothing too serious please.

Last night I was a movie we rented called Amazing Grace. Now this movie was about the life of William Wilberforce, the man who was responsible for abolishing the slave trade in Great Britain (now I read disturbingly this morning that the bill did not abolish it entirely. For a while it continued illegally. If a slave ship were in danger of being caught, its cargo was just thrown overboard).

What fascinates me is how societies can be morally blind to the great evils of their time. Slavery was such an evil of the 1600s-1800s. If we go ahead in time we find state sanctioned racial discrimination. If we go back in time we would find the evils of witch hunts and inquisitions. As a Protestant believer I have long been aware of the the Spanish inquisition, but one historical detail that I have been unaware of is that our history is just as bad. I spent some time reading over the Internet about the anabaptist believers (the predecessors of the Mennonities) and how they were burned by the Catholics (and John Calvin) and drowned by the reformed (Zwingli). Luther was in no position to directly persecute the anabaptists, but he did support their persecution (he was also an anti-Semite..another moral evil..his writings were used by the Nazi Socialists to justify the holocaust).

Learning all of this was disconcerting to me. If the Protestant reformation was this great move of God that I was taught in Sunday School that it was, how come its leaders had such moral blindness in certain areas. I don't have an answer for that. But even in my life as a child, I have witnessed how Christian folks seemed to be the ones who were the most resistant to ending racial discrimination.

It does seem obvious to me that no society is exempt from its moral blind spots. Otherwise good people can be morally blind to the prevalent evils of their generation.

I can't help but think that somehow that future generations will look back at the present time and shake their heads in amazement and wonder just how come a society that claims to be humane and just sanctions the killing of innocent (unborn) human life.