Religion and the Killing of Innocents

This is not a post about the current situation in the Middle East. This is about the religious roots of the recent events in Ferguson, MO. I am not saying that the killing of Michael Brown was directly motivated by religion. I see it as a somewhat racist event. Why would a white policeman feel it necessary to shoot an unarmed black man six times in order to stop a perceived threat other than the fact that he was black?

In order to see some of the religious roots of racism in America, one needs to
look back into history. When the slave trade began, the whites who bought the slaves already looked upon people with differently colored skin as less than human or otherwise inferior to themselves. Since this was to be their labor pool for the manpower hungry agriculture the were doing, they needed to teach them english. They also went about forcibly converting the slaves to their brand of christianity in order to "civilize" them. Of course they used the bible verses that backed up their worldview that the slaves were inferior, and that god wanted them to be slaves and do what they were told.
After a century of this kind of brainwashing and indoctrination, the slaves were set free. Now the whites faced a problem. They could either accept the blacks as equals and go against what they had been taught for generations, or continue to oppress the blacks and continue teaching their children that they were the superior race because "god said so". They took the second option because it was much easier to continue what they knew instead of thinking for themselves and changing their worldview. Meanwhile the blacks learned to read and found the verses in the bible that contradicted what they had been taught by their former masters. The began to demand equal treatment. It took a hundred more years to bring about equality in the law, and we are not done with that task.

The divisions that christianity in America makes today are far more subtle, but one only needs to look at the white extremists who say that god is on their side to know that the religious roots of racism are still there. It is part of the reason that black men in particular are seen as dangerous by many whites in this country.