Tag: Human Rights

On a Heresy

The issue with using religion as a base to write and enforce laws is that religion is man-made and subjective. Your religious beliefs, even if they are different from mine, are no more or less right or good. And the same is true for my religious beliefs. Two people can look at the same thing or idea or work of “scripture,” express our individual interpretations about it, and suddenly my orthodoxy becomes your heresy. And so laws based on these opinions–and that’s all that they are–are not only wrong on their faces, but they also go against basic human freedoms of liberty, justice, and equality (none of which are so-called Biblical principles, by the way).

And all of that that takes us to a case of heresy that was brought against a man in the 17th Century. At this time in what is now Italy, the Catholic Church held political as well as religious power. They prosecuted and persecuted people who did not follow the letter of the Catholic ordinances and beliefs to their interpretation of religious perfection. In this particular situation, a man simply did not agree with the church that the earth was the center of the universe, that all objects circled around our globe.

Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish astronomer and thinker, had posited a different idea, that the earth revolved around the sun instead of the Catholic model of the opposite. Now, Copernicus wasn’t the first to hold this belief; Greek astronomers and others had made the same claims centuries earlier including the concept that the earth rotated on its axis. Islamic astronomers confirmed these Greek ideas. However, it was the Copernicus proposal that this man had espoused, and it’s what the Catholic church prosecuted him for. One major reason for their prosecution at this time was because Copernicus had published his findings a century before; he drew the known planets in correct order radiating out from the heliocentric system. Many people began listening to the theory, and the Catholic Church saw this as a threat to their ways of belief and their control over what people believed.

So, they put this poor man on trial for agreeing with Copernicus. During his cross examination by the Church’s prosecutor, the man walked back his belief out of a sense that he knew the punishment for his “crime” could be severe. He said that, after careful consideration, that rather than a “belief” in the heliocentric idea, he wanted merely to use that concept as merely a starting point for scientific discussion.

We must remember that this period saw the Catholic Church under attack from the surging Protestant movement. Printing presses published ideas that countered the Church. The Renaissance and the early beginnings of the Age of Enlightenment further challenged the orthodox and monolithic Catholic faith and power. That is why trials such as this one, while seemingly over a trivial matter, were so important to the Catholic hierarchy. While this doesn’t excuse the severe abuses the Catholic Church committed during this period of the rise of heterodoxy in Europe, it does help to explain it. Sadly, similar behavior is occurring across the globe as extremists in all nations are demanding that laws be passed that match their beliefs and not that protect basic freedom of thought and belief.

The argument of the man that he didn’t actually believe Copernicus but only wanted to use his ideas as discussion points did not sway the Catholic court. They found him guilty of crimes against the Church and against God. His sentence was to be under house arrest for the remainder of his life. And that’s what happened to him.

It would take the Catholic Church 300 years before it admitted it was wrong and exonerated Galileo for his “crime.”

On an Abolitionist

James Forten is one of the often overlooked heroes of the Abolitionist Movement in the United States. Born in the 1760s in Pennsylvania to an established Keystone family, Forten had a difficult childhood because his dad died when James was still a kid. He was forced into the workforce at an early age, but, like fellow Philadelphian, Ben Franklin, that experience taught him thrift and hard work.

As a teen, Forten served his emerging nation as a powder boy onboard an American frigate during the American Revolution. After his war service, Forten apprenticed with a sailmaker in his hometown. The owner of the company retired after Forten received his mastery papers, and he sold the business to the enterprising young man. It was in this business that James Forten made his fortune in an era when sailing was the nation’s economic life-blood.

He decided to use his money to further the cause of ending African slavery in the United States. You see, Forten had been schooled as a young man in a Quaker schoolhouse, and that sect produced many of the leaders of the anti-slavery effort. He learned his Quaker lessons well. What most people don’t realize is that Forten was a large part of the money behind William Lloyd Garrison’s famous and influential anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, and he even wrote opinion pieces for the paper.

In addition, Forten became a vice-chairman of the American Anti-Slavery Society. His wealth gave his time (and money) to devote his life to working for the ending of slavery. Forten was one of the signers of a petition to Congress in 1801 advocating for the ending of slavery in the US (one of the first such petitions to be made public). He and his wife had nine children, and each of them were raised to see the Peculiar Institution as a national evil. They all grew up to work for the rights of former slaves in the post-Civil War American south. When Forten died at age 75 in Philadelphia, his funeral was attended by thousands of people, both white and black.

Forten believed in the fundamental rights of all people. He also advocated for women’s rights 100 years before women got the right to vote in this country. However, it was his work against slavery for which he is most remembered. To him, slaves weren’t property; they were humans. They had rights simply by being humans and by being in this country. It made no difference that they were African-Americans. They had the same rights to life, liberty, and to pursue those things that made them happy, he believed. Those were the rights he had been able to pursue his whole life, and he strongly believed that slaves should be able to do so, also.

You see, James Forten was an African-American, too.