(reading notes, justice)

A friend wrote in a locked post that they were interested in "a more academic Bible study that wants to discuss colonialism and erasure." This sounded very interesting to me, and led me to poke around a bit. My path eventually led me to the work

Brett, Mark G. Decolonizing God: The Bible in the Tides of Empire. Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd, 2008.

which arrived yesterday.

The colonialist experience closest to the author is that of Australia, and so there are some interesting elements to the book for an American reader -- it's still Anglocentric but has the breadth of the British Empire's many colonies, as opposed to American focus on Native Americans (and a blind eye to our Pacific colonies, maybe a footnote about Hawaiʻi). I will admit a mental block on references to the Dutch (New York, yes, but?) until hit over the head with the Afrikaners.

Chapter 1 provides the overview of Biblical defenses of colonization, but my take away is that there were other defenses as well. Sepúlveda's arguments seem more (in Brett's presentation) about asserting that the American natives were lesser, and natural law (citing pre-Christian classical Aristotle) says the greater rule the lesser. (Insert all the problematic greater and lesser, and a comparison of monkeys and men preceding Darwin. This has led me on a chase to understand how humans and other primates were understood pre-Darwin. https://journals.openedition.org/apparences/1283 is useful at the paragraph that begins "To provide a brief recap." It's hard to read

> Early Christianity, however, sharply separated humans and animals, viewing animals primarily as property or food rather than exemplars, and introducing laws prohibiting bestiality.

understand whether "Early Christianity" refers to some biblically based theology or to the cultural tendency at the time.

I do find this - https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2020/03/on-the-suspect-origins-of-humanitarian-war-.html - to be a little more helpful in understanding Sepúlveda's arguments.

Brett notes John Locke's principle of Terra Nullius, explained by Cory Doctorow in Locus:

In 1660, John Locke published his Two Treatises of Government, where he set out to resolve the seeming conflict between individual property rights (which he valorized) and the Bible (ditto), which set out the principle that God had created the Earth and its bounty for all of humanity. How could a Christian claim to own something personally when God had intended for everyone to share in His creation?

Locke’s answer was the “labor theory of property”: private property is the result of a human taking an unclaimed piece of the common property of humanity and mixing it with their labor (each human owns their body and thus the labor of that body), creating a property cocktail: one part unimproved nature, one part human sweat of the brow, mix well and serve in perpetuity.

With land, the “labor theory of property” has been applied as "agricultural use." Interestingly, sometime between 1841 to 1856 David Livingstone noted that the idea of Terra Nullius as agricultural improvement might have some issues:

... the doctrine has rather a wide application. It would strip Earl Grey of his broad acres around Alnwick Castle as well as Sandillah [Sandile] of the gorges and blood-stained valleys of the Amatola. It would place in the very same category the English and Irish landlords who evict their tenantry in order to form deer-parks, and the Bushmen who endeavour to perpetuate a wilderness with their poisoned arrows. (Schapera (ed.), David Livingstone South African Papers, p. 76. )

Chapter 2 is interesting, but i have gone down far too many rabbit holes today and need to sign off.