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This is primarily due to the ethnocentrism that is inherent in religious thought.  People simply want to believe that they and/or their community are superior to other people and other communities.  As soon as a group of people feels itself to be "chosen" or set apart from other groups, the seeds of racism are sown.  This is the most divisive concept in human history for while it unites people within a given community, it sets that community
against all other communities since these others are, after all, not good enough to have been chosen.  The result of this mode of thought is that the history of religion has been the history of warfare.  This is a consistently recurring theme throughout world history, one from which we have still not learned.

Many Christians insist that the Bible be our absolute standard of value. Presumably, most of them would agree that slavery was a great moral evil. Yet how do they justify this?  Their "holy book" contains not a single condemnatory word on the slavery issue (neither, for that matter, does the Quran or any other major holy text).  Indeed, there are many passages that support the institution.  To cite but one example, Jesus, in Luke 12: 47, discussed the proper way to beat slaves.  If Christian biblical absolutists are to be consistent, they must support, not condemn, the institution of slavery.

Of course, religionists are great at rationalizing away such problems. Christians do so by insisting that there were political reasons why the writers of the Bible were unable to condemn slavery, or that the admonition to love everyone means that the Bible wants us to treat everyone equally.  These arguments are specious.  After all, Christian "values" are supposed to transcend mere political considerations.  Were politics a concern when
the absolutist Ten Commandments were formulated?  Since they obviously were not, why were the writers of the New Testament playing political games?  Gods alleged demands had, up to that point, always been clear and unequivocal.  If slavery was a moral evil, and if the Bible is Gods word, then God should have condemned it in no uncertain terms.

Moreover, how does the survival of slavery fit in with the notion of a supposedly all-good, all-powerful God?  Couldn't God have found a way to makes his demands known to all humanity, rather than to just a few primitive, nomadic shepherds (who soon split up among themselves because even they couldn't agree on Gods "absolute" word)?

Gods followers obviously felt that their deity supported slavery, since not a single early church leader spoke out against its injustices.  Such revered figures as St. Augustine and St. Tertullian wrote not a word against slavery.  In fact, not a single condemnatory word was written (or at least has survived) attacking slavery until the ninth century, and then only because it had been replaced by feudalism, which was really little more than
slavery under a different name.

In the early years of their history, before Christianity gained control of Western Europe, it was an underground cult and, like all such cults of that time, it had its secret codes and symbols known only to its practitioners. This enabled it to survive.  Some of these symbols, such as the fish, have survived to this day.  If the Christians knew slavery to be wrong, surely the would have devised some sort of code or underground text that exposed
the evils of human bondage.  If they had done this, they would have beenable to eliminate slavery once they attained power.

Not only did they not eliminate slavery, it became much more brutal under the Christians than it had ever been under the Greeks or Romans.  Voices had been raised against slavery prior to the Christians attaining power but, once they did so, all dissent was crushed.  In Greece, slaves had rights that were unheard of during the Christian middle ages: They owned property and were generally well-treated.  Most were domestic servants and did not endure back-breaking work.

Roman slavery was initially quite brutal, but thanks to the philosophies of the Stoics (who were secular), their lot improved and by the beginning of the second century CE, slaves had low-protected rights.  These too disappeared in Christian Europe.  Even so brutal an emperor as Caracalla, who reigned form 211-217 CE was humane enough to pass a law forbidding parents from selling their children into slavery.  However, Constantine, the
first Christian emperor, abolished this reform and added some really inhumane new laws: One of these stated that if an abandoned or wandering child were found, it person who found it could sell it into slavery.

By the late middle ages, the slave trade was a most lucrative business. Protestant England was just as guilty in condoning and promoting the slave trade as were the Catholic countries.  In fact one particularly devout trader, one Captain Hawkins, actually named one of his ships "Jesus" and regularly preached the love of Christianity to his crew and human cargo. When slavery was finally banished from England, it was due to the influence of secular law, and was vigorously opposed by the church hierarchy. It is not a coincidence that the freedom of the slaves across the world occurred at the same time that the church was losing its stranglehold on the state.  Humanitarian reforms, a by-product of the Age of Rationalism that swept over Europe in the eighteenth century, ultimately spelt slaverys doom.

It says something about the morality of the Bible that sex is viewed as a"sin" while real evils such as war and human bondage are not.  The Bible is at best ambiguous and at worst openly supportive of slavery.  Its evils are readily apparent from even the most cursory study of history.  Any honest reading of the "good book" will disclose just how bad it really is.

REFERENCES:
1) The Arrogance of Faith by Forrest G. Wood.  Published by Alfred A. Knopf,
1990
2) Christianity and Slavery by Joseph McCabe.  Published by E.
Haldemann-Julius, 1927

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