Church of the poison mind

On our trip to the Whitney Plantation there were numerous sights and stories that could have (and did) wretch up significant emotion to the point of tears.  There was one in particular that stood out to me, and that was the sight of a large, metal crucifix attached to the inside of a holding cell where slaves were kept either out of punishment, but usually to wait to be bought.  So many things ran through my head seeing that crucifix; one being that this was the same symbol that was a source of hope and community for post-emancipation former slaves in a church that stood not far from this cage, yet there it was, affixed upon the bars of what held them like livestock.  In my agnostic mind I cannot help but see this contrast and look at that cross as just as essential a cage as the actual cage; a mental cage.  These people stripped not only of their freedom, much of their humanity, and their own spirituality and religion, baptized and told to worship a bearded, white lie, further undermining their sense of power and worth.  How can you tell a people they are less than you when the person you worship, and tell them to worship does not look like you, but more like them?  I'd imagine that would be pretty hard, but luckily for slave owners, visual interpretations of Jesus as a man of bronze skin and woolen hair were and are in short supply.

This brings me to the other major thought that went through my head upon witnessing the above visual, which has more to do with the slave owners, and those who were complicit in their inaction.  This cross, I imagine, was put there not by slaves, but by the owners, the same people who helped force their slaves' conversion to Catholicism.  I have to think that this cross was put there to offer some sort of comfort to those being held, and that despite their treatment of the slaves as subhuman, they offered up their religion, again, I assume in part to offer some sort of comfort (not to mention means of control).  So, on some level these people who owned or condoned had heart, compassion, sympathy, one might say humanity.  These people were not 100% bad, yet they participated in something that was so devoid of humanity in its stripping of it from others.  They treated humans like property and tools, working them ragged, beating them, possibly killing them, then went home and loved their family and hugged their friends, went to church.  These people weren't 100% bad, but they were deluded beyond belief.  To think of the amount of lies being told to self and others, and the staggering amount ignorance, all to keep up the charade of slavery as being okay, allowing these people to retain a modicum of humanity in order to function is just mind blowing.  Talk about opiate of the masses.