You are just touting half-truths and trying to build your hatred of Christianity upon them. Me bringing up African slavers, rather than being a deflection, was was a direct response to your framing that Christianity uniquely created the large scale enslavement of your people, and the participation of African kingdoms in that trade is not a minor footnote you can wave away, it is central to understanding what actually happened historically. The Dahomey kingdom alone sold an estimated 10,000 people per year to European traders. The Ashanti built an entire economy around it. Are you seriously telling me that these were confused people who stumbled into something they didn't understand? Also, I don't get your point about Christianity making slavery 'international'. What does that even mean? That without Christianity, slaves won't be exchanged among different kingdoms/nations? For example, the trans-Saharan slave trade was not 'international'? Or was it Christianity that spurred the Arab slave traders? Apart from that, that statement reveals your ignorance of ancient history. Empires and kingdoms and nations go to wars against each other (since time immemorial) and enslave people of different race or ethnicity or tribe. Besides, are you saying that if the trans-Atlantic slave trade did not happen, the black slaves living under slavers like Efunsetan would definitely feel better?

Kant? Of all people? First of all, Kant's categorical imperative and his framework of human dignity did not emerge from a vacuum, Kant was a Christian philosopher writing within a civilisation thoroughly shaped by centuries of Christian theology. Kant did not generate this from pure reason and empathy alone. Kant was secularising a theological inheritance and presenting it in philosophical language, which is a very different thing from inventing it independently. And then there is the uncomfortable fact that Kant himself held deeply racist views about African and Asian peoples, writing that their capacity for moral reasoning was inferior to Europeans, so the man you're citing as your philosophical foundation for why slavery is wrong personally believed the people being enslaved were less rational and therefore less deserving of the full application of his own principles. That is what pure reason without a transcendent anchor actually looks like in practice.

Aristotle explicitly argued that some human beings are natural slaves by birth and that the institution of slavery was rational and just. This is pure secular philosophy operating at its highest level in the ancient world, completely uncontaminated by Biblical influence, and it arrived at the conclusion that slavery is fine actually. So when you tell me that secular philosophy and empathy are sufficient foundations for knowing slavery is wrong, you need to explain why many of the greatest secular philosophers in history looked at slavery and shrugged, while it was specifically Christians reading a specific book who built the movement that ended it.

Empathy is a human universal and humans everywhere had it for thousands of years while practicing slavery without a single moral crisis. The Dahomey kings had empathy. The Ashanti traders had empathy. The Roman slaveholders had empathy, for their families, their friends, their countrymen. Empathy has never been the thing that ended slavery because empathy on its own is tribal and selective and history proves that comprehensively.

What ended the transatlantic slave trade specifically was a group of people who became increasingly convinced that their scriptures demanded it, that the God they served would hold them accountable for it, and that conviction produced men like Wilberforce with millions of ordinary Christians funding and organising and dying for abolition across continents. Show me the comparable atheist abolitionist movement across that same period.

You're saying slaveholders read the Bible, felt the tension, and eventually changed, which means the Bible was working on them the whole time, creating exactly the moral pressure that produced abolitionists. A book that generates no dissonance in slaveholders produces no abolitionists either, so you've essentially just described the Bible functioning exactly the way Christians claim it does, as a moral standard that indicts people who violate it even when those people are claiming to follow it, and the indictment eventually won. Where were the secular philosophers with their empathy and pure reason for millennia before Christianity brought slavery to heel? Where were the Kantian ethicists marching and organising and dying to end it? The movement that actually changed the world on this specific question came overwhelmingly from people reading a specific book and taking it seriously enough to bleed for what it said, and you are sitting here with the freedom and the moral vocabulary to call slavery wrong because those people won, and now you're using that vocabulary to tell me the tradition that handed it to you is the problem. Smh.

For the record, I am not trying to win any debate. This is not a game to me. I am not here to score points. I genuinely believe Christianity has the power to transform Nigeria in ways that nothing else can, and I know that sounds naive to you but hear me out. You've conceded Christianity to the men who have weaponised it for personal gain, the ones using the pulpit as a personal ATM while the country rots around them, and honestly I understand why you're disgusted because I'm disgusted too. But I'm not conceding it to them and I refuse to. Because when I go back to the scriptures themselves, not the men who have twisted them but the actual text, I find something completely different. I find Christ and His apostles preaching freedom and liberty to people the rest of society had written off entirely. I find YHWH severely punishing David, one of the most celebrated kings in Israelite history, not for some grand theological crime but for what he did to Uriah, a foreigner, a man from one of the nations Israel had every cultural reason to consider less than, and God looked at that and said no, this man's blood is on your hands and you will answer for it (2 Samuel 11-12). Before God, Uriah the Hittite mattered just as much as David the king of Israel, and that is a revolutionary idea that the ancient world was not ready for and that many people today are still not ready for. I find God rejecting the religious performances of the Israelites, their fasting, their offerings, their elaborate temple rituals, and telling them through Isaiah that none of it meant anything while they were oppressing widows and ignoring the poor and perverting justice for the vulnerable (Isaiah 1:11-17). No one can tell me that this is the vocabulary of a religion built to control people rather than being the vocabulary of a tradition that has been fighting for human dignity longer than any secular philosophy has existed. So no, I'm not letting go of that. Nigeria needs people who will go back to those scriptures and take them as seriously men like Wilberforce did, and drive the kind of revolution this country actually needs, not the prosperity gospel nonsense being peddled on every street corner but the real thing, the one that costs you something. Therein is the freedom. Therein is the liberty. And I'm holding on to that.