A movie that pretty much everyone who goes to church will have heard of is Amazing Grace.
It’s the story of William Wilberforce’s attempts to have slavery abolished in the United Kingdom.
I saw it on Wednesday with my church young adults group and it was quite moving. I could just imagine a tenth of the cinema going “I will be the next Wilberforce” or something to that effect. Lo and behold, within two minutes of exiting someone had grabbed me (literally) and tried to recruit me into his (rather ambiguous) vision.
I mentioned this to a good friend and he said that it really challenged him to think of all the unsolved problems in our generation.
For mine this was Aborigines. In fifty years, a hundred years time we will look back upon ourselves with shame. Just as we cannot believe it took until 1967 to give Aboriginals some of their basic human rights, we will look back and wonder how they were allowed to have a life expectancy 20 years behind that of the rest of us….
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August 18, 2007 at 2:19 pm
Rosie Brehaut
It made me think of the problem of slavery. According to World Vision there are actually more slaves today than there were when Wilberforce was fighting for the abolition of slavery. Kind of scary! Who is championing their cause?
August 19, 2007 at 5:05 am
Mat
Whoa.. I did not know that Rosie
Thanks for the comment
I guess a majority of that would be in Africa cos if it were elsewhere we’d probably hear more noise about it
August 19, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Ben Newton
Rosie,
Stop The Traffik is an organisation that is fighting human trafficking and slavery, headed by Steve Chalke.
For instance: 40% of the worlds cocoa beans, the ones used for chocolate by Cadbury and Nestle are harvested by child labourers in Cote d’Ivoire and people who have been abducted from neighbouring countries. A BBC documentary filmed this and asked one of the children working at a plantation about what he would say to us, it was something like:
tell them that every time they have a piece of chocolate, they have blood on their teeth.
it would appear that the dollar sign, for western companies, is more important than quality of life
August 19, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Mat
Well again.. wow
But surely governments can regulate this somehow…?