Thursday, October 13, 2011

IS DISCRIMINATION CHRISTIAN?


     Would it really surprise us to hear from Christians that they do not believe in discrimination?  And yet, to no one’s surprise, who knows a little bit about the history – not the propaganda – of Christianity, to learn that Christianity was founded squarely on discrimination.  By God, it sure is.  We are surely aware that Christianity is little more than a chip off the old Judaic block.  If we remember a little about the Old Testament, we must recall how Moses went up to Mt. Sinai/Horeb and brought down ten tablets, later known as the Ten Commandments, a deal made between Moses and Jehovah, that is, a contract between Jehovah and His People, the Jews, not Arab Moslems, not British, not Americans, not Chinese, not Buddhists, not Gnostics, not Manicheans, not Mithraists, not Sufis, and certainly not Christians – only Jews.  Since they were the “chosen people of God (Jehovah, not Allah, not God the Father, not the Holy Ghost, not Jesus Christ),” the Jews had to keep clean and their distance from all others, or what has been covered by the over-all label of “Gentile.”  Like it or not, that is discrimination.
     For Christianity to get off to a viable start, the early Christians had to do likewise, show their superiority, criticize, and condemn all those who did not believe in their new path to salvation.  Like it or not, that is discrimination.  But what doe it matter?  They are all doing nothing more than peddling myths.  It is not important whether the Jews or Christians are discriminatory.  What is important is to understand what is discrimination and why.  Luckily our answers derive from the examples we have just given: to lord over other people we see and consider as inferior to ourselves and treat them as inferior, and even worthless.  We need only point to the slaughter of the Pagans, Gnostics, and Jews by the Christians during the first centuries of the new religion, Christianity.  Then, of course, there are the many centuries of the holy work of the Holy Inquisition, which we can argue wasn’t done by Christians but by fanatic Catholics.  Sorry, but they are two peas from the same pod.  Just to skirt any further argument on that point, we can always point to Salem, couldn’t we?  There were the “superior” and “inferior” ones, the former discriminating against [persecuting] the latter.
     Do we not see these same patterns all around us in our daily lives?  Think about the differences in races, and today in ethnic groups or classes.  Do we not see this same thing happening between “whites” and the “darkies” and the “have’s” and the “have not’s” every day in our lives?  For centuries we saw the Negroes as sub-humans and treated them like slaves, if not animals?  In fact, we often treated our animals far better than the Negroes.  Why?  Because we white folk thought blindly of ourselves as superior and saw them as inferior, people we could abuse or take advantage of for our purposes or at our pleasure.  Doesn’t that fit the same pattern?  We even try to justify our perfidy and meanness by referring to the Bible.  After all, we can’t go wrong there, if we have the divine authority to support our vile actions.  Then there are the noble examples we have had throughout our history.  Did we not cut the Negro right out of our Constitution, though we talked about how “all men are equal under God” – except for the Negro?  We also have the excellent example in glorifying the “Robber Barons,” who steamrolled over their “inferiors” – those who were not among the “elected?”  In fact we have statues, universities, and charities built in their name, do we not, like Rockefeller, Carnegie, et al?  Where they not the ones who bloodily crushed all competition and had the workers in rags and beaten brutally for striking for decent wages and human working conditions?  Yes, we have admirable examples to show us how to discriminate, humiliate, and dehumanize our fellow creatures.
     So, why do we make such a fuss about discrimination anyway?  Aren’t we going to discriminate against the next inferior person that dares to be our equal or stand in our way?  Of course we are.  When don’t we?  Oh, you’re not going to let some superficial “politically correct” nonsense stand in your way, are you?  Heaven’s, no!  We save and play such hypocritical charades when we’re out in public in the glare of the limelight and likely to be criticized by our peers for revealing our hypocrisy.
     We see such hypocrisy all the time “in private,” when no one is around who will condemn us.  For example, there are many cases in which among themselves they are free to call Negroes “niggers” to express their true attitudes and feelings, just as the reverse is also true of Negroes who speak of whites in private as honkies.  There is at present in Dallas a “much ado about nothing,” but it seems quite a to-do among the people involved: a “war” between Black and Latino kids in the pubic schools.  Where do the kids get these attitudes if not from their good Christian parents?  Obviously, somebody feels superior to his inferior.  Does it matter who is inferior and who superior in this particular case?  Of course not.  The point is that it happens everywhere, all the time.  So, we ask the question again: why do we make such a fuss about discrimination, when we are all party to it, and it will go on – forever?  Consider what we see every day in our media headlines after thousands of years of philosophy, theology, religion, the [worthless] Civil Rights Act, the finest educational systems, and a world that has reached the highest form of civilization, we still have wars, riots, looting, patricide, matricide, fratricide, sororicide (sister), uxoricide (wife), mariticide (husband), infanticide, (and after we’ve killed off the rest of the family) suicide, massacre (like when we take an automatic weapon into a school cafeteria and shoot at anyone in sight), and genocide.  Why not, when we hate our “neighbor” as much as ourselves?  It’s the Christian way, isn’t it?
     Is there a lesson to be learned in all this?  I doubt it.  But we can always hope “and pray” that someone [in a laboratory?] will invent a new human being.  Not another monster with our Frankenstein genius, for heaven’s sake!

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