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The real racism is not merely an unreasoning and illogical fastening onto the welfare of some race or other, like leeches which would suck it dry - as shown in the disgusting exhibition in Britain of youths who stabbed to death a person with black skin, crying "What ? What ? Nigger!", the suspects now allegedly being free from prosecution. That is bad enough. It is that which pretends that it is wrong to note racial characteristics at all, as if facts were subjects of political popes who rule in glorious salaries, without understanding, like drunken lords.
FOUL as are these grotesque wantonries against people of this or that race (and Africa itself in the Congo wars has shown enough of the variations on the theme which can come even from within that nation, one race or even tribe preying systematically on another), the illusion that evidence is not to be respected is worse. If a given race statistically tends towards drunkenness, will pseudo-pious pretensions of oblivion make this untrue? If a given race tends to flagrant toleration of crime, will this sanctify the fallen nation, that such statistics are illegal, reference to such data improper, even when relevant to just pursuits ? If, for example, a certain nation or race tends to stifle individuality, is this to be 'annulled' lest there be 'trouble' ?
Is the massive reality of gross injustice AGAINST INDIVIDUALS of any nation or race to be made the dictatorial scourge with which to force men to pretend that groups of persons of a given culture or place or time do not, or did not do things in this or that warped or wrong way! If so, good-bye truth, and acknowledge your new idol: convenience.
This fact does not remove, but rather reinforces the horror of gross insolence and proud arrogance against people of a given race or nation, as here. EVEN IF there is statistically discoverable some drunkenness or wantonness or ruthlessness or self-aggrandisement which has in fact come from some group, race, nation or whatever, this has nothing whatever to do with what some individual in that race is, or may be. Whether or not it influenced him/her, is a question; what the individual in fact is, is the answer.
Further, in all such matters, the basis, such as the statistics themselves must be sure, and the realisation must in parallel be stark, that one's own culture or race may be guilty in SOME OTHER WAY of this or that tendency. Indeed, the very suppression of realities at a racial level, where these in fact exist, as a POLICY towards all groups whatever, can create such a sickening sense of artifice and artificiality, that reactions, as of blood-lust youth, can be DIRECTED towards resentment against such pressures, exacerbating the problem. At the apex, one of the worst features of this easy-to-do political folly of pretending that all is well with all, and calling factuality racism, is just this: that in the field of religion, it can even reach the point of deliberately discounting ONE RELIGION which is perhaps significantly found within some race, nation or culture, in the interests of political correctness; and elevating another with an orgy of subjectivistic political illusion.
SINCE facts do not matter, and convenience is king, in such cases, therefore the religious field is to be devastated by pure hypocrisy, it being "judged" or "deemed" in a real and most flagrant racism which reaches even to heaven in its arrogance, that their religion is good and fine and some religion often found in one's own nation is 'no better'. As if GOD were to be determined by this kind of folly, as if, to take a parallel example, physical laws were found by making some sort of convenience schedule which would give to the scientists of every race a proportional glory, so that none should feel miffed, degraded or discriminated against!
The folly that God is found in individual conscience as some sort of existential read-out, and not in the objectivities of evidential reality, whatever one chooses to do in rejecting it, is perhaps the greatest (statistically) and least (logically) of all the myths of the twentieth century. It is not restricted to our own time, as you see in Psalm 50:21ff.), where God challenges the wrong-doers who
"sit
and speak against your own mother's son", whose
"tongue
frames deceit", who
"cast
My words behind you".
"You
thought,"
He challenges,
"that
I was altogether like you!"
Indeed,
"these
things you have done and I kept silent...
But
I will rebuke you, and set them in order before your eyes.
"Now
consider this, you who forget God,
Lest
I tear you in pieces,
And
there be none to deliver:
Whoever
offers praise glorifies Me;
And
to him who orders his conduct aright
I
will show the salvation of God."
This nation, to whom the prophet there spoke, was to a nation long exposed to divine mercy and law, in the Covenant. It was not pretension, as if religion were a subjective invention of man and society, making formal declarations which no one believed and those in power circumvented; it was rather hypocrisy. The case that those claiming (as the nation then did) the divine place of their God, are to have hearts so filled with Him, that His ways are the natural result. Thus Christ said this: Good trees bear good fruit, and this, Every tree not planted by My heavenly Father will be uprooted (Matthew 7:17-19, 15:14, cf. Isaiah 61:3).
Morals are bound on outsiders, but found in insiders, because Christ lives within them (Colossians 1:27, Colossians 3:9-14) and while hypocrites, conscious, and unconscious and confused, thrive in many lands and times, they will not do so in that ultra-racial, ultra-cultural reality when the God who made the mind of man judges him according to truth (Romans 2:2).
Then every pretence, every
reckless hatred, whether racial or political or personal, will have its
end and unless the mercy of God intervenes,
There, where light is excluded, those who have preferred darkness can wallow in it (John 3:19-21,34-36). As for God, He is love; but He is also truth; and truth demands love and love demands truth; and mercy enables the finding of both in the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ of which the Christian can say: "by which the world is crucified to me and I to the world" (Galatians 6:14). As Paul puts it, "He made Him who knew no sin to be the sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him" - II Corinthians 5:21.
Reader, is it so with you ? If not, whether you share the illusions and myths of political convenience, subordinating God to social aspirations, or the hate of those who vilify the righteous or judge by appearance, applying uncertain rules to certain individuals with unchaste haste and hotheaded presumption, there will be one more racial issue for you to face. There is a special race (I Peter 2:8-10), chosen in Christ who rejects no applicant who comes in faith for mercy from His sacrificial offering and resurrection power, which is His. Without this, your race is inadequate, and it is in this case only, wholly general to it, so that there is not one individual in it who qualifies.
THIS race is His body (Ephesians 2:19-22, I Cor. 12:27), and moves with Him whose perfection secures entry into heaven. While it lives on earth, as His, it is kept by Him (I Peter 1:5), chastened as necessary ( Hebrews 12:6ff.), sealed (Ephesians 1:13-14) and accepted in Him (Eph. 1:6), chosen for an inheritance (1:11). No church can determine its bounds, though any true church will be careful not to transgress in the face of the judge of all men, but to proclaim the word of God and follow it; and the church of the living God can indeed note and relay from the book of the Lord, the transgressions against entry into the Kingdom of Heaven, which nullify false claims. Yet in the end, it is the Lord who judges and who declares, Judge not!
Break His word and it is His word which judges (John 12:48-5). Kill 'niggers' or reduce 'them' to a lesser status in some evolutionary or other mythology, as so many have done, often despairing of a better result, and you judge. Accept all in terms of what does not matter, their history, cultural background, skin colour and so forth. Many are underprivileged and need opportunity; others may tend to trade on this and imagine their 'race' means that human responsibility ends: all of which is mere myth.
Race is not good enough to sanctify ANYONE and no excuse for ANY obliteration of standards; but compassion will help, and divine grace will prevent the arrogant 'judgments' of men, whether evolutionary, mystic or muddled; yes, or even as providing opportunity for blood lust to evidence itself in some sort of mental torpor, stupor or other asininity. There are those for whom the careful social, cultural creation of myths for convenience' sake, whether flattering or denigrating, provokes reaction. In a mercurial age of road-rage and other intemperances, the lie merely multiplies violence. It is grace and place before the face of God Almighty in the love of Christ, who paid the difference and enables the comradeship which transforms, which matters.
The
rest, its hatred, its self-aggrandising assumptions, its evolutionary insults
and the whole pit of seething serpents of illusion, which bite the imaginations
and spoil the actions of men so readily, it is lost in the race. It is
merely an introduction to the halls of lie, which according to their ilk,
stand ready for the flame of hell (John 8:19-44). THAT is the end recourse
of ungodly illusion, which rejects the truth, and fosters the festering
lies that demean some men, if not in this way, then in some other, and
reject the levelling lordship of that One Lord, whose cover for people
of ANY and EVERY race, is as deep and as profound and cost as much, for
every one who receives Him (John 1:12-13,16-17).