So many of the people who regularly touch my life live in constant fear that, one day within the next generation or two, the world will no longer be dominated by white people or Christians!
by Charlie Leck
I am astounded by my white, Christian brethren who sound as if they are prepared to go to battle with all people different than they. [See Wednesday's blog for a discussion of prepositions and the objects of prepositions.]
There is one fellow in my golf club who used to send me all sorts of heated emails about Muslims and how they are going to dominate America even as, as he said, they currently dominate Europe. He stopped sending them when he tired of my constant fact-checking of them. A very fundamentalist Christian lady emails me regularly about the danger of other religions and keeps proclaiming that Christianity is the ONLY faith through which one can come to God – that one only truly knows God through Christ. She claims we were founded as a Christian nation and that we ought to make that formal by law.
Oh, my goodness.
Do we realize, that if we lined up for battle, how outnumbered we are – we white and we Christians?
And what does it mean to be white? Can anyone answer that? Are Middle-Eastern people white? If not, what color are they? What about South Americans? What are the Indians of India and what are Native Americans?
You may think you can easily answer the above questions, but you cannot when you begin to think about all the complexities of race.
How many human racial groups are there? Quickly, off the top of your head!
Are Asians a racial group or a geographic group? Quickly!
What does it mean to be Caucasian? Does it mean white? Or does it mean people of a geographic group – descendents of Caucasus region of Europe/Asia.
Into what classification do we put people with mixed parentage?
If one uses generally accepted definitions of different nationalities as either white or non-white, we should understand (we white folk) that we are outnumbered by more than 4 to 1.
Those of us who accept the label of Christian are also seriously out-numbered by 3 or 4 to 1.
Fundamental Christian groups claim there are more than 2 billion Christians in the world. It is a seriously inflated and fictitious number. Don’t ever believe it? Christians don’t lie; however, many liars are Christians.
My greatest disagreement with fellow Christians has to do with the concept of one true faith – that is, that there is only one route to salvation (accept the word, salvation, just for now, in its loosest possible sense). Of course, these Christians use the Bible as their source for such sure knowledge. The Bible, however, is a seriously questionable source since the early Church so regularly tampered with the original documents in order to both establish a liturgical theatre and to justify its own primacy over all other religions.
I am tired of people who are Christian and white thinking those two attributes make them better than other people. Besides being extraordinarily ignorant, it leads to nothing but trouble.
Fundamentalists of any faith are a danger and they are potential radicals. It was not Muslims (people of Islam) who destroyed the World Trade Towers. The towers were destroyed by fundamental, radical and ignorant Muslims. The Federal Building in Oklahoma City was destroyed by a fundamental and radical Christian – and he was also ignorant.
All of these things whirl around in my mind when I think about the opposition to the proposed and planned Muslim Center in lower Manhattan. If you want to read the best -- the very best -- statement made about his whole matter, I urge you to read Dick Cavett's blog REAL AMERICANS PLEASE STAND UP!
It is time for us all to make peace and truly attempt to understand one another.
My last question is this: Why are we afraid of a group of people who want to briefly and regularly pray a few times each day?
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