Explorations

With All My Heart: Discrimination & Prejudice part II

I am well aware that my last post on this subject ended in floating in the air in a somewhat preachy place above the middle of nowhere. When I first set out to write on this topic I didn't realise that the post would be so long or that the writing of it would be quite so difficult and time-consuming...

Why the Groundwork was So Important:

In Part 1 I tried to show, very briefly, how many people's approach to the vital issue of discrimination is often contaminated by a mixture of inconsistent ad-hoc ideologies, individual and societal self-interested, and poor biblical interpretation. For this reason, I suggested that, discovering a truly Christian understanding of this vital issue of discrimination and prejudice would require us to take a Cartesian approach. Since we are assuming a Christian worldview, our point of departure is slightly less abstract than the famous "Cogito ergo sum". It is the word of God, which itself commands us to renew our minds. We also know that all of the commands in the bible hinge on two fundamental ones: Love God and Love your neighbour.

Twisting the truth to suit our own interests and preconceptions is a practice so old and entrenched that it probably predates time itself, as is the problem of people who fail to see the forest for the trees, forgetting these fundamental principles for the sake of keeping the lesser ones. That is why I have emphasized this aspect so strongly...because it is absolutely vital that we build everything with these two commands in mind.

Down to Business
Get over yourself:
So....finally what these actually mean for discrimination and prejudice. Well, firstly, loving God with all our hearts means a radical and absolute abandonment of "prejudice" in the literal sense- ie of "pre judgement". If we really love God with our whole hearts, then when we enter his presence we will leave our preconceptions, customs, desires etc, at the door. Whatever we were taught to do & think, whatever we WANT to do or think, is irrelevant-serving, obeying and doing the will of God is the alpha and the omega, it is the whole purpose of the Christian life (see Mark 2:21-22, Ecclesiastes 12:13, Galatians 2:20, 1 John 5:3 ) This excludes any favouritism based solely on self-interest or self-justifying loyalties.

For example, whilst I don't believe that we should eradicate all patriotic feelings or actions, (this is impossible mainly for pragmatic reasons) the kind of patriotism that says "my country right or wrong" has caused a lot of damage in this world. It has allowed superpowers to shamelessly pursue their own interests at the expense of thousands of lives, and, closer to home, was the rationale our foreign minister gave for stealing oil from a fourth-world country, and motivated youths to rage about Cronulla beaches dressed in flags. Here is a discrimination against people purely on the basis of their skin colour, culture or the place in which they happen to be born, based on a loyalty, not to God, but to an abstract entity that only really emerged as a result of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. There are many other examples of prejudice and inequality that results from a failure to submit ourselves to God. If people started really submitting to a higher power than their desires. or traditions, or the capitalist-rationalist-liberal-Western worldview we've grown up with with a lot of the world's problems would be greatly ameliorated.

There are two other important aspects of loving God with our whole heart that have a radical and potentially world-transforming impact on ideas of inequality and discrimination...to my mind these are some of the most beautiful and liberating aspects of Christian doctrine...but unfortunately its almost midnight and I've been waffling on again.

Since I want to do these beautiful truths justice I'll have to finish up and make you wait until part three...where I explain how all human beings are...