The racism at the heart of the Judeo-Christian worldview is easily recognizable to those unobstructed by the sacred veil that hides its face from its proponents. Indeed, all religion tends to promote a decided ethnocentrism, even if it seeks and struggles in doctrine and practice to transcend it (as admittedly does Christianity with grand pronouncements like “…in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek etc”; however, such follow other nakedly racist commentaries such as ‘salvation is unto the Jew first and then after/also the gentile’.) Even Jewish Jesus echoes the racist epithets of his culture, calling a Syro-Phonecian woman a dog, for example, even if he rises above that posture in the self same conversation, as also with the Samaritan woman with whom his discourse similarly starts in the condescending arrogance of the received value systems of his culture, (you ignorant Samarians vs. us orthodox Jews) ending however in transcendence and transformation.
The fact is that religion, although it wrestles to place Humungous ideas such as “the Maker of Heaven and earth’ within reach of the common man, (to even lump both earth and ‘heaven’ comparatively in the same sentence demonstrates the conceptual limitations of scale involved in the assumptions) it cannot help but trip on its own anthropocentrism in doing so . Getting the God-story to fit within the cramming confines of the generational traditions of whatever branch of mankind, stretching from Neanderthal existence to modern Homo sapiens sapiens, is bound to be at the expense of extraordinarily deflating the one and inordinately inflating the other. Nevertheless, the effort is deemed essential for the derivation of meaning and purpose for the potentialities of any culture of self conscious beings.
Equally important then is the aspiration to transcend these unavoidable bigotries produced in identifying ‘God’ with whichever nation, culture or race, whichever language of whatever sacred canon of texts or whatever stories told by whosoever’s ancestors, purportedly since whatever times of antiquity. Like Peter, Paul and Jesus, we must seek to rise above the received knowledge and practices of our day and catch a higher glimpse of the possibilities of our own existence.
The idea of the sacred is what releases us to imitate the boundless creativity evident in whatever context of existence. Whenever that idea is coopted to sanction repression in the name of whatever perceived ‘order’, the most injurious perversion has usurped the accurate representation of the Logic of the Universe, whose unmappable expansivity and stupendous diversity are an everlasting testament to the true nature of Divinity.
What difference is there between the Apartheid South Africa we so recently repudiated and the modern Jewish State, still defended by so many because of a prevailing religious narrative? Both show the same vehement resistance to the manifestly more equitable philosophy, defended almost everywhere else in the free world – Universal Adult Suffrage – One man/woman, one vote; and for the same reason – the hegemony of racial superiority and the necessary racist repression required to defend it would have to be surrendered. The sacred power of a Name (whether of one’s group or one’s god) would be replaced by the profanity of a number (majority rule). However, when sacred uniqueness supports elitist arrogance, it is time to sanctify the ordinary and recognize the sacred numbers and shapes at the base of all formation, including the apparently untamable collective consciousness of humanity.
It was the compelling and demonstrably transformative idea of Universal Adult Suffrage that inspired Michael Manley to flatly inform both Reagan and Thatcher, who were most reluctant to be persuaded, that – if you don’t bring Vorster down (The South African racist regime), we will (The Third World). It will take us a little longer and cost us all a great deal more blood, but Vorster’s idea of ‘divine order’ (and Apartheid was as religiously ensconced as is Zionism) is coming down as it is an offense to some of the best ideas humanity has yet had of what constitutes the good life in human community, whether or not they came from anybody’s holy book.
Netanyahu is in no way different from Vorster in his seemingly implacable resistance to the growing consensus of international opinion that freedom is the right of people of whatever ethnic background or religion and the responsibility of whatever government over a jurisdiction to establish, protect and ensure for all people within its domain. He has surrounded himself with people who share a very opposite ideal, grounded in a completely different set of ideas, hiding under the invocation of some divine right to rule.
Whether it be Jew first, or White first, or whatever ethnicity, being a second class citizen in anybody else’s nation state or religious empire is seriously out of date. We’ll see how that goes.
YeKengalé 