Challenging Bigotry

A dinosaur with a big head and a small mind recently conversed in public. He referred to these people and them and how we have tried to help them in so many ways to pull themselves up out of their native poverty and general uselessness – and all that’s happened is that they have dragged us down. Instead of us making them better, they have made us worse. Ain’t it a shame what this country has come to, and other such talk.

Relics are out there, as bigoted as ever, sitting on church pews every Sunday, singing hymns and giving cold hard cash to send missionaries around the world to help those people learn about Jesus and go to heaven in the sweet bye and bye. Of course, if one of them walked in one Sunday morning and sat down beside them when they were worshipping Jesus, they might very well lay a dinosaur egg on the spot.

Just when we begin to think that everyone around us understands that people are people, all members of one human race – think again. Dinosaurs yet live in our neighborhoods and attend churches and we do business with them every day. Some are preachers, deacons, elders and teachers. Listen up and you may overhear them lamenting the condition of ‘the good old U.S. of A.’ because of what those people have done to ruin it. And, of course, it’s always someone else that’s the problem in this land of immigrants and immigrants’ children.

The Holy Scriptures teach that there is one human race. All nations (that’s everyone, y’all) are descended from one man. Whatever differences exist between people of whatever ethnicity, the differences are not essential, having to do with essence. People are people.

Ancient Jews and Greeks were different in plenty of ways, descended from different ethnic streams. But Paul (the Jew) said to the Athenian philosophers (Greeks), “God that made the world and all things therein…hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation” (Acts 17:24, 26). According to Christ’s apostle, all people of all ethnicities descended from one man.

The living God, the Creator of all that is, has revealed His mind through the special revelation contained in the Bible. He ordained that all people of all nations would descend from one man, Adam. There is one and only race of people: the human race.

When a dinosaur speaks of Whites and Blacks and Asians and Islanders as belonging to different races, he shows his ignorance – ignorance of the Bible and ignorance of reality. He also shows insecurity.

An insecure person always looks for someone else to blame. That is the very sort of fearful thinking that Hitler capitalized on, blaming them and those people for all of Germany’s problems. Playing to the fear, the insecurity, he convinced enough Germans that if only they would eliminate a certain group of undesirables, everything would be wonderful again. Eliminate them they did. The Holocaust followed. Ideas have consequences. Some people never learn; they love darkness rather than light because their hearts are as dark as hell itself.

–TSA