Tag: Racism

Can racism be fixed?


It is a topic on many people’s mind for some reason, especially in America, but why is it so important? What is bad about racism? Why do we still have it, even after more than forty years of “the dream”!? What can we do about getting rid of racism?

For starters, we could just program our children to not notice the color of people’s skin. It is done in schools all of the time, the “programming” of our kids. But what about the adults, the ones that have lived through the sixties and seventies ad nauseam, where will it end? Those of us who saw the riots in Los Angeles, the shootings in Chicago, etc. cannot just forget. Then there are the family stories of lynchings and the slavery that was endured by great-great grandparents. Yes, all of this must be taken into account but what can be done about the racism of today?

Can we fix it? It cannot be apologized away. There isn’t enough gold or silver or any amount of groveling which will pay the price to a people who were taken from their home land, sold into slavery by their own people or who were conquered and then sold. Nothing that can be said or done in reparation for over four hundred years of slavery and bigotry and hatred!

I am a Caucasian male, born in the same year as our President. Yes, I have seen the terror in people’s eyes, the fear and anger during the late sixties when I was just starting school at about the same time that Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered and a few months later Bobby Kennedy was shot while campaigning! The thing is that none of my family, as far back as I can trace, has ever owned a slave. Yet, “crackers”, white people like me, are blamed for every slight, every injustice that has ever happened in the past one hundred years or more.

Why? Because of racism. Not our racism, but the racism that exists in our culture. I don’t blame African-Americans for this, it is not their fault. It is not my fault that racism exists in the South or in America as a whole. I believe that Satan himself has used racism to great effect in America and has used it to stir up so much hatred and enmity between people who don’t know each other, they just know that skin color and culture are different between us. God created mankind, He did not create certain races of people to do certain things and others to do other things in this world. God created one race that had many different shades of skin color because of the climate that they settled in, not because one is better or worse than any other!

God is the only person Who can bring about the end of racism and bigotry and when Jesus comes back and rules the world as King, it will happen! This is not an “if” or a “possible” outcome, it will happen because Jesus said so! At the end of the Tribulation, when the one-thousand year reign of Christ begins, there will be no more bigotry and racism and those who try to keep it going will answer to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords! God removed His people from slavery after four hundred and thirty years, He did not endorse it. Those who were in slavery in Israel were to be released on the seventh anniversary of their slavery, it was not to be a life-long servitude unless the slave loved the family enough to become a bond-servant and it was the slave’s choice not the masters.

We cannot do away with racism by our own choices. Humanity doesn’t have the moral and ethical capacity to get rid of it or any other bigoted ways of treating people, not on our own strength at least. The love of God through Jesus can open our eyes and our hearts so that we no longer act on our cultural and familial learned behavior toward others, but if it has been taught from an early age it is still there. Only the change wrought by Jesus in your life and mine can cause it to be any different, so the choice is clear…choose Christ as your Savior and follow Him. Serve Him as your Master and Lord because He is the only Master to whom service is due!

Beauty in Creation


Have you every noticed the sun rise? Many people don’t because they don’t wake up early enough. The problem with sleeping in is that you don’t get to see the most beautiful part of the day. Of course, there is always sunset, which depending on the weather can be just as beautiful but usually with different colors. The time in between those two, the sky is blue for the most part depending on the weather. Every time that we notice the sky, the colors and the things that we notice about it all have to do with the weather. If it is stormy in the morning or evening, then the sky is usually red and purple or a variation of those two colors. If it is about to snow or rain, then mostly what we see is the gray clouds and the haze which comes with them.

Creation is a word that is not very popular these days, mainly because it doesn’t take the “theory of evolution” into account. Why? Because it is only a theory, it can’t be proven any more thoroughly than creation can except we have God‘s Word on one and only a scientist’s theory for the other. Which one would you believe? I think that I would put more stock in what God says than what a scientist thinks, but that is just me.

We have many people in our world who can’t seem to get a handle on religion or which one they want to put their belief and their eternal destiny in. Religion is something which man created which is why there are so many different ones in the world. In the beginning, God did not create a religion. All that He wanted was mankind’s obedience and his love expressed through our thankful offerings of our first-fruits, whether it was a first lamb born or the fruit from our gardens. If it was the first crop from the vegetable garden, it was acceptable to God. Cain brought his offering in due time, his was not the first fruits which was the reason God did not accept his offering.

We have forgotten this in our culture, in this day and in this twenty-first century. We have such a instant gratification culture that no one thinks about God much anymore until they really, truly need Him! He is the Creator of all things and yet we teach our children that it was by accident that life came to this planet, through some chance encounter with a comet that had amino acids in its ice and that they congealed into proteins on their own. Nothing is created by chance or accident and this can be proven by simple experiments. Try throwing an egg, some salt, a little baking powder, some flour and some milk into a bowl and swish it around a bit then give it a little time and some heat in an oven. Will that be biscuits or bread or a cake? This accidental concoction may taste OK, but then again it may not be edible at all. Accidental creation just doesn’t work.

All of mankind is bound up in a drop of blood. All of us have red blood, whether our skin is white or black, brown or with a yellow tinge to it or some other color, darker or lighter. We are created in His image, God’s image and it doesn’t matter what color our skin is. The culture that we grow up into is the part of each of us that is hard to reconcile, not our races or at least that is what should be known. We have different views of our cultures, whether they are acceptable to each other. Racism has run rampant in our world, not just in America but in all of the world. The problem is that it is not race that is the problem, it is intolerance of the differences between cultures, between people who judge themselves better than others because of their skin color regardless of whether they are white or black or any other color.

God’s Creation is beautiful and the people that He placed in it are to, and it is time that we started acting  toward each other like He wants us to and following His rules and laws toward each other. We need to come to the realization that God created us to be stewards, to be tolerant of each other regardless of skin color or culture. We should celebrate the differences that we have while also celebrating our similarities.