Only Biblical Christianity offers a rational basis for opposing racism and for pursuing justice.
Equality before the Law is a Biblical principle:“The community is to have the same rules for you and for the alien living among you; this is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. You and the alien shall be the same before the Lord. The same laws and regulations will apply both to you and to the alien living among you.”
Num 15:15-16 “Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favouritism to the great, but judge your neighbour fairly.”
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| Jesus Christ |
Leviticus 19:15 “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Galatians 3:28“For He Himself is our peace Who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”
Ephesians 2:14 “From one man He made every nation of men…”
Acts 17:26 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation.”
2 Corinthians 5:17-19 “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength…love your neighbour as yourself.”
Mark 12:30-31 Before the coming of Christ, the heathen nations despised honest work and consigned it to slaves. When Christ was born, half of the population of the Roman Empire were slaves. Three quarters of the population of Athens were slaves.
But Jesus revolutionised labour. By taking up the axe, the saw, the hammer and the plane, our Lord imbued labour with a new dignity. Christianity undercut slavery by giving dignity to work. By reforming work Christianity transformed the entire social order. Our Lord Jesus Christ began His ministry in Nazareth with these words: “The Spirit of the Lord is on Me…to proclaim freedom for the prisoners…and release to the oppressed.”
Luke 4:18 When the Apostle Paul wrote to Philemon concerning his escaped slave, he urged him to welcome back Onesimus “no longer as a slave, but…as a dear brother…as a man and as a brother in the Lord.”
Philemon 16: Because of these and other Scriptural commands to love our neighbour, to be good Samaritans and to do for others what you would want them to do for you, Christians like St. Patrick, William Wilberforce, John Newton, William Carey, David Livingstone, Lord Shaftsbury and General Charles Gordon, and so many others, worked tirelessly to end the slave trade, stop child labour and set the captives free. Amongst all the religions of the world, only Christianity brought an end to the slave trade. On the other hand, those who hold to Darwin's theory of evolution, have no objective basis with which to counter racism. In fact, Darwinian Evolutionism has inspired a whole host of racist ideologies and movements including Communism. The actual title of Darwin's famous evolutionary book is: “On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.”
Karl Marx wanted to dedicate “Das Kapital” to Charles Darwin and wrote “Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in the natural sciences for the historical class struggle.” “
Violence is the midwife…” As Stalin so succinctly put it: “Evolution leads to revolution.”
Both Darwin and Marx expressed racist views. It is ironic that so many Russians and Africans have held Marxist beliefs, because Marx himself despised the Slavs and the Blacks, writing that they were “frozen at pre-civilisation levels” and would never make any contribution to history!
Both Darwin and Marx expressed racist views. It is ironic that so many Russians and Africans have held Marxist beliefs, because Marx himself despised the Slavs and the Blacks, writing that they were “frozen at pre-civilisation levels” and would never make any contribution to history!
(Karl Marx The Racist, 1978; Understanding The Times, David Noebel, 1991; Marx and Satan, Richard Wurmbrand). “They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity…” 2 Peter 2:19
The Oxford English Dictionary defines racism as: “…discrimination against or antagonism towards other races.”
Yet many who speak out vitriolicly against racism, are themselves racist, displaying intense antagonism towards people of other races, and advocating policies which discriminate on the basis of race.
These are many of the same people who would respect Martin Luther King, but who are not willing to live by his maxim: “They will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Frustrated people easily give in to character conditioned hate. The easiest idea to sell anyone is that he is better than someone else. The holocaust in Rwanda where mobs of Hutus slaughtered over 800 000 Tutsi Christians is just one example of the destructive power of tribalism in Africa today. More people were killed with machetes in six weeks in Rwanda, than have been killed by nuclear weapons in all of history.
H.G. Wells noted that racism “justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty and abomination than any other sort of error in the world.”
Abraham Heschel described racism as “the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.”
It is disturbing how many African leaders, while ostensibly opposing racism support one of the most vitriolic racists on the continent today: Robert Mugabe.
Despite Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe, being guilty of some of the most vicious racism with a disastrous policy of state sponsored terrorism, the stealing and looting of farms and businesses, murder of farmers and opposition members, terrorising of supreme court justices, bombing of opposition newspaper offices, imprisoning of critics and reckless promotion of racial hatred against whites and Jews, the ANC government of South Africa steadfastly refuses to criticise Mugabe.
The crisis in Zimbabwe is severe. People are dying of starvation in a man made famine, orchestrated by the ZANU-PF government of Robert Mugabe. Thousands of productive farms have been seized by government organised mobs. Vast herds of cattle and wildlife have been slaughtered. Crops and stores burned. Farmhouses looted. Many people beaten or murdered.
One of the most productive agricultural economies in Africa has been systematically destroyed because of fanatical racial hatred. Not only did these farms feed the entire nation, but they also exported food, providing the highest percentage of foreign exchange earnings. These commercial farms were also the largest employers of labour in the country and provided homes for up to 4 million farm workers and their dependants.
Yet, the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, needing a scapegoat for his failed socialism, played the race card and declared: “Farmers are enemies of the state!… We have degrees in violence!…I will be a Black Hitler - 10 fold!…Those farmers who resist will die!”
During the March 2002 Presidential Election in Zimbabwe over 1 400 MDC election observers and supporters were arrested in a massive nation wide clamp down on the opposition. Human rights groups documented over 70 000 human rights abuses in the run up to the elections. This included severe beatings, abductions, torture and murder. ZANU-PF officials, supporters, war veterans and youth brigade militia rampaged through residential areas, attacking people indiscriminately, beating street vendors, dragging white farmers from their cars, savagely beating and murdering many.
Yet, although almost all observers condemned the elections as fraudulent, incredibly, the African National Congress (ANC) government of South Africa expressed their “warm congratulations” to Robert Mugabe for “a convincing majority win.”
Many condemned the ANC's “obscene haste” to declare the poll legitimate, even before all the reports had come in. When the head of the South African Observer Commission declared the elections “legitimate” and brushed aside the widespread murder, violence, abduction and torture of observers and massive irregularities, he was jeered by journalists and diplomats alike. When questioned about the disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of voters in Zimbabwe, the ANC official dismissed it as “an administrative oversight!” Journalists laughed out loud, stood up and walked out in disgust.
“Whoever says to the guilty, you are innocent - peoples will curse him and nations denounce him.” Proverbs 24:24
It is evident that this blind support for Mugabe is inspired, in large part, by racial prejudice. Despite Mugabe engineering one of the most “spectacular economic collapses in history” with his national suicide of Zimbabwe, all too many black political leaders support him - irrespective of the lawlessness and savagery afflicting the population of Zimbabwe.
This racism and hypocrisy was also evident at the UN World Summit hosted in South Africa. Even while Mugabe's supporters were slaughtering endangered wildlife and destroying huge forests and game reserves in Zimbabwe, Mugabe was being applauded as a key note speaker at the World Summit on Sustainable Development! Some of the greatest game reserves in Africa have been in Zimbabwe. Now many of these wildlife sanctuaries are scenes of unprecedented slaughter. Along with the wholesale poaching, marxist mobs have been engaged in wholesale theft, abductions and murder. Properties have been burned out, tourists have been chased out of safari camps and game rangers have been assaulted and even killed.
“How long will the land lie parched and the grass in every field be withered? Because those who live in it are wicked, the animals and birds have perished.” Jeremiah 12:4
Under Mugabe even judges have been assaulted by mobs in their chambers in court, journalists and editors have been arrested and tortured, pastors have been arrested for praying for peace and justice, and the only independent daily newspaper and radio station in Zimbabwe have been blown up.
“Destructive forces are at work in the city; threats and lies never leave its streets.” Psalm 55:11
How can anybody in the ANC ever again speak against the racial discrimination of “apartheid South Africa”, when they have instituted their own racial discrimination through affirmative action in South Africa and are so enthusiastically supportive of Robert Mugabe's vicious racism in Zimbabwe?
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| Dr Peter Hammond |
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness…who are wise in their own eyes…who acquit the guilty for a bribe, but deny justice to the innocent…for they have rejected the Law of the Lord Almighty…” Isaiah 5:20-24
Dr Peter Hammond is the author of In The Killing Fields of Mozambique, Holocaust in Rwanda, and Faith Under Fire in Sudan. 
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