Ezra Azra--Is Racialism Racism?

“If you understand racism, then where does it come from?” Zachary Beck in his 2011 story, “Is Racism Racist.” Published on www.storyhouse.org.

In the meaning of the word Racialism there is no element of superiority-inferiority in comparisons among the approximately sixty human Races in existence.

Racism is the prejudice that compares Races by the criteria of superiority and inferiority.

In infinite reality there are times when superior-inferior consideration is necessary. Indeed, in the realm of organic life countless facts make the consideration unavoidable. Unfortunately, as it is with every consideration, misapplication is too easy.

Racism is one of the too easy misapplications of superior-inferior thinking.

In four major god-religions at present the misapplication of superior-inferior thinking began in their teachings that women are inferior to men.

All four religions teach that a male god began everything; and without any help from a female partner.

From this unrighteous beginning, the further devolution into lumping entire Races in the inferior-Woman category, was as easy as slipping on a banana peel.

This criminal teaching first appeared significantly in Hinduism in India more than three thousand years ago; and again in the Ancient land of Mesopotamia, more-or-less seven centuries afterwards.

Hindu teaching is that the first human was a Man. He lived happily alone for a very, very long time. There came a time when he was the cause of the accidental creation of the first Woman during one of his rituals of self purification. That is, she came into being by accident. In other words, that first Man, a Hindu, could have prospered well enough had women never come about!

This secondary status of Woman is continued thereafter in the stories in Hinduism of Woman’s inferiority alongside Man.

One such story is about almighty God Shiva’s consort, Parvati, losing a dance challenge to him because she refused to perform equally with Shiva a dance step she considered to be unfeminine.

Written scripture first appeared in Hinduism nearly four-thousand years ago. There were four books, the Vedas. In all the holy rituals prescribed in the Vedas, women were, and still are into this twenty-first century, forbidden from officiating.

The Vedas were written in Sanskrit, originally. Sanskrit was regarded a holy language. In Hinduism, up until the middle of the twentieth century, Hindu women were not allowed to learn to read, write, or speak Sanskrit!

In time, Hinduism effortlessly and seamlessly devolved from its Woman-is-inferior teaching, into declaring entire Races of people, inferior to others.

In Hinduism there is the societal racist-like caste hierarchy. It was first recorded in the Hindu scriptures, the Rig-Veda, in approximately 1500 BCE in the Sanskrit language. Out of the initial four castes of people in Hindu India in Sanskrit times, by the beginning of the twentieth century there were thousands of additional subcastes practiced.

In every twist and turn in the thousands of years of the history of the evil of mind-boggling intricacies of casteism in Hindu society, the one constant has been the arbitrary assignment of superiorities and inferiorities.

Such assignments were there at the very beginning when the initial four societal castes were compared to parts of the human body. The highest caste, the Brahmin caste, is referred to as being the Mouth. The lowest of the four, the Shudra caste, the Untouchables, is assigned the Feet.

If but the shadow of a low-caste person passes over a high-caste person, the latter has to be purged by centuries-old holy Veda-prescribed cleansing rituals.

More-or-less seven centuries after the Hindu creation of Woman as inferior to Man, the insult to women was repeated in Mesopotamia where the story originated that almighty God Jehovah deliberately created Eve to be inferior to Adam.

Adam was a Man; the first human to be created by Jehovah as Jehovah’s highest achievement in His six-days creation of everything in the infinite Universe: “God created Man in His own image; in the image of God created He him.”

Again, as in Hinduism seven centuries previously, being the ‘first’ carried the deliberately intended implication of being superior.

Nonetheless, the original Mesopotamians, the first Biblical communities, were not as certain as the Hindus had been about the inferiority of Woman, as is indicated in the Mesopotamian folklore tale of Lilith.

Lilith was the first Woman created by almighty God Jehovah to be Adam’s mate in the Garden of Eden, long before He created Eve, His second Eden Woman.

When Jehovah first decided to create a female mate for Adam, Jehovah gave no thought to a superior-inferior relationship between that first human couple. Hence, Jehovah, in his creation of Lilith, the first Woman, repeated the same algorithm he invented for the creation of Adam, the first Man.

Hence, Lilith was created equal to Adam in potential for infinite achievement.

However, just as nobody knows the origin in Eden of the evil which suborned that Serpent, which “was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made”, nobody knows for certain why Lilith got the notion that Jehovah and Adam expected her to behave as Adam’s ‘second banana’ “help meet”, rather than as his equal.

Consequently, Lilith abandoned Adam and ran away so successfully, that even almighty God Jehovah never found her ever again. And so when Jehovah decided to make Adam a second wife, Eve, Jehovah studiously avoided repeating His Adam algorithm. He invented a different one.

To create Adam and Lilith, Jehovah had used only three ingredients: His almighty spit, and “dust of the ground”, and His own “breath of life.” Hence, Adam and Lilith could not but be equal in potential achievements in every way.

In the creation of Eve to be Adam’s genetically subservient wife, Jehovah took no risks, as He carelessly and unwittingly had in His creation of Lilith.

To guarantee Eve’s genetic inferiority, Jehovah made Eve from one of Adam’s ribs; that is, from one of his most expendable minor body parts. Just to be clear about how minor a rib is in our anatomy, a big toe serves us more importantly than most of our ribs.

Hence, although the Lilith story is a clear indication the Mesopotamians had doubts about women being genetically inferior to men, in the not-so-long-run, women were treated as inferior to men in Mesopotamian Culture as evilly as they were in Hindu Cultures. And, hence the many instances in the Bible of Jehovah-sanctioned customs that bestow divine-right superiority of men over women.

For example, Jehovah’s command to Moses in the Bible book of Leviticus is that if a Mother gives birth to a son, her subsequent ritual of cleansing must last seven days. If she gives birth to a daughter, the cleansing ritual must last fourteen days. In other words, a Mother is rendered unclean twice as much by a daughter than she is by the birth of a son!

Notwithstanding their incipiently noble doubts, the Mesopotamians, too, as the Hindus had earlier on, sooner or later slipped on that notorious banana peel. By the time of the lifetime of Abram the Chaldean Mesopotamian, the Mesopotamians included entire Races in their inferior blatant arrogant evil Racist thinking:

‘The lord said unto Abram, Get thee out of Chaldea, the country of thy birth, and go to the land of the Canaanites which I give unto you, for a possession; ye shall inherit their land. And I will make of thee a great nation which I have chosen for my own inheritance. I am the Lord your god which has severed you from other people that you should be mine. And I will without fail drive out from before you the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, Jebusites.’

As evil as this racist declaration of Jehovah’s was, it was not His worst. His most horribly perplexing worst racist utterance was when He turned against Abram’s Chaldean race in a declaration to His prophet: “The Lord answered me and said, For, lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation which shall march through the breadth of the land, to possess the dwelling places that are not theirs. They are terrible and dreadful.”