Blog@GraceJunction

Hi Vikas,

I saw your blog about the ‘racist attacks’ on Indians in Australia. And the situation i believe continues to remain grim with the government issuing a travel warning for people planning to visit Australia. Hope your course there is in the final stages and you will be back soon. It is nice that you are taking up the issue in the interests of the new students who have spent lakhs of rupees to get their admissions. The situation certainly is gloomy for those who have gone there with many dreams.

‘Equality’ seems to be your battle cry - the right to be treated equally with people of every race, religion or nationality. This offers the perfect context for us to carry on our discussion about ‘God and truth’ before you left the country. Consider this: an author once said that around the same time when his child was born another celebrity also gave birth to a child. And he said that ‘being as objective as he can be, he could not understand why his child being much better looking than the celebrities child, the media chose to throng at the celebrities premises and none of them gave any attention to his family’. Why? He said that we are all born unequally privileged. He said that we are all born with different genes, skin color, beauty, talents, wealth and everything else that we inherit on this earth. And I believe that is so true. So the next question is where does this need for equality come in when we all are born unequally?

You might say that we all are human beings. But then again when we say that we are human beings aren’t we also discriminating against the other species? Are we created any better than the other species? Who gives us the moral authority to say that humans are better than dogs or dolphins? When we consider humans to be better than the other species aren’t we becoming responsible for ’species-ism’ as in ‘racism’? Why are we enraged when an atheist like Richard Dawkins says that - A thinking and feeling chimpanzee is more valuable than a human foetus with the faculties of a worm? Isn’t he right when he says that there is no basis for a greater reverence and legal protection for a human foetus which is no more human than an amoeba over an adult chimpanzee which is even capable of learning a human language? These are questions that should trouble us. Because even my small child will choose her siblings over the pet that she so much adores. Does that mean that there has to be something about the way we are wired that gives us this feeling of greater worth than any other species!

Justice says that ‘equals need to treated equally and ‘unequals’ need to be treated unequally’. I was so angry with my teacher who gave the same marks for the student who was less proficient with his essays than I was. I felt I was treated unjustly because I was treated equally with an unequal. And all around us we see examples of this in our society. Nobody gives the same treatment to the runner who came first in the race and the one who came third. Because it’s our inner need to be treated justly. So where does this need come from when we know that we are all different in so many ways? How do we know that we are a greater species compared to the rest? There are no answers apart from a God who gives us this worth - A personal God who has volition, thoughts and feelings.

The Bible says that man was created in God’s image. And no other species was attributed this quality. So without God we are completely stripped of this argument for equality among human beings and the sense of greater worth over every other creation. And if there is this God who gives us the same value by putting HIS image on us then we should not tolerate ‘racism’ because we have been all created as equals. And if God gave only human beings this quality then no one can say that any other species is greater than even a human foetus despite the claims of evolutionary biology. So you are right in raising your voice for an equal treatment among so called unequals. No matter who we are in terms of our race or nationality, the same creator gave us the same worth. We are children of the same God. Without HIM, you need to question the credibility of your demands.

Let Truth and justice prevail!

Darshan.

Tags: australia, inequality, racism

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Letters, Navin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.