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Eye on the world: Silencing racism
In “Why so much blatant racism is bubbling to the surface” The Christian Science Monitor reports on the tenor of the conversation about race in the United States. The Monitor writes, “Racist speech is accompanied by an emboldening of white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan—which grew from 72 chapters in 2014 to 190 last year, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.” The First Amendment right to free speech, coupled with platforms on the internet for everyone to project their voice (sometimes anonymously), the current conversation is “forcing the most entrenched forms of racism to the surface in new ways. While shocking to some to hear, the outbursts give a more accurate portrayal of how much further America needs to go to heal race relations.” However, “recent examples of blatant racism have been met by swift public condemnation. Americans, on the whole, remain firmly intolerant of intolerance.”
Ideas on this subject:
From the Bible:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them ….
From the writings of Mary Baker Eddy:
Man is idea, the image, of Love; he is not physique. He is the compound idea of God, including all right ideas; the generic term for all that reflects God’s image and likeness; the conscious identity of being as found in Science, in which man is the reflection of God, or Mind, and therefore is eternal; that which has no separate mind from God; that which has not a single quality underived from Deity; that which possesses no life, intelligence, nor creative power of his own, but reflects spiritually all that belongs to his Maker.
— Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 475
The Divine Being must be reflected by man, — else man is not the image and likeness of the patient, tender, and true, the One “altogether lovely;” but to understand God is the work of eternity, and demands absolute consecration of thought, energy, and desire.
— Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 3
Related articles from The Christian Science Journal and the Christian Science Sentinel:
In “Breaking the shackles of racism”: “Christian Science not only teaches that there is just one kind of man, the man of God’s creating, and that what appears to be mortal man is only a false sense of creation; it also explains that as these facts are clearly understood, we give up the false sense of man for the correct view, which helps to heal and transform the human scene.” And “An understanding of the inherent dignity and worth of man as the beloved child of God must replace the false sense that portrays man as either the agent or the victim of evil, or error.”
In “How I pray about racism”: “We open our view to the higher qualities that each of us stands for. Racism basically shows an inability to see the good in other races or tribes. Yet we naturally love good and dislike evil. Therefore, seeing every race, every tribe, and every geographical entity as embodying God's goodness, is a way to heal discord and strife, and foster the unity of mankind.” And “As we all soar, a little like the astronauts, in this divine heaven by focusing our thoughts on the good we each have from God, the differences between us will start to disappear, and the universe will become a more beautiful, heavenly unity.”
The articles above and others dealing with this subject can be found on JSH-Online.com or on CSMonitor.com.