Never the Twain Shall Meet

The Michael Vick dog-fighting scandal highlights the extreme differences between the barbarian cultures of color and the white post-Christian culture. The white post-Christians have, for the last fifty years or so, been the criminally indulgent parents of their adopted black man-child. If Blacky got in trouble for raping white women and murdering white men, the indulgent parents excused Blacky, because they understood the horrible nightmares, caused by white people, that made Blacky commit the wayward acts. So, Blacky grows up believing that whatever he does, no matter how heinous, will be, if not countenanced, then at least tolerated by his white parents.

"So why," the confused, angry Blacky asks, "Are my parents so harsh with me over this dog-fighting nonsense?" And of course Blacky cannot be expected to understand the white post-Christian; their world is not his world. Blacky does not feel any need for a humane God; he needs only a powerful God. Whether he professes Christianity, Islam, or Vodoo, the god he worships is always a god of power who can be propitiated through sacrifice. There is no God of mercy in his racial memory bank.

The white post-Christian, however, does have a God of mercy in his racial memory bank, although his mind will not accept the preposterous notion of an incarnate God. And yet the post-Christian retains an incredible longing for a merciful God, so he soothes his longing for that God by making a religion out of some of the merciful derivatives of the antique faith. Such a derivative is a respect and affection for God's creatures. It is very touching to read about how fond that most Christian of authors, Walter Scott, was of his pet cat and pet dog. He loved them in a way no barbarian could possibly understand. But Scott's love for animals was not an unacknowledged derivative of his love for the God-Man; he understood the connection. The modern post-Christian does not.

So of course Blacky is confused, hurt, and angry. His white parents are behaving, as he sees it, irrationally. And Blacky is right about that. It is irrational to hold on to the derivatives of a faith once you have rejected the main tenets of that faith. But Blacky's failure to understand his post-Christian parents' abhorrence of dog-fighting is just one more example of why blacks and whites should not mix.