There are few things that fill most of us more thoroughly--and rightly--with pity and disgust than the suggestion that religion can correspond to race. Of course, such an aversion cannot be thought to be universally emblematic of humanity, given so many countervailing examples from our history.
But now we reckon, quite rightly, that "race" is an ideological construct. This construct requires, of necessity, a system of artificial distinctions. One might be reminded of the ludicrous nineteenth-century notion of the races of humans springing from separate species of apes. It is gruesomely fitting that the same era gave rise to the supposedly unanswerable contention from the opponents of Darwin, that ample time had passed, in those few decades, for the godless paleontologists to produce the "missing link" between apes and humans.
Scientists in succeeding generations have not failed to respond that digging up candidates for that and other "gaps" in the fossil record could be thought merely to result in twice as many gaps. If we as a species want to draw distinctions, we are at liberty to do so. Certainly the racists of the nineteenth century would do so, simultaneously consigning black people to the far reaches of the evolutionary tree, and then bemoaning their unaccountable ability to combine with white people and produce a cornucopia of worthy offspring.
We see gaps and distinctions when they do not exist, and we fixate on them when they do exist. So it is with religion, and the ludicrous notion that one person believes in God and another does not.
If our religion were true, it would address people as they are--wavering creatures of flighting attention. Such are the believers in God, inasmuch as he is believed in, or not believed in. We continually fail to do either.
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