By Kelly O'Connell ——Bio and Archives--June 11, 2012
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Wright had come under the sway of the writings of James Cone, a professor of divinity, father of the black theology movement and author of the seminal Black Theology and Black Power (1969). Cone taught that Christianity needed to be freed from "whiteness." He and Wright conceived of a Christianity in which black rage and the black power ideology fused with Marxist thought. According to Cone, "black people must find ways of affirming black dignity which do not include relating to whites on white terms." Integration was impossible because it was brought about by "black" and "white guilt." Cone approvingly quoted Malcolm X: "The worst crime the white man has committed has been to teach us to hate ourselves." Freeing blacks would require getting them to love their inner African and Wright would do just that--Trinity's longtime parishioners be damned.
For white people, God's reconciliation in Jesus Christ means that God has made black people a beautiful people; and if they are going to be in relationship with God, they must enter by means of their black brothers, who are a manifestation of God's presence on earth. The assumption that one can know God without knowing blackness is the basic heresy of the white churches. They want God without blackness, Christ without obedience, love without death. What they fail to realize is that in America, God's revelation on earth has always been black, red, or some other shocking shade, but never white. Whiteness, as revealed in the history of America, is the expression of what is wrong with man. It is a symbol of man's depravity. God cannot be white even though white churches have portrayed him as white. When we look at what whiteness has done to the minds of men in this country, we can see clearly what the New Testament meant when it spoke of the principalities and powers. To speak of Satan and his powers becomes not just a way of speaking but a fact of reality. When we can see a people who are controlled by an ideology of whiteness, then we know what reconciliation must mean. The coming of Christ means a denial of what we thought we were. It means destroying the white devil in us. Reconciliation to God means that white people are prepared to deny themselves (whiteness), take up the cross (blackness) and follow Christ (black ghetto).Cone's bizarre theology offers ideas also found in the militantly racist, anti-White American Nation of Islam (NOI). One site describes NOI teaching:
According to the Nation of Islam, Allah, (God) created man, and the man he created was black. They believe that Allah himself is the original and supreme black man. He is the supreme being among a mighty and powerful race of black men. One of the most consistent concepts that flows through the teachings of the Nation of Islam is its racial focus. Everything negative and bad that has happened to the black man is attributed to the white man. It is even claimed that Christianity is a white man's religion, and is not an appropriate religion for any black person. The natural and true religion of the black man is Islam as defined by the Nation of Islam. The sad social and economic plight of the black man can be blamed on the white man. The white man is said to have robbed the black of his true heritage by forcing the teachings of Christianity upon them while they were slaves. By forsaking the slave master's religion and turning to Islam, they are reclaiming their true religion. Thus, Christianity becomes the religion of slavery for the black. The racial focus of the Nation of Islam, the elevation of the black race above all others, and the disparagement of the white race, are serious conflicts with traditional Islam. Traditional Islam claims to be the true religion for all mankind, regardless of race. The Nation of Islam is not accepted or recognized as Islamic by any of the Islamic organizations.
Replace God with Humanity and to elevate mankind, however implicitly, to the status of divinity. This is what it means to establish "Humanity" or "utility" as the "ultimate source" and end of moral obligation and value. Indeed, Mill's efforts in this regard may have been more socially effective than those of the more radical carriers of the same impulse. Precisely because they appeared more moderate and were clothed in the idiom of the liberal tradition Mill knew so well, Mill's anti-theological animus was able to insinuate itself into Anglo-American consciousness in a way that the more radical and essentially alien Continental expressions of that animus could never hope to do. Anglo-American society did not become self-consciously Marxist or Positivist. It became, instead, "modern-liberal"‚"secular," humanistic, positivistic, collectivistic, relativistic‚ committed not to the establishment of the Communist Paradise or the Final Positivist State but to a mundane "service to Humanity" and the pursuit of a chimerical "social justice." Christianity was of course not destroyed but relegated, as Bentham and Mill had long intended, to the innocuous position of private or subjective preference. Mill's evisceration of the traditional God, precisely because it was less extreme and thus less threatening than the militant atheism of a Marx, was all the more socially effective. Yet for all practical purposes, the Probable Limited god Mill offered his descendents was a god as dead, as effectively neutralized, as Marx's or Nietzsche's.Raeder also points out another intriguing fact:
J. Wesley Robb, in The Reverent Skeptic: A Critical Inquiry into the Religion of Secular Humanism, identifies several leading tenets of the contemporary "Religion of Secular Humanism":All of these postulates are similar, if not identical, to various of Mill's teachings.
- "There is no entelechy, no built-in pattern of perfection. Man is his own rule and his own end";
- "A philosophy founded on the agreement that 'man is the measure of all things' can have no room for belief in the intervention of non-material postulates";
- "We have increasing knowledge of our world, and there is no need to postulate a realm beyond it";
- "Humanism believes that the nature of the universe makes up the totality of existence and is completely self-operating according to natural law, with no need for a God or gods to keep it functioning".
The aim of parousiastic gnosticism is to destroy the order of being, which is experienced as defective and unjust, and through man's creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order.
Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community ... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.We must conclude that Obama's religion is simply a virulently racist Marxism hiding under the banner of Christianity, not unlike Vodun or Santaria. Further, such syncretism cannot be labeled as mere Christianity. Instead, as Comte and Nietzsche proved, to scheme to kill God and elevate mankind to His throne is a crazy task that will drive such plotters insane.
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Kelly O’Connell is an author and attorney. He was born on the West Coast, raised in Las Vegas, and matriculated from the University of Oregon. After laboring for the Reformed Church in Galway, Ireland, he returned to America and attended law school in Virginia, where he earned a JD and a Master’s degree in Government. He spent a stint working as a researcher and writer of academic articles at a Miami law school, focusing on ancient law and society. He has also been employed as a university Speech & Debate professor. He then returned West and worked as an assistant district attorney. Kelly is now is a private practitioner with a small law practice in New Mexico.