Radio Leicester Thought for the Day
© John Denney 24
October 2003
Did
you see that TV documentary The Secret
Policeman about trainee police officers?
Where a handful of new policemen were exposed as holding extreme racial
prejudices? I was horrified to think
that people to whom we had given great authority were ready to act with
prejudice and with favour. I am
glad they were outed and forced to leave the police service. I hope that there are few undetected rotten
apples in our police service, who slur the name of the great majority of the
police force, who do a difficult job fairly and well.
Prejudice
is a great time-saver. It helps us form
our opinions without getting the facts straight. Not one of us is entirely free from prejudice
of some kind. I don’t like so-called Rap
Music; I don’t like slack-jawed children’s TV presenters who have poor diction;
I can’t bear Coronation Street or Eastenders. Now, these are pretty trivial examples of
prejudice, and I bet you have plenty of your own. But none of these are on a par with racial
prejudice and racial stereotyping.
Racial
prejudice is another confirmation that mankind has fallen away from God’s
intentions. Because we all stem from the
same common ancestor. Whether that is the
Bible’s Adam, or the 5.4 million year old fossil found in Ethiopia doesn’t
matter. Either way, we’re from the same
root stock. Your DNA isn’t very
different from that of any other human being on the planet, whatever racial
group they might belong to.
Remember
Shakespeare’s Shylock? Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a
Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the
same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you
tickle us, do we not laugh?
The
prejudice then was against Jews. Today
it’s about people whose skin is a different colour. But God spoke through the prophet Samuel, saying
I judge people
differently from the way humans do. Men
and women look at the face; GOD looks into the heart. [1 Samuel 16:7]
I
remember a man with a hope that stood against prejudice. A man with a God-given inspiration to speak
against the forces of negativity and the folly of stereotyping. I ask you his question: Do you have a dream today[1]?