To say race is not based on genetic realities (which is true) is not to deny that social constructs of race are real and influential. If we say they don’t matter, don’t we deny the realities and injustices that some people experience because of race? Sometimes a person’s racial identity is important to them and they don’t want it erased. We are more than our souls. I don’t think Colossians 3:11 implies that we should ignore social realities of gender, ethnicity, or social status, just that we must remember that none of the advantages or disadvantages of those categories apply to our identity in Christ.
2 Likes
Just from your description alone, it sure sounds like a qualitative difference. Take a biologically very important difference: a pair of healthy humans of the opposite sex from any populations can mate and reproduce successfully. That is not true of dog breeds.
First, the idea of race is highly variable across cultures and across time even within a culture. Second, if human races do not map to genetic populations well, then yes, we absolutely should dismiss it as being analogous to dog breeds. That doesn’t mean we should dismiss it as a social factor.
The simple fact is that geneticists handle human populations very differently than they do dog breeds, because the genetics of the two species are very different.
I think we are quibbling around the edges of the main idea on which we seem to agree or the discussion has moved from the theological to the pastoral which I was not addressing.
Please point me to a reference that confirms this point.
My wife helps with a dog rescue group and at least half of the dogs that we have kept are mixtures of two or three breeds. There also exist the terms cockapoo and labridoodle to denote intentional cross breeding
I was just recently looking up Chihuahua/Great Dane crosses, and although a few dubious stories circulate, I couldn’t find any reliable accounts of it.
It seems likely to be impossible – but not the kind of thing biologists are going to write papers about.
We humans tend to be affected by tribalism. We have this compulsion to divide the world into us and them, and things like skin color, culture, and language are easy ways to identify if someone belonged to us or them. I think this is the basic human compulsion behind racism and our need to divide people into races.
It is also interesting to note how even the Christian church has been influenced by this human compulsion. Different cultures started different traditions that survive even until today. We still have Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox traditions, as well as the myriad of Protestant sects and traditions. We still even have tensions between Protestants and Catholics in some parts of the world, often drawn around cultural borders.
As others have been saying, there isn’t an objective thing called human races. We subjectively choose which features to categorize people by while ignoring all of the traits that are found spread throughout many different races. People are so much more than just a handful of arbitrarily chosen alleles, and that is where our ideas on race really fail us.
We have this compulsion to divide the world . . .
True, this compulsion to divide, or ignore similarities, is seen even this the discussion thread.
This topic was automatically closed 6 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.