‘Hate’: I do not think that word means what you think it means

Jul 5, 2016 by

by Jonathon van Maren, LifeSite:

In my third year of university, I had to take a mandatory class on the history of Canada’s indigenous peoples. One of the main topics that came up again and again was the impact of the missionaries who arrived, often alone, to proselytize among the various aboriginal nations. They came, they taught, and many of them died horrific deaths replete with burning, flaying, and dismemberment. My fellow students were not quite sure what to make of this. During one seminar, a young knock-off Noam Chomsky declared that these men were obviously racist, since they apparently viewed the spiritual beliefs of the aboriginals as inferior to their own.

I asked the student in response if he thought the priests had truly believed in the existence of heaven and hell and in the truth of their message. Considering their courage in the face of an almost inevitable grisly end, he was forced to say that yes, they did. If that was the case, I asked him, what would be more racist: Priests deciding that the indigenous peoples of Canada were not worthy enough to merit proselytization, or deciding that these people were human beings of inestimable value, and thus all pains should be taken to reach them? If the missionaries truly believed that the natives would go to hell if they never heard the message of Christianity and yet decided they were not worth the effort, would that not be genuine racism?

The student had nothing to say. He looked a bit stunned.

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