If Yeshua (Jesus) were here in the flesh now, He would be stomach-sick at looking at how people who claim His name treat others. Most often, Jesus is a brand name used to take advantage of others, including First Nations in Canada and indigenous people world-wide.
When I went with a group of Chinese Christians from Vancouver to a First Nations reserve to the north, and saw a fellow who was in a rundown cabin protecting the entrance to the place where some rich people want to build a new ski hill, he said: “Jesus, that a**hole!” This was because he had been sodomised by a Catholic priest as a 7 year old boy.
His words reverberate in my brain until today: “Jesus, that a**hole!” I had never heard these two words together in one sentence. It shocked me to the core of my being. And if I were him, maybe I would be using even stronger adjectives to decribe the religion of my oppressor.
A couple years later, another First Nations man on Vancouver’s Water Street, in Gastown, was carving masks for the public. In a conversation, he mentioned to me:
“Wherever white man has gone, he has brought destruction.”
This sentence also has been burning in my brain ever since I heard it.
And often it’s not the skin colour but the ideology of this “master race” that is so dangerous.
First Rome, then the other European Empires took Jesus’ faith and twisted it into the Groupthink of Empire. They invented many co-existing ideologies such as Evolution, Survival of the Fittest, Marxism, capitalism, globalisation, etc, but in the end they were all the same: “Spread out, have dominion over the earth.” Not only over plants and animals, but over other humans they deemed inferior. Including BC’s original imported cheap labour: the Chinese railway workers, the Japanese salmon cannery workers, the Hawaiian loggers, etc.
It breaks my heart to see a religion of what I previously perceived to be salvation and freedom to be the greatest tool used in oppressing others worldwide. First used by Europeans, now used by capitalists of every ethnicity. The Kingdom of God and the worship of Mammon combined to make a perverse, twisted religion of control.
If I were First Nation, I would stay clear of the religion of my oppressors. And their capitalism (including the false prophet, Calvin Helin, the FN man who grew up in a white family and figured out how to use his early childhood background to make lots of cold, hard cash).
I even challenge Chinese and Koreans here in the Greater Vancouver region, many of whom have converted to Christianity and started going to church:
“Are you into this because you are disoriented in a new country, and crave community?
Is this just a fad to you?
Do you think this Western religion is really going to meet your needs, and find for you the ‘true life’?”
That is, are you believing this simply to gain an advantage?”
I’m sure Jesus is pissed off that people are using His faith like this. I would be too. His faith was always meant to be the philosophy and ethos of a small minority of devoted people who loved the poor and opposed Empire, in whatever form it shaped itself. But instead, Empire has taken over the faith and used it for His purposes.
From the age of 13, I committed myself to the “Real Deal”. Unfortunately, I got bought off and caught up in this System for 30 years. When I started looking at the world through indigenous eyes, I decided to take a stand against Empire and this bastardised religion, with all the other forms of oppressive ideologies (Social Darwinism, capitalism liberalism, etc). It’s not as comfortable, but it’s more realistic. And faithful to the original intent of Yeshua the Messiah, as He expressed His mission statement in Isaiah 61 and Luke 4.
“The urge to save humanity is all too often only a false face for the urge to rule it,” stated American journalist H.L. Mencken.
Yeshua is one of the only ones to whom this does not apply. But it certainly applies to the vast majority of those claiming to represent Him in the last two thousand years.
sleeplessinturtleisland 