Human As Christian

creation of adam

My name is Ilaiah–O, you are from a wretched caste

I added Shepherd to it–O, you have become a Christian

I read and write–O, you have violated the Dharma

I read and write in English–Then, you want to break India

I travel abroad– O, Christians fund your travel

I believe in one God–Then, you are in touch with Jesus

My body will be buried–O, you want to resurrect

My tomb will be an English school–Then, English should be banned

God created English for all humans– Such God should be expelled

 

After a lot of personal experience, study and travel in my long life of seventy years, I came to the conclusion that all humans, except a few, in the world are Chritian. This conclusion is born out from having been born in India which consists of 1.3 billion people with a good amount of land and a long history of human existence. And also my travel across Israel and study of its history and evolution, where the concept Christian took shape made me realise that the notion Christian has a deep relationship with God and Labour being twins.

I am not using the concept Christian in the sense of religion, church or prayer, heaven and hell, but in the sense of humans’ ideology of work to eat and drink in order to live. The concept Christian now should be defined, in my wisdom, as a socio-spiritual system of humans in the process of their evolution at a particular juncture of life that needed to work to eat and drink as they passed out of the life of the garden of plenty.

In order to have an organized society of work, not to live on booty of plunder or loot, with a philosophy of work that is divine there emerged God who worked for six days and rested on the seventh day. It might be accidental that the first theory of working God was constructed into a text in Israel but even the Indian people’s life, except that of a small number of people called Brahmins and their other allies called Dwijas, the philosophy of work to eat and live existed for millennia. If all were like Brahmins who remain away from the productive work, not to soil their hands, the human societies would not have survived after the life of hunting and gathering or collecting food in the gardens of plenty.

The folk tales of hundreds of agrarian spiritual deities in India show their relationship to work. This is true of all Chinese, Egyptians, Greek people and so on. Work around cattle breeding and agriculture made the idea of working God a Christian ideology. That is how God came to be known as a Shepherd.

In the spiritual books written by ancient Brahmins there is no idea of working God. In China, Greece, Egypt and so on such a picture of non- working God was/is not there. The idea of God is universally centred around making humans work and live. The God and human relationship primarily was a working relationship. In India Buddhism emerged as a kind of shramanic (respect to labour) school, but it did not centralise that idea of work and live into a systematically written text, or in the Sangha practice. Much later in the seventh century Islam emerged with a strong centralized idea of God and prophet. But God and work relationship was not its primary focus. Taking people to heaven was its main focus. That focus is meant to shorten the life of people on the earth without fully exploring the potential of labour and God’s relationship.

Work and innovative science are interlinked. Innovation and human progress are also interlinked. Any modern innovative society will have to be only a working society at an advanced level. Most human societies did not reach the level of acquiring advanced scientific innovational skills, as much as the Western Christian nations did, because they have not examined the relationship between labour and God in the process of growth of civilizations.

For example, in India the productive masses from the days of building of the Harappan civilization have strong work and God relationship but the Aryans worked out a negative philosophy of disconnecting work and God. That philosophy dismantled the social cohesion between working masses and God.

Unlike this negative process the builders of Jericho city in Israel did keep their connectivity between God and Labour. Their God worked for six days and rested on the seventh day with a vision of the scientific relationship between work and rest. The idea and practice of rest one day in a week was/is to rejuvenate the energy to work again. Fortunately for them there was no group of people, who never engendered an anti-labour and anti-God human community that treated soiling hands as sinful. When God created all humans in his own image, that image was made out of soil itself. Human body consists of soil, air, water and heat even now.

Any community that believes in all time rest and spends a leisurely life that community becomes a burden on the food producers thereby on God as well. This behaviour among humans is very, very exceptional. Even though the Pharisees of Israel behaved like Brahmins of India, for some time in their history, they had given up that behaviour a long time back once Jesus’ Christianization of the whole social system happened.

The builders of Faiyum cilty civilization in Egypt encountered the anti-production and science interaction as the feudalism of Islam acquired the character of Brahminism in Egypt. That is the reason why that civilization stopped producing advanced science and started using Christian science for survival. The Athens city civilization builders of Greece never gave up their philosophy of God and work as they were the first bridge between Jericho civilization and the Athenian civilization. Thus the whole of Europe came under the influence of Christian civilization where an inbuilt philosophy of God and work as spiritual and social hermeneutics structurally got institutionalized.

China and other countries have produced their own disconnecting relationship between work and God. There was a huge attempt to construct communist Atheism as the driving ideology of Russia and China but that attempt fell apart. Atheism has its own disconnecting dogma.

Any discourse around God without relating it to work and harnessing of natural resources would have the potential to kill the innovative abilities of people. Democracy and liberalism have done a lot of positive work and they have silently connected God and work because they essentially are Christian. Advanced science took shape in their Christian ethic that taught people to work and live.

Once work and education get interchangeably connected human civilization moves further and further. The idea of Christian did that while other systems failed. But vast masses, the world over, are Christian as they believe in God and Work as civilizational twins for human survival.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a socio-spiritual reformer and author in a caste ridden India. His books Why I am Not a Hindu, Post-Hindu India, Buffalo Nationalism, The Shudras–Vision For a New Path, Untouchable God, God As Political Philosopher–Buddha’s Challenge to Brahminism are meant to carry on the reform

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