All posts tagged: Original Sin

Repent of your white privilege: Is racism the original sin?

You have probably heard of “whiteness” the offense of being part of the dominant majority, that discriminates against minorities with different skin colors. If we consider the whole world, light-skinned people, whose ancestors came from Europe, including people who still live in Europe, form a large minority. In the world community, Asia and Africa have huge populations. I remember learning in school, about the explorers who sailed from Europe and conquered and settled North and South America, and Australia and New Zealand. The new nations that grew from this prospered and sometimes dominated the world. In the southern United States and Brazil, and the Caribbean, large slave populations were imported from Africa. From that division of society, Europeans and Africans, racism tends to be defined by skin color. The United States had a violent civil war, and many civil-rights protest movements. “Whiteness” and “White Privilege” were ideas that fuelled academic discussions. Now, with protest groups like “Black Lives Matter” that protest against “Whiteness” and try to change it, the argument has gone public, and onto …

Ho Chi Minh city (formerly Saigon) Viet Nam. Credit: Colin Key/Flickr/Creative Commons

Original sin

Studies show that the average person lies about 100 times a day. As one writer tactfully noted, this was not talking about you specifically, but the average person. In the study, published in the Journal of Basic and Applied Psychology, University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman recruited 121 pairs of men and women attending classes at the university to take part in the study. They had no idea what it involved at this point. They were then brought together and asked to have conversations with the other participants. Most of them did not know each other. They were unaware that the conversations were being recorded and researchers received the required permission after, before moving to the next stage. The students were then asked to view the video and to pick out the lies — from the most innocent to the most blatant. They found that over 60% of the participants lied within the first ten minutes of their conversation and told an average of 2.92 lies. They found men and women lied the same amount, …