Are Christians Cannibals?

Joshua (a.k.a. Jesus), the man, was a rebel against the Jewish establishment. He ridiculed the high and mighty Pharisees, with their haughty legalistic showmanship. His core message was about Love, which, supposedly, is the message of most major religions of the world. He was, however, one of the few teachers who recognized the mental component to liberate the masses: that what is important is what goes on in the mind—the outward show of animal sacrifices and piety is a dog without the right mindset.

Like many great men, Joshua was seemingly full of contradictions. Why the anger in cursing up a fig tree or beating up traders in the temple? We will never know why he was reluctant to help the Greek woman who had a daughter possessed by a demon just because the woman was non-Jewish. Then, his most enigmatic act was at the Last Supper when he blessed bread and wine and offered it to his disciples as his body and blood. The offering of animals and humans to the gods was nothing new as long as human conjured ways to communicate with the mysterious universe.

Ostensibly, he was going to be the “sacrificial lamb” for the sake of a world gone astray. When the missionaries, backed by the might of gun powder, snuff and trinkets, brought this message to the Afrikan shores, the idea of human sacrifice wouldn’t have been anathema to some Afrikan societies. What would have been problematical to some would have been the eating of human flesh and drinking of human blood, albeit symbolically. To achieve this the missionaries and their backers of force first had to debase the Afrikan and his practices, which were equally symbolic attempts to reach the Unknown.

The Afrikan practices, in their noble motivations, are generally attempts to work on the mind so as to reconcile, thank or ask—effectively, no less different from what Joshua preached. It boggles my mind when a highly western-trained Afrikan shuns certain Afrikan practices just because he is “saved.” In a piece in a local weekly, the elders recognized that the Afrikan had a problem after many years abroad where he sought refuge because of his participation and failures that resulted in many deaths and sufferings. He was asked to do certain things, but he refused claiming his allegiance only to Jesus. The question I ask is: if the said Afrikan labels our practices as the works of heathens, should we label him a cannibal for his eating the body and drinking the blood of a Jew?