Boxing = Legalized Assault : Jack Johnson
By J. Grant Swank Jr. (02/06/06)
While watching PBS Home Video: "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson,'" I could not help but realize that what I have held to all my life is reality. It is that boxing is, as stated on that video, "legalized assaulting."
Therefore, as a Christian, I oppose what sometimes is called "prize fighting" — boxing.
This film directed by Ken Burns shows the raw raw raw side of boxing from its start when men fought bare handed, sometimes in remote fields so that lawmen could not find them.
At the start, several young boys would be blindfolded, put in a space to bat one another around until one was left standing. Circling them would be drunken men, screaming for a winner. Is that not barbarism?
Then there came along glove covered hands and boxing commissions. But not so at its naked start.
I have often wondered how any civilized brain could sit through a boxing match. Human seeks to lay low another human. It’s the beating up of the temple of the Holy Spirit. It’s punching at that made in the image of God.
Yet there are those who not only thirst to enter into the “sport” but mortals who sit and cheer and bet on this obscenity.
The human frame is meant to be cared for. It IS the zenith of creation, according to the opening chapters in Genesis. As religious people believe, the human body has been stamped with the “image of the divine.” In other words, what we have here on this Earth as casing for the human spirit is to be regarded as treasured — indeed holy before the eternal throne.
Then to throw that human shell into a circumstance by which it is beaten up, damaged, at times not only flung to the ground but hurt beyond repair, sometimes slain, is sinful. It is evil. It surely is not of heaven. It must then be of hell.
Yet there are countless church folk who go to “fights.” There are some into boxing who claim to be Christians. Yet all of that makes no sense when examining the Scriptures, reading particularly Saint Paul’s counsel in how spiritually and physically to care for the human body.
Further, Scriptures inform readers that the human wonder is housing for the Eternal Spirit. When one then punches, hits and seeks to lay low that which houses the Everlasting Presence, is not that sacrilege? Is not that an intentional plot to hurt that that should instead be revered with the most precious regard?
When I voice this opinion to many of my friends, some look at me as if I have lost my mind. Of course, that reaction is what I expect.
When a society baptizes even evil as legitimate, many are taken in by the societal acceptance. But that does not take away from the eternal verities of divine revelation.
Nor does it take away from the bald logic that persists in defending the fundamental reason that points to boxing as brutal. It’s “legalized assault.”
Copyright © 2006 by J. Grant Swank, Jr.
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