Who has the authority to determine what should be the criterion of
membership in the community?
Who has the authority to determine what should be the criterion of membership in the community? Again, what should be the criterion of determining the ‘criterion of membership’ in the community? We (hence it is ‘we’ who determine, but who are ‘we’ or what authority ‘we’ have got to determine the ‘criterion of membership’ in the community? Is it not our ‘implicit supposed purity’ that permits ‘us’ to include ‘them’ in the community? Hence ‘we’ have already made a distinction between we and them which is not injustice?) can exclude the plants and the animals accepting the common view that they don’t have rational and voluntary (intentional) capacity, and we can determine that only the human beings can be members of the knanaya community if one wishes or desires to be its member (even if this decision is arbitrary which I may call homocrazia (authority –arbitral- of the humans).
The concept of purity may be the premise of someone, but not mine. By this I don't neither negate nor affirm purity in our community, be clear. if you criticise me for a word that i have used only once in a long letter, and the more, in a hypothetical sentence where the term is put between the inverted commas, i have the impression that you have understood very little of what i wanted to say. As an author I take my responsibility in my inability to transmit the notion to the reader!
"So, if a community's sole identity rests on unsubstantiated and unproven claims centered on unassailable "purity" notions, isn't this very premise a fault-line?" i do really agree with you in this. but if it is used as a criticism against the knanaya community, i have to say that either you have not understood the identity of the community, or you deceive the persons by giving a wrong notion of the identity of the knanaya community. if you are interested, you can give a glance at this article, to see the identity of the knanaya community how it is perceived by me.
"but if your deception should hurt a single member of this group with your call to "get out of the community","in this phrase, when you left out a single word it has changed all its sense which i think is called deception. I have used instead, "can get out of the community" where can is important. The auxiliary verb can may denote either a possibility or a plea and not a command. Instead the verb 'to get out' can be made to make the imperative form 'get out' that i have not used. if someone omit certain parts intentionally to alter the meaning of a phrase (i think that you have not done it intentionally!), i call it deception.
if there exists terms like, "race, ethnicity, faith, skin color, shape of the nose etc", they are not created by me or by the community. They do exist, just because they are different realities, otherwise, they would be called with the same name. the distinct existence of a thing or reality is not a crime or sin. there exist various races, faiths, ethnicity, etc, and if i negate such existence, i will be the greatest fool in the world. the differences may come from their origin, their substance and their mode of existence. i don't think that i have to eliminate all these differences to eliminate the so-called "racism" which is used against the knanites from many angles, even if i don't know what does it mean. i don't think that i should melt everything inorder to create one reality( even if it will be the 'the Purity' to which you mentioned), to create a better world. the problem arises when i discirminate one for the other.
i don't have the pretext that i know everything (like "we know what is endogamy"). i have not said that endogamy is not a perfect system, neither what endogamy is. i have pointed only to some of the reasons to maintain the endogamy in our community. i have expressed only my opinion which are my convictions based on the studies, experience and my thinking that may change tomorrow with higher studies, experience and thinking.
Fr. Byju Mukalel
Florence
Knanaya Family
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