Religion
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Last edited Mon Nov 24, 2014, 11:19 AM - Edit history (1)
Interesting site.
http://espressostalinist.com/genocide/native-american-genocide/
The Europeans saw themselves as the superior culture bringing civilization to an inferior culture. The colonial world view split reality into popular parts: good and evil, body and spirit, man and nature, head and hear, European and primitive. American Indians spirituality lacks these dualisms; language expresses the oneness of all things. God is not the transcendent Father but the Mother Earth, the Corn Mother, the Great Spirit who nourishes all It is polytheistic, believing in many gods and many levels of deity. At the basis of most American Native beliefs is the supernatural was a profound conviction that an invisible force, a powerful spirit, permeated the entire universe and ordered the cycles of birth and death for all living things. Beyond this belief in a universal spirit, most American Indians attached supernatural qualities to animals, heavenly bodies, the seasons, dead ancestors, the elements, and geologic formations. Their world was infused with the divine The Sacred Hoop. This was not at all a personal being presiding ominpotently over the salvation or damnation of individual people as the Europeans believed.
For the Europeans such beliefs were pagan. Thus, the conquest was rationalized as a necessary evil that would bestow upon the heathen Indians a moral consciousness that would redeem their amorality. The world view which converted bare economic self interest into noble, even moral, motives was a notion of Christianity as the one redemptive religion which demands fealty from all cultures. In this remaking of the American Indians the impetus which drove the conquistadors invading wars not exploration, but the drive to expand an empire, not discovery of new land, but the drive to accumulate treasure, land and cheap labor.
okasha
(11,573 posts)what these commies are talking about.
Re-read the last two sentences till you get it
Or not.
Cartoonist
(7,309 posts)between Christianity and the genocide. Take off your blinders.
Cartoonist
(7,309 posts)Thus, the conquest was rationalized as a necessary evil that would bestow upon the heathen Indians a moral consciousness that would redeem their amorality.
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I acknowledge the land grab. Why do you fail to see the religious connection? The last two sentences are just two sentences from the whole site. It sounds like you are cherry picking the content and ignoring the rest. The land grab was easy, because Jesus made it so.
rug
(82,333 posts)cbayer
(146,218 posts)rug
(82,333 posts)Why didn't they teach us this in school?
And why the hell didn't we learn about Enver Hoxha?
cbayer
(146,218 posts)What kind of school was that?
You need to request a refund.
okasha
(11,573 posts)we did in sixth grade.
And I know that Angelina Jolie did an Albanian accent in Alexander.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)the genocide of north america's indigenous peoples was entirely due to religion.
I dare you to disagree with that statement. Being only in kindergarten, I know you do not have the needed cognitive and reasoning skills to broach any kind of challenge.
Prophet 451
(9,796 posts)Would you like to discuss the history? Because I think most well-read people are aware of the genocide of teh Native Americans.
Cartoonist
(7,309 posts)Or at least they don't think Christianity played a role in it.
If you have no interest in my posts, then ignore them. You aren't required to comment.
edhopper
(33,467 posts)The last graph looks like a sound assesment of the treatment of Native Americans.
Scholarly opinion, but a valid one.
Cartoonist
(7,309 posts)I am trying to educate myself. I agree with the contents. I included a sarcastic comment in response to an insult I recieved from someone who should know better but doesn't.
okasha
(11,573 posts)when you recognize your own cultural imperialism. You've got one bad case of White Man's Burden going there, Toons.
I suppose I should be astounded at the arrogance of some white guy trying to "educate" this poor dumb NDN about the history her family lived through. I've seen too much of it to be shocked any more, though.
TexasProgresive
(12,154 posts)No response, Cartoonist, to okasha?
Cartoonist
(7,309 posts)Okasha speaks for herself. I don't know why she absolves Christianity for what happened here in the new world. As she says, there is nothing I can teach her. There is nothing Vine Deloria, Jr. can teach her either.
When trying to understand the world, there are good teachers and bad. Should I listen to Martin Luther King, Jr., or Herman Cain and Ben Carson? Should I listen to okasha or Vine Deloria, Jr,? I think I'm going to go with Deloria on this one.
side issues and not about the article per se.
got it.
Cartoonist
(7,309 posts)My point in posting this article was to corroborate a contention I have that Christianity bears some responsibility for the genocide that happened here in America. I have also posted two other articles, one of them by a Native American. Perhaps I should have included them all in one mega post. Excuse me for making things inconvenient.
I certainly would be interested in discussing the culpability of Christianity in genocide, as it is one of my arguments against religion as a whole. How do you feel about that? Am I all wet, or is there some validity to my contention? Obviously, there is endless debate over the question of God's existence, and it leads to lively debate. What confuses me, is the absolving of Christianity's role by a member of the people who were victims of this genocide.
SamKnause
(13,087 posts)Thanks for posting.
Cartoonist
(7,309 posts)I like the graphics. I was going to include them. I am glad you discovered them by visiting the site.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)I am a working class, self-taught, unrepentant Marxist-Leninist; a writer turned activist and political scientist, lover of coffee. I uphold the non-revisionist line of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin. My fields of study are Marxist criticism and political science.
Check out the US Imperialism page.
okasha
(11,573 posts)about my response.
I have not denied that Christianity "played a role" in Native genocide. That's your own invention. If you read your own posts, you with see that the authors cite religion not as a primary cause of the genocide but as a "rationalization" and "justification.". I.e., an attempt to make atrocity palatable.
The root causes of the American holocaust were economic and political--greed for land and resources, and the doctrine of manifest destiny. Imperialism, in a word. You characterize these causes as a "land grab" and brush them aside.
Wrong. Your facts and your reasoning are both deficient here.
I realize that you or one of your clique will probably alert on this. I don't care.
You decry the role of religion in the Native genocide, but you're just one more white missionary. Your attempt to force an alien paradigm onto Native history is pure cultural imperialism. Your stance is arrogant, ignorant , and deeply racist at its core.
Cartoonist
(7,309 posts)Thank you, that's all I wanted to hear. The rest of your post is BS. I get the same BS from Christian apologists all the time. You're no different.
I don't think anyone will alert on this. Its just religious apologia, and that's protected by religious privilege. Discussion over.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)I wish the discussion were over, but I suspect you will continue to kick this until it dies.
Leontius
(2,270 posts)some of the damage done by the expansion of the US into tribal lands. Did they help or did they just do damage to native culture in another way?
Cartoonist
(7,309 posts)I think okasha referred to this as the white man's burden.
okasha
(11,573 posts)Many of the early defenders of Native Americans were Christian, eg. de las Casas and Sahagun in Latin America; Roger Williams, William Penn and the Georgia Baptists in North America. In many places where the missionaries were sympathetic, Christianity and Native religion blended, and you see that continuing today.
Where the missionaries simply attempted to impose Christianity, there were abuses, such as the boarding schools. In other places--a Navaho friend tells me that quite an astonishing number of dogmatic priests and ministers perished in accidental falls while strollling along the mesa tops at night.....
cbayer
(146,218 posts)We received an amazingly biased version of US history. I didn't know that at the time, only in retrospect.
When I moved to the SW, New Mexico, I was shocked to discover that there was an entirely separate history about that region.
I had learned that the US was settled in New England by the English and then spread westward until it was all completed.
I knew virtually nothing about the Spanish side of this whole story.
What was most remarkable to me was how the indigenous Mexicans so successfully pushed back against the white, catholic invading class.
The religious history of that region is fascinating, as you know.
The missionaries were certainly not kind to the indigenous people and the stories of what happened on the tops of those mesas are probably true. They were up there for a very good reason. They were scared out of their wits.
But the spanish and the indigenous and the gringo populations reached "understandings" that I haven't seen elsewhere in this country.
Do I have that right or is it wrong?
okasha
(11,573 posts)Because I went to Catholic girls' schools, I was introduced very early to both Spanish and French colonization in the Americas as well as the Puritans, Plymouth Rock, etc. It will no doubt seem strange to some reading this, but that's also where I learned that Cortez was a sadistic bastard and that Cuauhtemoc was a great hero. Same with Benito Juarez, the first indio to be elected President of Mexico, even though his government confiscated Church lands and imposed severe restrictions on clergy.
That same tendency to mesh cultures extends into areas that were once Spanish, then Mexican, lands. Perhaps it came about.because here the Anglos
Response to cbayer (Reply #28)
okasha This message was self-deleted by its author.
struggle4progress
(118,212 posts)Cartoonist
(7,309 posts)From Now That the Buffalo's Gone
But even when Germany fell to your hands
Consider dear lady, consider dear man
You left them their pride and you left them their land
struggle4progress
(118,212 posts)how to hate; and the big wheels turn around and around"
struggle4progress
(118,212 posts)"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions"
struggle4progress
(118,212 posts)struggle4progress
(118,212 posts)The bread that you withhold belongs to the hungry; the coat, that you keep locked in your storage-chest, belongs to the naked; the footwear rotting in your closet belongs to the barefoot. The silver that you keep hidden in a safe place belongs to everyone in need. However many there are whom you could have helped, that many you have wronged
struggle4progress
(118,212 posts)... From miles around unto Blackheath, the people made their way
And John the priest of Colchester these words to them did say,
"When Adam toiled to win his bread and Mother Eve she spun
All folk were equal, one and all, and masters there were none" ...
struggle4progress
(118,212 posts)struggle4progress
(118,212 posts)... In May 1520, Müntzer became a pastor in Zwickau in Saxony ... In August 1524, Müntzer became one of the leaders of the uprising later known as the German Peasants' War ... Under torture he confessed that he believed that omnia sunt communia, all things are in common. His head and body were displayed as a warning to all those who might again preach treasonous doctrines ...
struggle4progress
(118,212 posts)"Give your money to the poor"
So they laid Jesus Christ in His grave ...