Reply #138: Jaysus! "The history of the land grab matters" ?? [View All]

"The history of the land grab matters"

That part is right enough.

"but now it's simplified to a question of the religion of both sides."

is the most brazen straying from logic I've yet heard! How many of these rock-headed hooligans, on either side of the issue, ever see the inside of a church building except for an occasional wedding or christening? There is no more "religion" involved in this than there are in the ghetto gangs of the US. The only difference is that in N.I. the colors are "green and orange" whereas in the 'hoods of the US they are the "red and black" and Bloods and Crypts.

Here in the States, where we took in the petty criminals and political malcontents who were "transported" from your British courts, we took most of those ancient settlers and packed them cheek-to-jowl with the kidnapped blacks from Africa, forcing them both into involuntary indentured servitude (slavery for the blacks) without even a broken promise (as we gave the blacks)of "forty acres and a mule".

And now the US has "race riots" and "race wars" in the United States, just as you have "sectarian violence" in N.I. So tell me, does this evolve from some natural antipathy between those captured African blacks and the dirty, ragged peasants who were banned from Eire, Scotland, Wales and Britain? Some fierce natural antagonism between these groups who had so many centuries of non-contact with each other?

Face it. The artificial divisions we see here in the States are no different than those you are trying to attribute to "religious differences" in Eire. The differences you see, and bemoan, are only tangentially connected to religion, and that done solely through the economics of it.

As Sean O'Casey said:

There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.