A Christian Nation? Have any of you done any research into the

Plymouth Colony, its founding and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Where were these people from and why did they come to the New World? What was their goals as to forming a government?

The website I found is The Quaqua Society - FINANCIAL AND CAREER ASSISTANCE FOR HOME EDUCATORS

The article is on the Massachusetts Bay Colony

http://www.quaqua.org/pilgrim.htm


I think that this peek at the past might give us a vision of what we may face if the right wing conservatives get their way in making the USA a Christian Nation.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
This famous statement has produced many paraphrases and variants:
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.
Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.

George Santayana (16 December 1863 in Madrid, Spain – 26 September 1952 in Rome, Italy), was a philosopher, essayist poet and novelist.



A few bits from the article on the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, were a small religious group that was part of a larger Puritan movement (the Puritans preferred to describe themselves as "the godly," not as the "Puritans"). The Puritan movement denoted a loose collection of religious beliefs, not a particular denominational sect. Puritans believed that all institutions, including government, schools, families, communities, and the Church of England, should be "purified" by cleansing away all cultural characteristics regarded by the Puritans as ungodly.

After the Pilgrim Puritans encountered religious persecution in England, they fled to Holland. Subsequently the Pilgrims sailed to what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. From about 1630 onward, other Puritans organized the much larger Massachusetts Bay Colony under the auspices of the Massachusetts Bay Company. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was located where Boston now stands, and along with Plymouth formed the first two colonies of Massachusetts.

snip

In their new home, the Puritans implemented many of the same onerous legal restrictions upon religious liberty that had vexed them while living in England. For example, John Cotton, a leading Massachusetts cleric, implemented a law that no man could vote unless he was both a Puritan church member and a property owner (non-Puritans were dispossessed of their private property). Additionally, all colonists were legally required to attend austere Puritan church services. If the Church Warden caught any person truant from church services without illness or permissible excuse, the truant was pilloried and the truant's ear was nailed to the wood. This approach was widespread and long-lasting in Puritan society. The Plymouth court of 1752 convicted defendant Joseph Boardman of "unnecessary absence from worship" and "not frequenting the publick worship of God." In short, Puritan salvation was to be achieved through compulsory social engineering of the community, rather than voluntary individual piety.

The Puritans implemented a form of Platonic Christian Socialism, which was based upon an ideological synthesis of such influences as 1) Plato’s Republic, 2) a utopian interpretation of the New Testament (especially Acts 2:44-46), 3) a joint-stock agreement between colonial shareholders and the London-based John Peirce & Associates company, 4) a Continental European cultural attitude toward education (acquired during Pilgrim settlement in Holland), and 5) especially close economic and cultural bonds between Boston's elite and the ruling class of England. During their first three years in the New World, the Puritans abolished private property and declared all land and produce to be owned in common (a commonwealth).



< Don't anyone tell Beck about the Platonic Christian socialism. On second thought...we should send him this article...We can sell tickets to watch is head explode. >


In Plymouth over half the colonists promptly died from starvation. Governor William Bradford observed that the collectivist approach "was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort." He lamented the "vanity of that conceit of Plato's . . . that the taking away of property and bringing community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God." Governor Bradford implemented private ownership of property, but Platonic Christianity continued to dominate other aspects of regional social policy.

For his part, John Winthrop delivered a famous speech in 1630 that articulated the prevailing contemporary Bay Colony ethic of social collectivism:


e must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly Affection, we must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities for the supply of others' necessities, we must uphold a familiar Commerce together . . . make others' Conditions our own, . . . always having before our eyes our . . . Community in the work, our Community as members of the same body<.> . . . e shall find that . . . when shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the Lord make it like that of New England: for we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill.


Winthrop's words were not mere inspirational rhetoric. Each statement reflected an expansive element of social policy, pressed to its logical end and enforced by the Puritans with deadly seriousness.

The leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony openly espoused rule by the elite. "If we should change from a mixed aristocracy to mere democracy," Winthrop once explained, "we should have no warrant in scripture for it: for there was no such government in Israel . . . A democracy is, amongst civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government." John Cotton wrote: “I do not conceive that ever God did ordeyne as a fit government eyther for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors who shall be governed?"

Despite utopian aspirations, the Massachusetts colonies were quickly beset with political and religious division. Internally, the Puritans persecuted and even tortured non-conforming Christians. In Boston Common, dissenters were hung or buried alive. In 1636, Roger Williams, who became a Baptist, was banished in the dead of winter and led some religious dissidents away to found Rhode Island. The same year, Thomas Hooker, another preacher at odds with the Bay Puritans, founded Connecticut with a separate breakaway group.

Native American tribes, some of whom were suffering from the onslaught of European diseases, also developed a hostile, violent, and deeply distrustful relationship with the Puritans. The Puritans abducted some of the Native Americans to ship to England. In 1633 a law was passed to require that Native Americans would only receive "allotments" and "plantations" if they "civilized" themselves by becoming Puritans and accepting English customs of agriculture and living:

For the settling the Indian title to lands in this jurisdiction is declared and ordered by this Court and authority thereof, that all the lands any of the Indians have in this jurisdiction have improved by subduing the same, they have a just right unto, according to that in Gen. I, 28, and Chapter IX, I, and Psalms CXV and 16, and for the civilizing and helping them forward to Christianity, if any of the Indians shall be brought to civility and shall come among the English and shall inhabit their plantations and shall there live civilly and orderly, that such Indians shall have allotments among the English, according to the custom of the English in like cases.


Laws of Massachusetts, Edition of 1672, at 74. Unfortunately, this Puritan legal concept later inspired Captain Richard Henry Pratt to instigate a devasting nationwide ethnic cleansing program against Native Americans from 1874-1904, which was designed to civilize the tribes and remove them from their lands. Richard Henry Pratt, Battlefield & Classroom 272 (Ed. Robert M. Utley 1964). Pratt forced Native Americans all over the United States to attend and participate in Christian church services in the Massachusetts tradition. Id. at 158-59, 163-64, 181. Pratt's ethnic cleansing movement would rely heavily upon Puritans in New England and New York for essential funding, logistical support, and political endorsement. Id. at 194-95, 197, 200, 202, 214-15, 221, 231, 237, 252, 283, 285.See also Removing Classrooms from the Battlefield: Liberty, Paternalism, and the Redemptive Promise of Educational Choice, 2008 BYU Law Review 377 (full text here and here).



Food for thought...I wonder if those Fundies in Texas are going to include this in their new Text Books?

"book depository" that will serve the needs of those who want textbooks that say it like it really was.....

That's why those first three words of the Constitution, written real big, are "God hath ordained." Wait, no; they say "We the People." How very odd.

the republicans get their zest for torture. And of course their family values.

Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782


But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782


Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787


I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Richard Price, Jan. 8, 1789 (Richard Price had written to TJ on Oct. 26. about the harm done by religion and wrote "Would not Society be better without Such religions? Is Atheism less pernicious than Demonism?")


more at:

http://www.nobeliefs.com/jefferson.htm


"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-Thomas Jefferson (Notes on Virginia, 1782)

a somewhat lighthearted look at the devolution of the situation among the three rival religious colonies. It's clear enough that the Puritan way was unpopular among many of the colonists themselves.