Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Nov 26, 2022 4:56 pm
It would challenge some aspects of that founding, but others would most certainly depend entirely on Christian values. For example, it's quite certain that general human rights proceed from Christian principles, and by way of the American experiment as well. That's why the UN declaration parrots the language of Locke, whose who rationale is entirely Christian.
As for "stolen land," that's debatable, too. Aboriginal life is pretty vicious, and involves slavery, tribal warfare, and plenty of bloodletting, in its own right. Aboriginals use territories, but their traditions has no conception of written contracts or even of land ownership. As an Aboriginal, you use the land where you are, use it up, and move on. So you can't "steal" what nobody has even claimed to "own."
But that the collision of cultures that led to Europeans coming into conflict with Aboriginals generally, how is that any better or worse than the tribal hatred between the Blackfoot tribe and the Cree, or between the Iroquois and the Hurons? These were wars of extermination, and included torture, scalpings, infanticides, rape, and every other sort of attrocity available to the primitive imagination. These are things that people do to each other; and to them, Christianity is the cure, and not the cause.
As you rightly point out, none of that has anything to do with Christian values.
First of all, I am trying to examine how
your belief-system functions. I see the Sermon on the Mount value-declarations as being impossible to implement, except (as I have said before) by a sole individual, perhaps in a relatively isolated community, where all agree to follow those rules.
Certainly a state, and the State, cannot be and will never be Christian in the sense you mean. The original colonies began on a note of conquest and usurpation. This was so in the northern hemisphere as in the southern hemisphere. These are basic facts. They cannot be skirted and they cannot be revisioned. They simply are.
I agree that a given colony, municipal community, or state can devise internal rules which you describe this as "general human rights proceed from Christian principles" and create generally 'just' conditions for those living within the confines of the system. But that has little or no effect on what was required to gain the space where that colony, community or state was established. It is simply an observation then, not a judgment, that there are arrays of non-Christian (and indefensible) actions that cannot be separated from the founding.
Since I understand that idealistic value-systems
produce hypocrisy when a larger conglomeration of people pretends to implement them, or to declare *these are our values*, I am forced to take a more realpolitik view. It is therefore just as I say: a person or perhaps a small community could practice Sermon on the Mount values, but no larger conglomeration of peoples could. What happens then? They can do little else but to become 'christianesque'. We have been over this before in depth.
It is not that I myself put weight on the 'stolen land' idea but rather that I notice that it is a functioning narrative. It functions within a group of observations about conquest, domination, slavery, subservience to powerful interests and groups. It seems to me to be a way of examining things that is deeply bound-up in Christian ideas. So the intensity of the critique against *America and all she is and represents* is, oddly, a restatement of core Christian categories. It is an extension of the desire to see oneself as mored in sin, as determined by needs & desires that always result in sinful outcomes, and then by that strange need to *repent* for all that one is, all that one does.
And as I say if you (the person Immanuel Can) really took your Christian critique to its limits, your statements would not be that much different from those of the intense 'progressive' or antifa-like views. How odd it seems to me that you seem to hypocritically refer to it (the absolute application of Christian ethics) but in relation to a State (the US as the largest and most powerful state enterprise the world has known) that has not and cannot even be a Christian actor in the sense you seem to imagine possible. It is, and I say this without judgment, and in relation to your proposed idealism, thoroughly anti-Christian.
Many people who lament that people have fallen away from Christian ethics locally and personally and decry general cultural corruption, who then advocate for a return to 'Christian roots' as they imagine a Christian nation as being even
possible, fail to grasp the issues related to world domination and the use of raw power. The nation itself cannot be Christian and a given person could become Christian, and live according to those values, only to the degree that they withdraw from the system itself. Divest themselves from it as it were. They would then join some smallish community and, to the best of their ability, try to live in accord with those values.
As for "stolen land," that's debatable, too. Aboriginal life is pretty vicious, and involves slavery, tribal warfare, and plenty of bloodletting, in its own right. Aboriginals use territories, but their traditions has no conception of written contracts or even of land ownership. As an Aboriginal, you use the land where you are, use it up, and move on. So you can't "steal" what nobody has even claimed to "own."
I suggest that the core of this (perverse) statement is to be found in OT values, such as they are. The 'nations' were seen as corrupted and declared by the ventriloquist Yahweh to be fair game for subversion and conquest. No respect need be offered to such heatherns and they can, then, be conquered and have the *higher truths* taught to them.
However, strict and straight conquest, as a sheer act of power and power alone, often does not need to resort to such gymnastics. It simply acts and annihilates those who oppose its imposition. Sometimes I think the more *honest* approach is better.
