-Caveat Lector-
----- Original Message -----
From: day <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > The Balkanization of America
<...>
> > There it is. There is the glue that made us The United States of
> > America. Our Christian faith and heritage is the cement that united
> > people of different ethnicity and culture. Past immigrants assimilated
> > themselves into a common American culture. Our grandparents were free
> > to worship God in their own way but they understood that faith in God
> > and the Christian value system were at the heart of this country's
> > existence. All that is lost to us today. There is no Christian culture
> > in the mainstream of American society today. The departure of our
> > common heritage is turning our nation into the western Balkans.
And here we have it: The Big Lie. "Murka wuz a xian cuntry but now
all the spiks'n'spooks'n'raggys'n'qweerz are tearing out our gutz."
[Slightly paraphrased] A lightly-disguised call for a State Church,'
which of course is unconstitutional; so if the author of the above
ever took an oath to Protect and Defend the US Constitution, that
oath was shredded with the expression of that sentiment.
The Big Lie. And the truth? America has never been a 'christian'
nation. Pre-independence, the British North American colonies were
primarily Protestant - but not monolithically. Scads of competing
sects, all denouncing each other, purging themselves of dissenters,
provoked fierce conflict between High-Churchers & Low-Churchers &
Non-Conformists. The Founders were a loose collection of theists,
deists and atheists. Around the time of the US Civil War, increasing
numbers of Catholics immigrated - and were often portrayed by their
Prod brethren as pagan, polytheistic, even subhuman [see the images
of the Irish as apes in newspaper cartoons of the day.] Pre-TV,
there was no "common American culture" - the various regions kept
distinct dialects, values, politics, preferences. Even now, with
the nation wired up the yazoo, commonality of culture exists mainly
in shopping malls and cinemaplexes - see THE NINE NATIONS OF NORTH
AMERICA for an explication of the diversity.
What's the main factor common to most Americans? FLIGHT! We or our
ancestors fled from somewhere, 'escaping' from the draft, bad debts,
bad marriages, bad weather, bad faith, bad something-or-other. And
of course many were brought here involuntarily, and have/had nowhere
to return. So we're looking over our shoulders at a grim past. THAT
is what binds us together - not an agreement as to the number, nature
and intentions of whatever deities we can imagine.
The Big Lie. It's the shout of conspirators, demagogues, power-heads.
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