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Re: Thoughts about Independence    By bonwillow on 7/4/2006 9:03 PM (For those of you who wondered, I changed the format of my blog slightly, thus needing to re-post this article a few hours after first posting it.) What does Independence mean to you? What does this day mean to you?

Re: Thoughts about Independence    By Peter Beacham on 7/23/2006 6:20 PM You claim that ‘this country was created by floods of refugees from religious oppression.” That concept is totally erroneous. You also state, “Often I see that my ideas are not really mine.... I've swallowed someone else's beliefs without thinking them through.  Your notion that the U.S. was founded by those fleeing religious oppression is one of those concepts that are not really yours. It is a concept that has trickled into your brain by indoctrination from a wide variety of sources. Starting with the Mayflower, the U.S. was founded on a quest for money, elitism, a desire to pursue sensual pleasures free from the moral/ethical systems of the majority regardless of whether those systems were embodied in a state or a relgion. The U.S. was not founded on the notion of escaping religious persecution but on escaping public scrutiny of unworthy objectives. The Protestant Reformation arose out of a challenge to religion by self indulgent atheists driven by ego and a reliance on the information of the senses. The two main groups were the Humanists of the Italian Renaissance and the Nominalists who rejected anythin that they couldn’t see (sounds a little like the neanderthal, self-absorbed ‘Show Me’ motto of Missouri.) The poster-boy of the Protestant Reformation was Martin Luther, a failed and libinous monk who wanted to get away from the constrictions that society and his religion placed on his licentious propensities. Luther used the excesses of some of the clergy as an excuse to found his own religion wherein he would be free to pursue his own excesses. This idea of camouflaging one’s ego-aggrandizing and sensual motives by starting a new religion or country by claiming opposition to similar excesses of the few of some other religion or country soon found a ready acceptance by all those who lacked discipline, faith and insight. The Puritans were just one more in a long line of groups whose members were short-sighted, self-seeking, and sensually oriented and who merely banded together for common support just as the members of a fetish club get together to celebrate each other’s kinkiness or as NRA members get together to justify their racism or as a few libinous men in Utah want to justify their appetites under the cover of plural marriage. The Pilgrims were also known as Separatist Puritans because they wanted not only to separate from the Church of England, itself a Protestant Church, but also from other groups who did see things their way. These Pilgrims who boarded the Mayflower in 1620 believed the only true church was a willing association of people who believed alike. When such a group organized a church they drew up a church covenant or compact, which they signed, and elected their own pastor. The pastor’s credentials didn’t have anything to do his state of spiritual enlightenment or biblical knowledge but rather consisted of assenting to whatever weird and wonderful fantasies were common to the group and to being the manager. He was essentially a sop to conscience and got paid for telling the rest of the group that what they were doing was okay. They wanted to be let alone because their beliefs couldn’t stand the light of day (and still can’t). Oh, yes the voyage of the Mayfair was financed not out of religious conviction by a bunch of English merchants who hoped to profit by trading in the New World. Just months after the landing at Plymouth there was another landing at Jamestown to pursue new land and business opportunities. In 1631, William Claibourne became the first white settler to set-up a trading outpost by buying an island in the Chesapeake Bay from the local inhabitants for 12 pounds sterling thus setting the precedent of privatizing public land in North America. So much for religious freedom. The settling of the U.S. was founded on greed and ego, there were no redeeming altruistic or spiritual components in that mix. It is claimed, also erroneously, that the Pilgrims introduced a rudimentary democracy when they signed the Mayflower Compact, an agreement to form a "civil body politic". This agreement was signed because a schism threatened to develop between the Pilgrims and the non-Pilgrims on the Mayflower. Once again, the schism was due to the over-heated egos of the Pilgrims. This group of Pilgrims wanted to do what they wanted to do without regard to the views of others or to the terms of their original land grant. A minority group of individuals wanted to be free to land where they wanted to regardless of whether that area was outside of their land grant. Again, an exercise in self-justification with no higher redeeming qualities. Of the 102 on board the Mayflower, only 41 signed the Compact and of those, none were women and only three were non-Pilgrims, so the compact was merely an extension of the Pilgrims’ self-serving church contracts where they agreed to agree with one another and ignored the rest of the world. The compact was merely a willing association of a minority people who believed alike. So the U.S. was not founded on religious freedom. It was not founded on democratic freedom. It was founded on economic and sensual desire period and nothing had changed by the war of 1812 when the Governor of Canada referred to the Americans trading in Montreal as ‘licentious fanaticks’ and nothing has changed to this day - not the elitism, not the quest for money, not the sensual desires, and not the desire to escape moral and ethical scrutiny. The main problem with the U.S. is that it has from its very beginnings confused license with independence.

Re: Thoughts about Independence    By Bonnie Willow on 7/27/2006 4:35 AM Wow, you have a very detailed and unique insight into the history of the founding of the U.S. I don't know enough about those specific facts you cite, to conduct a reasonable conversation with you on those points. Thanks for sharing your views, though. I suspect others might be able to carry on a livelier debate on this subject. I'm not expert at US history, sadly. My post was focused more on my own personal definition of independence and its place in my life. I am curious about your dislike of the sensual leanings of these various historical figures. (my perception; I could have misinterpreted your meaning) Are you of the belief that it's in our highest good to transcend desires of the flesh? Or are you rather expressing dislike of your perception of their impure moral / ethical motives? Although I spend decades of my adult life in the belief that it was imperative to transcend all appetites of the flesh, I have changed my mind to some degree. I am now more inclined to believe that we have these desires because they are part of the human package, and that they can be used either to ground and expand our spiritual experiences OR to dissipate our energies and divert our focus from our purpose. This is a heckuva big subject, so this comment only reflects a small facet of my views on that issue. Does anybody else out there care to chime in on any aspect of this discussion?

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