Tema: Spain's Black Legend

Iniciado por Rodrigo

Well, according to my dictionary: Deism /ˈdeɪɪz(ə)m, ˈdiːɪ-/ ▶Noun. Belief in the existence of a supreme being, specifically of a creator who does not intervene in the universe. Does that really match Christian teachings?

Not orthodox teachings.

I don't care wether the instigators were southern US people or northern US people. Anglosaxon immigrants had been generously welcome in Texas (Mexico), a country that didn't belong to them, and they rose up against the legitimate owners of that region. Their fellow anglosaxon brothers of the U.S. could just have helped them secede from Mexico, but taking along also California and New Mexico sounded better.

You ought to since most of the Anglo immigrants into Tejas et al. were southrons.

What exactly was the problem in the U.S.? The US-Spanish war broke out 20 years after the war between Spain and the Cuban separatists was over anyway. Moreover, meddling in a foreign country's internal politics in order to obtain benefits and colonies is also imperialism. I hope you don't believe Spain sank the USS Maine, do you?

From what I recall the official and unofficial conducted by by the States and Spain couldn' determine the proper reason as to why the Maine went under.

One of the popular conspiracy theories call it a false flag attack undertaken by the U.S. to provoke a war with Spain over Cuba. As I've said the Congressional Democrats (southrons) were looking for a long time to absorb Cuba and other Spanish possessions in the region.

I'm not saying they had, because it would have been impossible for them. But Cromwell was a predecessor of those same anti-royalist, anti-catholic, republican ideas and you know what he did.

Cromwell was a gunpowder tyrant who had the king executed, hardly a role-model.

But I also think it's hard to be a good north american patriot and a traditional catholic.

Yes, because truly patriotic Americans reject such antiquated (as I see them) societal notions as excessive religiosity, feudalism, monarchism, papism/clericalism, etc. and are able to balance a belief in God with secular and political ideals.

"Every man, conducting himself as a good citizen, and being accountable to God alone for his religious opinions, ought to be protected in worshiping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience," George Washington, Letter, United Baptist Chamber of Virginia May 1789.

I'm not speaking flippantly; I was born, baptised, and confirmed into Wesleyanism (Methodism) and was a fairly pious Protestant up till about age 20. I dabbled in Catholicism for a bit, in addition to other creeds, but ultimately rejected it all. Why? A number of reasons: quislings at the pulpit and in the pews, a growing awareness of comparative religion, a changing opinion of Jesus, a changing view of God, etc.

Now, what does this mean? In my case, not a great deal, but within a national context:

From the point of view of human history, the way in which the Thirteen States became independent is of far less importance than the fact that they did become independent. And with the establishment of their independence came a new sort of community into the world. It was like something coming out of an egg. It was a western European civilization that had broken free from the last traces of Empire and Christendom; it had not a vestige of monarchy left and no state religion. It had no dukes, princes, counts, nor any sort of title-bearers claiming to ascendancy or respect as a right. Even its unity was as yet a mere unity for defence and freedom. It was in these respects such a clean start in political organization as the world had not seen before. The absence of any binding religious tie is especially noteworthy. It had a number of forms of Christianity, its spirit was indubitably Christian; but as a state document of 1791 explicitly declared, "The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion." The new community had in fact gone right down to the bare and stripped fundamentals of human association, and it was building up a new sort of society and a new sort of state upon those foundations.

H.G. Wells, The Outline of History.

Or a portion thereof. Once I began to undertake a study of secular American law and the Constitution... this was one of the main reasons why my view of things began to change. You're right, a traditional Catholic wouldn't make a good American patriot (and a good American patriot isn't a flag-waving Southern Baptist evangelical). The loyalties of the traditional Catholic are at odds with the loyalties of a patriotic American: Christ and the saints, the Madonna, the Pope, etc. in once sense and the Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc. in the other. I'd be extremely hard to harmonize the two, as the Catholic accepts things such as papal infallibility, divine inspiration of holy writ, etc. and the American, while believing in God in some way or another (as a deist, Catholic/Christian, religious seeker, and so on), has a natural mistrust and skepticism of such things. No, I don't mean atheism, which is a particularly noxious creed (atheists are one of the more despised minorities here), but that America's views of God, etc. are inseparable from our political and secular values. Catholicism can exist in America of course, but it'd be an exhausting struggle to prove that Catholicism can exist here precisely due to the secular values that many traditional Catholics seem to abhor (i.e. what seems to be called liberalism; liberalism in the U.S. has a different meaning than it does in Europe). The phenomenal growth of Catholicism in the U.S. owes itself to religious toleration on the one hand and a unified, organized doctrinal body on the other (as compared to the literal hundreds and thousands of non-Catholic denominations that proliferate around the land, which is like a parade of fools imo; Catholicism is at least consistent in what it teaches).

Liberty, justice: you seem to think that the Founders had the same political orientation as today's multiculturalists when they say the same words; nothing could be further from the truth. These dogs are political imposters who, to quote a bit of Paine out of context, taken the axe of universal democracy to the roots of American republicanism.