[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 16:44 -0400, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> Richard writes...
> 
> >the people who
> > do not share the vision of America as the new Jerusalem, the land from
> > which the good news of the coming Kingdom of God (and Wal-Mart) will
> > spread like a light to every nation on earth. This sort of rhetoric
> > could already be found in the writings of the first pilgrims before
> > their stockings got dry from the trans-Atlantic voyage.
> 
> ...echoing a similar capitulation to the current revisionistic version of
> American history touted by the religious right reiterated last Sunday in the
> lead article in the New York Times Magazine. 

Actually, my source for this was Sidney Ahlstrom's <i>A Religious
History of the American People,</i> considered by many the definitive
work on the topic. Ahlstrom chronicles a movement of Christians in
England who saw England as the land from which the light of the gospels
would spread to all nations. When they moved to the Americas, they saw
the new world as the New Jerusalem. This is pretty well attested. The
religious right of our times, of course, has rediscovered that
enthusiasm of the early Puritans and exploited it for their own
purposes. 

> By the time representatives of the
> colonies convened to hash out a Constitution, the de facto reality on the
> ground was that numerous religious groups had claimed wide swatches of
> territory for their own religion, and were loathe to share that with
> alternate religious persuasions.

That is not quite the case. Many of the swatches of land were de jure
territories, but not de facto at all. A case in point was Pennsylvania,
a land given by the British crown to Penn, the pacifist son of the
admiral who conquered Jamaica. Penn by that time had become a Quaker.
The Quakers were not welcome in many places in the Americas. Some states
had laws advocating the death penalty for anyone who knowingly
associated with or did business with Quakers, and there were a number of
public executions in Boston in which Quaker women were whipped and then
hanged in the public squares. Pennsylvania Quakers tended to be pretty
tolerant of others, as a result of which Pennsylvania was rapidly
populated by folks who were not tolerated elsewhere in the colonies.
Famously Pennsylvania became the home of many German pietists and
anabaptists, such as the followers of Menno Simons and Jakob Hutter.

> The Buddhist response to revisionistic disinformation should be accurate
> recounting of the events themselves -- their causes and conditions, clearly
> explaining WHY the first amendment states what it states, and why it only
> works when one retains both sides of the equation.

This is no doubt excellent advice, but I can't help wondering what
prompted you to feel a need to give us all this little lesson in history
and the evolution of the constitution. Did you feel you were telling us
something we didn't already know? Or were you writing this for the
benefit of the multitudes of religious right Republicans who hang on
every word we write here on buddha-l and model their lives on our sage
advice? 

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico