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Right Wing Whitewashing

What is the most serious threat facing our civilization?

According to an interview at The Daily Ablution, author Michael Crichton says: “Loss of classical liberal values in those western societies that embraced them.”

Right Wing News agrees. Sort of. See if you can spot which word is deftly omitted in Right Wing’s echo of Crichton: “I’m with Crichton. The loss of classical Western values is the most serious threat to our country.”

Whitewashing American History

Right Wing News continues:

We didn’t become the greatest nation the world had ever seen by accident, it happened because of our culture and because of the things previous generations of Americans did to make this into a great nation.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Part of our culture, and the handiwork of those previous generations, included cheap slave labor, the Trail of Tears, and a war with Spain over the misdiagnosed sinking of the USS Maine. The Spanish-American war alone netted the U.S. control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Hawaiian Islands.

Whitewashing Traditional Colonial Family Structure

Right Wing News also mentions family structure:

The more kids, percentage wise, who grow up outside of the traditional family structure, the more this country will decline. …[the] more kids who live in two parent families…the stronger this country will become.

Again, let’s not kid ourselves about the past. What were “traditional” families like when this country was founded? We have this from Digital History:

As early as the age of six or seven, many children were fostered outside their parental home, to work as servants or apprentices or to attend school. Short life expectancies meant that stepmothers and stepfathers and orphans were common. Language underscores the prevalence of multiple mothering figures. A midwife was sometimes referred to as a “good mother,” while older sisters were sometimes called “little mothers,” and the slave women who nursed white children were called mammies. Many men and women who bore no children participated in rearing young people. Social customs encouraged various forms of child-sharing, from indenture and apprenticeship to fosterage and informal adoption.

Lots of dead mothers due to childbirth, lots of stepparents, orphans, adopted kids…not exactly the Donna Reed show, is it?

Whitewashing the Founding Religion

The Right Wing News article ends with this:

This country was built — for the most part — by ambitious, Christian individualists who loved their country and — for the most part — those are still the people making this country work. As long as they’re still around in great numbers, we’ll continue to find a way to make it work no matter what the world throws at us.

Wait, wait, wait…hold on a second. Saying the Founding Fathers were all Christians is too generic and misleading. Asking what type of Christianity the Founding Fathers followed is more relevant, because the Christianity of the Founding Fathers wasn’t what most think of as Christianity today.

John Adams was a Unitarian and flatly denied the doctrine of eternal punishment. He believed all would eventually enter heaven. Most Unitarians reject the Trinity and accept all religions as valid faiths.

Benjamin Franklin described himself as a thorough Deist. Deists do believe in a good eternal God, but reject any sort of personal relationship with him. In Franklin’s own words:

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is like to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it.

Thomas Jefferson was also a Deist. He studied the teachings of Jesus, thought them wise, but rejected that Jesus was any more divine than the next person. Jefferson even wrote his own version of the New Testament with all the miracles removed. In a January 14, 1814 letter to John Adams, Jefferson writes:

The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.

So, yes, the Founding Fathers (most of them) did believe in a supreme being, and many regarded Jesus as a wise man whose advice was worth following. BUT, the Founding Fathers weren’t Amway Christians — Christians who’ve forgotten that the original message of Jesus was to give away all your possessions and help the less fortunate. And the Founding Fathers didn’t celebrate how rich Jesus had made them, or combine Christianity with capitalism without seeing the contradiction.

In the end, I wonder…what did the Founding Fathers consider the most serious threat facing our civilization? At least one cited public ignorance:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” ~Thomas Jefferson.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 7:33 am and is filed under Politics, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

23 Responses to “Right Wing Whitewashing”

PETE says:

Monday, April 2, 2007 at 6:05 pm

Amazing the gamut religion runs. The millionairs it has created, to the untold millions it has killed. And to see what people will do when told they are doing it in the name of God or Jesus or some other Almighty.

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Xman says:

Monday, April 2, 2007 at 11:39 pm

“God told me to strike Saddam, so I struck him”.
G.W.B.

I wish I could be around in a millions years when scientists are holding up our radioactive petrified skulls and commenting on how small our brains were, yet what great capacity for primitive beliefs and behavior.

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JoeC says:

Tuesday, April 3, 2007 at 5:58 am

There’s a vast difference in the religion practiced by G.W.B and, say, Mother Theresa. One is inclusive, kind, love-based, and the other is devisive and malicious.

“I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians.” ~Thomas Jefferson, letter to Richard Price, Jan. 8, 1789.

I’m a Christian, but it pisses me off how the wisdom of Jesus has been hijacked by a group of people with a mission far removed from what he preached…tolerance, anti-violence, etc.

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Xman says:

Tuesday, April 3, 2007 at 8:13 am

I know what you are saying. I have several very close christian friends. However, when we have sat to watch a history channel show that looks at old digs, old documents, etc. they want nothing of it. For the last bit, History Channel has been running some good shows on unearthing ancient biblical civilizations. I would have thought they would welcome a look at things with the knowledge we have gained over the last 2000 years. Not a chance. Devil is trying to weazel his way in.
This insistence on crediting the supernatural with absolutely everything is almost incomprehensible to me.

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JoeC says:

Tuesday, April 3, 2007 at 10:24 am

I agree…it bothers me when I see someone close their mind to new info, or jump through outrageous hoops to prop up old beliefs. I’m an Occam’s razor fan, myself. When choosing between:

A) The world is 6000 years old and God created petrified dinosaur excrement as a temptation to literal Bible believers to trick them into being eternal BarBQ, or…

B) The Bible mixes history, metaphor, propaganda, and fiction into a powerful concentration of hope, fear, love, and hate.

I’m gonna have to go with choice B. And, I don’t think that choice diminishes the book’s spiritual clout — it’s still a great work, as is the Koran, and Moby Dick, or A Course in Miracles, or whatever else brings a person wisdom and instills the Ethic of Reciprocity.

Now, a lot of people would think believing in a universal force at all is an ill-informed position. And that’s cool. Everybody’s on their own path on their own time in their own direction. Just, in my eyes, there’s plenty of contemporary evidence that something “extra” is at work…

For example, a six year old girl with terminal cancer, whose grandfather-she-never-met visited her and told her she was going to die and not to be afraid (link) This comes from Dr. Diane M. Komp, a pediatric oncologist at Yale-New Haven Hospital, NOT a first-century text with questionable historical origins.

Again, Occam’s razor, for me at this time…that’s where the evidence (not blind faith) is taking me. And in my opinion, if there is a universal intelligence (I’m assuming yes at the moment…) it knows that a good mystery is fun, and it’s provided a great milieu to chase the mystery…

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Xman says:

Tuesday, April 3, 2007 at 12:18 pm

I’m not a religious guy, but take wisdom and common sense from where ever I find it. I’d be perfectly happy to believe in god. If he created man in his own image, that means to me…all the flaws too. I’m just as happy to believe spacemen planted us here and sheephearders passed on the story as best they could.
But I lean more to natural forces being at work that we have a long way to go before we understand.
But, honestly, it’s all pretty irrelevant in my opinion as long as we are all open to all possibilities.
Didn’t you post a photo of our galaxy with an arrow pin pointing the tiny speck earth is? When I saw that, it made it harder to take myself so seriously…except that I wanted to try harder to throw off my “programming”.

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JoeC says:

Tuesday, April 3, 2007 at 4:28 pm

What Carl Sagan referred to as the Pale Blue Dot photograph. It sure does give one a different perspective.

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TheDevil says:

Tuesday, April 3, 2007 at 11:28 pm

I heard this on NPR last week, and it makes sense to me at least. If god did created human beings, then god also had to have evolved to become that intelligent such that it had an ability to create life. While evolution disbelievers argue that human life began with millions of years of evolution, but they are not able to answer the process god come to existence. God just happened out of nowhere? But life could not have? And the reason is - its god, the almighty. With the same reasoning that life could not have just happened, god could not have just happened either. Someone else had to create the� oh so powerful and intelligent god. Or the simple answer: god evolved just like us, maybe in the outer space. Or there is no god, and we evolved from a single cell.

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JoeC says:

Wednesday, April 4, 2007 at 5:56 am

You listen to NPR? You ARE the Devil! Hahaha…
You raise some good questions. This is just some speculative what iffffing based on info from people who’ve croaked and come back and quantum theory and a whole bunch of stuff in the attic:

Some say that God doesn’t live in the universe like we do, but that God IS the universe…that the universe itself is conscious and holds knowledge, so when the universe bubbled out of whereever it came, that’s when God was created (since God IS the universe.) There’s some hints of this in religious writings, like God is the beginning and the end, God is everything, through God are all things, etc. In this model, God’s consciousness and intelligence is the summation of all the knowledge and life in the universe connected at some level we don’t understand yet — maybe what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious is a part of this.

Anyway, not saying that’s the case, but just an idea from the collective attic…figure out where the universe came from, and maybe that’s where/how “God” (if God exists…) popped into existence, too.

Now my head hurts. If I was in China right now, it wouldn’t be too early for a beer! ;-)

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Indigobusiness says:

Friday, April 6, 2007 at 12:19 pm

It’s never too early for beer, when arguing religion.

God is built-in, I reckon.

Watch the new PBS film on fractals, and it all seems pretty obvious.

The reason we can’t wrap our deductive minds around this is the quantum mechanical aspect, it’s a mindfuck, to paraphrase Richard Feynman. If we think we understand the deepest stuff on a rational level, we surely don’t. We have to learn other, more lateral forms of thinking, in order to establish a meaningful grasp.

Joseph Campbell spells it out best, I think.
Check out the film The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work.

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Xman says:

Friday, April 6, 2007 at 11:27 pm

Speaking of beer and God……
If God really did create us in his “image”…(you know where I’m going with this don’t you?)
…then God is a beer drinker!

Hey, pass the pitcher down this end, will ya?

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JoeC says:

Saturday, April 7, 2007 at 6:56 am

Damn right he was a beer drinker! After all, Jesus (who said he was God, no?) performed his first miracle at a wedding where he…turned water into wine! And everybody said it was the best wine at the reception. (John 2:1-11) I think Jesus knew if you buy the keg, the disciples will show up at the party. ;-)

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Indigobusiness says:

Saturday, April 7, 2007 at 5:09 pm

Actually, Jesus didn’t refer to himself as God. In fact, he emphasized otherwise, and redirected such commentary toward God the father.

Everybody, in those days drank beer, after Noah. Beer and wine. They were safer than water. The anointing oils, and other sacred substances are even more an interesting matter of record.

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JoeC says:

Saturday, April 7, 2007 at 9:40 pm

Yeah, I remember seeing a show about the pilgrims on the Mayflower, and how everybody drank beer, even the children, because it was safe and the water wasn’t. So Jesus really didn’t claim to be God? I knew there were some times when he said he was “the son of man” and then some times when people asked him if he was God and he just replied, “you said it.” Then, there’s the historical problem of what he really said and what people writing the Gospels filled in with their own fictions…what about the anointing oils? Never heard much strange stuff about them–what’s their intrigue about?

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Xman says:

Sunday, April 8, 2007 at 8:11 am

It is unfortunate that history can’t be found as well within dna as “who my daddy” is.
But for some believers, I think their is a belief one will actually be able to speak to all who have gone before us at some point…to find out what really happened.
Now, who would I like to drink a beer with?
Cleopatra? Nah, I hear she was ugly. I can’t drink that much.
Aphrodite? Can’t remember if she was real or not.
Well, I was trying to kill two birds with one stone here..
You know what I mean. Who would I most like to #$%@?
Guess I’ll just settle for a beer with Sam Adams right now.

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Indigobusiness says:

Sunday, April 8, 2007 at 5:32 pm

If Jesus thought of himself as God, and believed in one God, why did he ask God (when he was on the cross) why he’d been forsaken?

There are several attributed references of Jesus admonishing and clarifying references to himself as God.

I’m troubled by how distorted this all has become. And how the import of the words have been morphed by assorted vernaculars.

Image, from the Latin imago, might have it’s root meaning in imagination as much or more so than countenance -for instance.

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Indigobiz says:

Sunday, April 8, 2007 at 5:51 pm

Check this out. I blogged about this awhile back.

I did one on anointing oils, too, I can’t find it but here’s a page from my archives with some interesting Jesus info.

Here, I found it.

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Indigobiz says:

Sunday, April 8, 2007 at 6:02 pm

In fact, I blogged the the anointing oil article twice. This version is better.

There’s one on mushrooms, too, somewhere.

(Pardon the previously botched grammar. English is a hard language.)

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Indigobiz says:

Sunday, April 8, 2007 at 6:06 pm

More botcheries…Aaarghh….I’m leaving now, to go drink beer with Cleopatra and Aphrodite…she real enough for me and my debaucheries.

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JoeC says:

Sunday, April 8, 2007 at 8:08 pm

IndigoBiz: Thanks for the links. Very interesting about the anointing oils, and I love this sort of stuff that gives possible new meanings to ancient writings like the Gospels.

There was a comment by twit on your site that I really liked, because I’ve suspected it myself:

As for Jesus, i personally believe he’s probably been greatly misunderstood &/or wrongly interpreted anyway. I tend to believe that he was trying to tell us, that we are ALL, the sons (& daughters) of God. The only thing that made him special was his acute awareness of that fact.

Especially after reading the Gospel of Thomas, rereading the Gospels from the perspective that Jesus is saying that we’re all the sons (& daughters) of God does make better sense to me, at least.

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Indigobusiness says:

Monday, April 9, 2007 at 5:18 pm

The Gospel of Thomas has some fascinating insights, I’m interested in all the texts…especially the ones that didn’t make the cut.

Christ Consciousness and Buddha Mind are two versions of the same thing, in my view. Avatars assume appropriate context. The message is about ultimate human potential.

Pageantry and sentimentalism get in the way, sometimes. It’s pragmatic, if mystical at times.

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JoeC says:

Monday, April 9, 2007 at 6:27 pm

Agree about the Christ/Buddha Mind.

You’ve probably already found this, but there’s a good collection online here: Early Christian Writings

Also, I really like this site: Near Death. Lots of interesting stuff in the Research Conclusion index section.

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Indigobusiness says:

Friday, April 13, 2007 at 12:07 am

Interesting links, thanks.

Reply

Right Wing Whitewashing

Whitewashing American History

Whitewashing Traditional Colonial Family Structure

Whitewashing the Founding Religion

23 Responses to “Right Wing Whitewashing”

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