I always laugh when people cite the Puritans and their alleged influence on the founding fathers. The colony they established was a rather brutal theocracy that imprisoned, exiled and sometimes put to death even their fellow Christians if they were the wrong brand. Funny how they trusted themselves with such power.
Saturday, August 16, 2014
Brayton: "More Christian Nation Nonsense"
Check it out here. A taste:
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11 comments:
This culture war BS is strictly amateur hour. A sneering left-winger trolling the internet for the dumbest right-winger he can find leaves everyone more ignorant than they started.
Tocqueville on the Puritans, for instance, would be time productively spent.
http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.sdsu.edu/stable/2132311?seq=16
Such false, hypocritical, fascist narratives influence our public policy. So exposure remains a necessity. Thanks for your service Jon.
In this case Charisma is an influential media outlet within conservative Christendom. Exposing what they falsely present as journalism remains imperative if we're demonstrably committed to optimal outcomes.
Don't let those who so obviously seek to avoid, deflect, and waffle on the bad behavior of a particular tribe when it's exposed get you down. Your input is welcomed and unfortunately, needed.
"You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly."
Try again. The Tocqueville. Something. Anything.
Just because the right-winger overstated his case doesn't mean that the left-winger [on an even less influential corner of the internet] sneering at it and dismissing it in toto has made any case either.
You hit the nail on the head, Mr. Heath. How this stuff "influences our public policy" needs to be argued and proved.
Mr. Brayton used the word "silly," as did CS Lewis in the quote above.
Nice to see you again, Micheal, once again carrying Ed's water. Now get to work, or kindly piss off.
Michael,
Thank you for your support. I try to be fair.
I assume that everyone can agree that the author of the Charisma article right off the bat commits the "The Founders" fallacy. There was no monolithic "America's Founders."
And, what's "Tocqueville on the Puritans" have to do with anything. That the founders, most of the founders and all of the key founders, drew upon a wide range of personal experience with humans in positions of power and a wide range of historical sources, including a heavy reliance upon Greaco-Roman sources, is not contestable. Really, read their work. As most anyone who's studied the founding period knows.
But then, as Tom said, Ed may have found "the dumbest right-winger" on the internet. I'm not so sure, the competition is pretty deep and wide these days.
"In fact, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, both signers of the Constitution, pointed to Jeremiah 17:9 as an underlying principle for the separation of powers...
A little googling finds that this is a widely used Christian statement around the tubes. However, apparently there is no source, or at least no one seems to be concerned with citing one.
Anyone have any ideas where the source(s) for this statement can be found exists?
Blogger Jonathan Rowe said...
Michael,
Thank you for your support. I try to be fair.
Until you give the front page to right-wingers sneering as do Mr. Brayton and his left-wing ilk, you are not being fair.
Further, since Mr. Brayton's driveby on the Puritans is guilty of the cardinal sin of "presentism"--judging the past by the standards of the present--it has no place anywhere near adult discussion.
[The Puritans were no less civilized than the Britain they fled.]
Tom Van Dyke writes:
Mr. Brayton's driveby on the Puritans is guilty of the cardinal sin of "presentism"--judging the past by the standards of the present--it has no place anywhere near adult discussion.
[The Puritans were no less civilized than the Britain they fled.]
Mr. Brayton is factually correct in how he describes the Pilgrim settlements in America.
Secondly and ironically, there was not only a standard of religious tolerance when the Pilgrims settled America, but some Pilgrims came from there, i.e., Holland.
It should also be noted that a motivation for the Pilgrims to emigrate from Holland was it was a religiously tolerant society, where the Pilgrim patriarchs feared their progeny would eventually stop submitting to their authority and the edicts of their holy dogma. That they'd lose their religion and inter-marry with non-Pilgrims.
So Ed Brayton's condemnation of Pilgrim tyranny is on solid ground from both a normative perspective and a historically relevant one as well.
The fact that Brayton is correct and Van Dyke is buffoonishly wrong should be no surprise to anyone who is keeping up.
The condemnation of the Puritans is supercilious presentism. And Tocqueville is far more worth the reader's time than Mr. Brayton's--and your--fatuousness.
A plague o' both your houses. Which is worse – the fact-free assertions of EH or EB’s Argument By Selective Observation reducing Puritan Mass. to a “brutal theocracy” without acknowledging their covenant constitutionalism as foundational to American political practice and theory (read some Donald Lutz).
Yes. Unfortunately, those who practice history by polemic [let's laugh at THIS dumb right-winger!] know little of their own side, and god forbid what the other side might be getting right.
http://www.dennisprager.com/new-prager-u-course-liberal-universities-hurt-liberal-students/
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