It cost a bit of $$$, but the peeps at Codeable.io (in my case, Patryck and Javin) took my request, which was basically:
“I like my current theme to my website, how can I keep this look but have it updated so it works well with the latest hosting updates to PHP?”
I purchased my theme in 2014, and the company that made it went out of business.
They said,
“We got you.”
And they did. Yay! They also made sure a favored “plug-in” of mine, Special Text Boxes, was running well with the updates. How they did that is their little secret. Lol.
For background. I had a theme for my WordPress site in 2014 from a company that is now defunct. The updated theme I purchased in 2022 was a totally different layout. I did not like the new look. I preferred my simple layout. The problem was the new PHP updates to WordPress would cause a fatal error. So I held on for a couple years but it needed to be addressed. So I happened upon a company through a recommendation, Codeable Aps, and in a short time my site was updated, looking the same (YAY!), and ready to go through many years of updates. Awesome!
I would highly recommend the team at Codeable Aps. The guys that helped me were Patryk Kachel and Jayvin. Thanks guys.
I second myself. Thanks Guys!
FYI, some maintenance and construction on my site will be going on over the holidays (Holydays).
Dennis Prager often notes that “Stalin labeled Trotsky a fascist, even though Trotsky and Lenin were the fathers of the Bolshevik Revolution.”Tiger Droppings discussed tis a bit:
Was listening to Dennis Prager, who is an expert in Soviet Union propaganda and speaks Russian. It was a common tactic for the Stalinists to label all their enemies Fascists, and even labeled Trotsky a fascist, who was one of the most ardent Communists in the entire Revolution. Once Trotsky was labeled a Fascist, his days were numbered.
Its interesting how similar all the tactics of the modern left are to the Communists of the early 20th century.
As I mentioned earlier, my field of study I was one of seven students in all of Columbia University to major in what was called Communist Affairs[….] At the Russian Institute at the School of International Affairs. I learned Russian, went to communist countries every year[…] I wanted to understand the enemy… that was basically what it was [for]. I learned Russian to read Pravda and Dostoyevsky, not to be able to converse. And so I know the left very, very well and. The first use of this terminology was from Stalin. Stalin called Trotsky a fascist. Trotsky, with Lenin, founded the Bolshevik party, not Stalin. Stalin was one of the early leaders, but the founders were Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky was the head of the Red Army in the Civil War that followed the Russian Revolution.
You can’t get more Communist than Trotsky, but he became an opponent of Stalin after Lemin’s death and he fled the Soviet Union [and] fled to Mexico. Stalin sent the assassins to kill him with an ice pick, which was done in Mexico.
He called Trotsky a Fascist.
So every one of your listeners [to the PBD Podcast] needs to understand this. [….] All leftists since Stalin have done the exact same thing, they call their opponents fascists. There is no exception. That is what they do. They call them the worst possible names.
I’ll give you one other Law about the left. And that is that there is no example of the Left being in power, whether in the country or the university, and allowing dissent. There is no example, and I have my favorite example as Prime Minister Ardern, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, during the lockdowns, said this:
[Extended Quote:] We will continue to be your single source of truth. We will provide information frequently. We will share everything we can. Take everything else you see with a grain of salt. And so, I really ask people to focus.[….] remember that unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth. [This was regarding Covid and Covid lockdowns and information. Most of what the New Zealand government pushed turned out to be – in fact – wrong.]
[….] Guess where she is now? Harvard. She’s teaching at Harvard. She is a kindred spirit to Harvard, Harvard!, whose motto […] means truth. But it’s a joke. It means nothing to any Left-wing group. Truth is, what is the Soviet Communist newspaper that I learned Russian to read called? Pravda. Pravda means truth.
Truth in the Left-wing world is what they say it is. It has no objective reality. The Oregon Education Department announced the idea that math has a correct answer is, is white supremacy.
Question to Thomas Sowell:Talk about President Obama. Do you think he’s a socialist?
Thomas Sowell:No, not technically, I suppose, because socialism usually means the government ownership of the means of production. The pattern he’s following is much more like that of the fascist, where the government leaves the production in the private hands, and the politicians tell them what to do, and that’s much more politically viable because, after the government forces the private industry to do something and it turns out disastrously; you can always haul the people from private industry up before congressional committees, denounce them on television and so forth. Leaving out the fact that it was you who forced them to do what they did.
How biased are these pushes? Mollie Hemingway and Laura Ingraham explain:
‘The Federalist’ editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway discusses NewsGuard’s global disinformation index categorizing right-leading media outlets as ‘risky’ and left-leaning outlets as ‘least risky’ for disinformation on ‘The Ingraham Angle.’
Larry Elder reads from Thomas Sowell’s 2012 article, “Socialist Or Fascist? Government Ownership Of The Means Of Production Means That Politicians Also Own The Consequences Of Their Policies…” (HUMAN EVENTS). I go out of my way to add to the audio by inserting various videos from Jonah Goldberg, Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan, Kamala Harris, etc.
MUSSOLINI QUOTE:
“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth… then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.”
Mussolini, Diuturna (1924) pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (Ignatius Press; 1999), by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.
SOCIALISTS/MARXISTS BECAME FASCISTS
Here is an extended quote from Dinesh D’Souza’s book, THE BIG LIE, detailing the easy switch from socialist leaders and unions to fascist — overnight:
…on March 23, 1919, one of the most famous socialists in Italy founded a new party, the Fasci di Combattimento, a term that means “fascist combat squad.” This was the first official fascist party and thus its founding represents the true birth of fascism. By the same token, this man was the first fascist. The term “fascism” can be traced back to 1914, when he founded the Fasci Rivoluzionari d’Azione Internazionalista, a political movement whose members called themselves fascisti or fascists.
In 1914, this founding father of fascism was, together with Vladimir Lenin of Russia, Rosa Luxemburg of Germany, and Antonio Gramsci of Italy, one of the best known Marxists in the world. His fellow Marxists and socialists recognized him as a great leader of socialism. His decision to become a fascist was controversial, yet he received congratulations from Lenin who continued to regard him as a faithful revolutionary socialist. And this is how he saw himself.
That same year, because of his support for Italian involvement in World War I, he would be expelled from the Italian Socialist Party for “heresy,” but this does not mean he ceased to be a socialist. It was common practice for socialist parties to expel dissenting fellow socialists for breaking on some fine point with the party line. This party reject insisted that he had been kicked out for making “a revision of socialism from the revolutionary point of view.” For the rest of his life—right until his lifeless body was displayed in a town square in Milan—he upheld the central tenets of socialism which he saw as best reflected in fascism.
Who, then, was this man? He was the future leader of fascist Italy, the one whom Italians called Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.
Mussolini’s socialist credentials were impeccable. He had been raised in a socialist family and made a public declaration in 1901, at the age of eighteen, of his convictions. By twenty-one, he was an orthodox Marxist familiar not only with the writings of Marx and Engels but also of many of the most influential German, Italian, and French Marxists of the fin de siecle period. Like other orthodox Marxists, Mussolini rejected religious faith and authored anti-Catholic pamphlets repudiating his native Catholicism.
Mussolini embarked on an active career as a writer, editor, and political organizer. Exiled to Switzerland between 1902 and 1904, he collaborated with the Italian Socialist Party weekly issued there and also wrote for Il Proletario, a socialist weekly published in New York. In 1909 Mussolini made another foreign sojourn to Trento—then part of Austria-Hungary—where he worked for the socialist party and edited its newspaper. Returning the next year to his hometown of Forli, he edited the weekly socialist publication La Lotta di Classe (The Class War). He wrote so widely on Marxism, socialist theory, and contemporary politics that his output now fills seven volumes.
Mussolini wasn’t just an intellectual; he organized workers’ strikes on behalf of the socialist movement both inside and outside of Italy and was twice jailed for his activism. In 1912, Mussolini was recognized as a socialist leader at the Socialist Congress at Reggio Emilia and was appointed to the Italian Socialist Party’s board of directors. That same year, at the age of twenty-nine, he became editor of Avanti!, the official publication of the party.
From the point of view of the progressive narrative—a narrative I began to challenge in the previous chapter—Mussolini’s shift from Marxian socialism to fascism must come as a huge surprise. In the progressive paradigm, Marxian socialism is the left end of the spectrum and fascism is the right end of the spectrum. Progressive incredulity becomes even greater when we see that Mussolini wasn’t just any socialist; he was the recognized head of the socialist movement in Italy. Moreover, he didn’t just climb aboard the fascist bandwagon; he created it.
Today we think of fascism’s most famous representative as Adolf Hitler. Yet as I mentioned earlier, Hitler didn’t consider himself a fascist. Rather, he saw himself as a National Socialist. The two ideologies are related in that they are both based on collectivism and centralized state power. They emerge, one might say, from a common point of origin. Yet they are also distinct; fascism, for instance, had no intrinsic connection with anti-Semitism in the way that National Socialism did.
In any event, Hitler was an obscure local organizer in Germany when Mussolini came to power and, following his famous March on Rome, established the world’s first fascist regime in Italy in 1922. Hitler greatly admired Mussolini and aspired to become like him. Mussolini, Hitler said, was “the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself.” Hitler modeled his failed Munich Putsch in November 1923 on Mussolini’s successful March on Rome.
When Hitler first came to power he kept a bust of Mussolini in his office and one German observer termed him “Germany’s Mussolini.” Yet later, when the two men first met, Mussolini was not very impressed by Hitler. Mussolini became more respectful after 1939 when Hitler conquered Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Norway, and France. Hitler continued to uphold Mussolini as “that unparalleled statesman” and “one of the Caesars” and confessed that without Italian fascism there would not have been a German National Socialism: “The brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt.”
Hitler was, like Mussolini, a man of the Left. Hitler too was a socialist and a labor leader who founded the German Socialist Workers’ Party with a platform very similar to that of Mussolini’s fascist party. Yet Hitler came to power in the 1930s while Mussolini ruled through most of the 1920s. Mussolini was, during those years, much more famous than Hitler. He was recognized as the founding father of fascism. So any account of the origin of fascism must focus not on Hitler but on Mussolini. Mussolini is the original and prototypical fascist.
From Socialism to Fascism
So how—to return to the progressive paradigm—do progressives account for Mussolini’s conversion from socialism to fascism, or more precisely for Mussolini’s simultaneous embrace of both? The problem is further deepened by the fact that Mussolini was not alone. Hundreds of leading socialists, initially in Italy but subsequently in Germany, France, and other countries, also became fascists. In fact, I will go further to say that all the leading figures in the founding of fascism were men of the Left. “The first fascists,” Anthony James Gregor tells us, “were almost all Marxists.”
I will cite a few examples. Jean Allemane, famous for his role in the Dreyfus case, one of the great figures of French socialism, became a fascist later in life. So did the socialist Georges Valois. Marcel Deat, the founder of the Parti Socialiste de France, eventually quit and started a pro-fascist party in 1936. Later, he became a Nazi collaborator during the Vichy regimeVacques Doriot a French communist, moved his Parti Populaire Francais into the fascist camp.
The Belgian socialist theoretician Henri de Man transitioned to becoming a fascist theoretician. In England. Oswald Mosley, a socialist and Labor Party Member of Parliament, eventually broke with the Labor Party because he found it insufficiently radical. He later founded the British Union of Fascists and became the country’s leading Nazi sympathizer. In Germany, the socialist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann embraced Hitler and produced plays during the Third Reich. After the war, he became a communist and staged his productions in Soviet-dominated East Berlin
In Italy, philosopher Giovanni Gentile moved from Marxism to fascism, as did a host of Italian labor organizers: Ottavio Dinale, Tullio Masotti, Carlo Silvestri, and Umberto Pasella. The socialist writer Agostino Lanzillo joined Mussolini’s parliament as a member of the fascist party Nicola Bombacci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, became Mussolini’s top adviser in Salo. Gentile’s disciple Ugo Spirito, who also served Mussolini at Salo, moved from Marxism to fascism and then back to Marxism. Like Hauptmann, Spirito became a communist sympathizer after World War II and called for a new “synthesis” between communism and fascism.
Others who made the same journey from socialism to fascism will be named in this chapter, and one thing that will become very clear is that these are not “conversion” stories. These men didn’t “switch” from socialism to fascism. Rather, they became fascists in the same way that Russian socialists became Leninist Bolsheviks. Like their Russian counterparts, these socialists believed themselves to be growing into fascism, maturing into fascism, because they saw fascism as the most well thought out, practical form of socialism for the new century.
Progressivism simply cannot account for the easy traffic from socialism to fascism. Consequently, progressives typically maintain complete silence about this whole historical relationship which is deeply embarrassing to them. In all the articles comparing Trump to Mussolini I searched in vain for references to Mussolini’s erstwhile Marxism and lifelong attachment to socialism. Either from ignorance or from design, these references are missing.
Progressive biographical accounts that cannot avoid Mussolini’s socialist past nevertheless turn around and accuse Mussolini—as the Socialist Party of Italy did in 1914—of “selling out” to fascism for money and power. Other accounts contend that whatever Mussolini’s original convictions, the very fact that his fascists later battled the Marxists and traditional socialists clearly shows that Mussolini did not remain a socialist or a man of the Left.
But these explanations make no sense. When Mussolini “sold out” he became an outcast. He had neither money nor power. Nor did any of the first fascists embrace fascism for this reason. Rather, they became fascists because they saw fascism as the only way to rescue socialism and make it viable. In other words, their defection was within socialism—they sought to create a new type of socialism that would actually draw a mass following and produce the workers’ revolution that Marx anticipated and hoped for.
Vicious fights among socialist and leftist factions are a recognized feature of the history of socialism. In Russia, for example, there were bloody confrontations between the rival Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Later the Bolsheviks split into Leninists and Trotskyites, and Trotsky ended up dead on Lenin’s orders. These were all men of the Left. What these bloody rivalries prove is that the worst splits and conflicts sometimes arise among people who are ideologically very similar and differ on relatively small—though not small to them—points of doctrine.
In this chapter I will trace the development of fascism by showing precisely how it grew out of a doctrinal division within the community of Marxian socialists. In short, I will prove that fascism is exclusively a product of the Left. This is not a case of leftists who moved right. On the contrary, the fascists were on the left end of the socialist movement. They saw themselves not as jettisoning Marxism but as saving it from obsolescence. From their perspective, Marxism and socialism were too inert and needed to be adjusted leftward. In other words, they viewed fascism as more revolutionary than traditional socialism.
[….]
Mussolini didn’t believe in race and he wasn’t initially a nationalist; rather, he was a revolutionary syndicalist. The term syndicalism refers to the associations or syndicates to which workers belonged. These were autonomous workers organizations that resembled unions, but they were not unions because the syndicates were organized regionally rather than by corporation or occupation. As dedicated Marxists, the revolutionary syndicalists agreed with Marx that class associations were primary, and that they must be the organizing principle of socialist revolution.
Very much in keeping with this class emphasis that was so central to Marx, the syndicalists, strongly influenced by Sorel, sought to rally the labor syndicates through a general strike that would overthrow the ruling class and establish socialism in Italy. This is what made them “revolutionary.” They intended to foment revolution, not wait for it to happen. They were considered the smartest, most dedicated people in the Italian Socialist Party and they occupied the left wing of the party.
The big names in revolutionary syndicalism were Giuseppe Prezzolini, Angelo 0. Olivetti, Arturo Labriola, Filippo Corridoni, Paolo Orano, Michele Bianchi, and Sergio Panunzio. Most of them were writers or labor organizers. All of them were socialists, and shortly all of them would be camelascists, even though Labriola opposed Mussolini’s regime when it came to power and Corridoni, who was killed in World War I, didn’t live to see it.
Mussolini was their acknowledged leader. He knew them well and conspired with them at meetings and rallies. He read their books and articles and published in their magazines like the Avanguardia Socialista, founded by Laboriola, which was the leading journal of syndicalist thought. Mussolini also reviewed and published the leading syndicalists in his own socialist publications.
Like all revolutionary socialists, the syndicalists had little faith in democratic parliamentary procedures and, consistent with Sorel and Lenin, they sought a charismatic leader who would inspire the workers to action. Mussolini, more than anyone else, fit their prescription. Mussolini was the one who led the syndicalists into a union with the nationalists in order to form the new socialist hybrid called fascism in Italy and (with some modifications) National Socialism in Germany.
The syndicalists organized three general strikes in Italy in 1904, 1911, and 1913. Mussolini supported the strikes. The 1904 strike began in Milan and spread across the country. Five million workers walked off their jobs. The nation was paralyzed: there was no public transportation, and no one could buy anything. Even so, the strike ended without causing either the fall of the government or the installation of socialism.
Dinesh D’Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the NAZI Roots of the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017), 65-70, 82-83.
“They called me a traitor. They did it to Donald Trump, they do it with Tucker Carlson, they do it with Bobby Kennedy… Anyone they deem a political threat.”
Trump appointee Tulsi Gabbard explains why she left the Democratic Party, and how they tried to destroy her.
The super interesting part I didn’t know about starts at the 8:55 mark – the “townhall” video library thing. Wow. CNN campaigned a while back on “Facts First.” Yeah right. They meant “DNC puppet to put a thumb on the scale” campaign.
I haven’t asked for financial help in 15-years, but since the company I worked for for many years almost went under during the Hollywood strike, I have had to find employment elsewhere. And, the monetary shortfall is being felt by me. So below are my Venmo info or a way to Zelle me. Honestly, anything will help towards my $1,379.40 goal by February, 2025 payment deadline.
Even A $Buck$ Would Help
So, I humbly ask if you have benefitted at all from some info, or link to another argument against the Left, or some Apologetic argument that helped with rearing a child well or responding to a skeptic. Drop some money if you can afford to part with it. Much thanks and blessings your way. We re all hurting a bit in tis Democrat incensed (worked up, enflamed) economy, so I understand. Trust me I do.
One should note that this is a DISTINCTLY Christian Holiday, via COLD CASE CHRISTIANITY:
….Regardless of how people may feel about the Thanksgiving Holiday, one thing should be obvious to even the most casual observer of history: Thanksgiving was (and still is) founded on the Christian notion we have something to be thankful for and someone to be thankful to. These first observers of Thanksgiving understood who it was they were to thank. Over and over again, through the early years of the colonies to the most difficult days of our national history, believers and leaders have affirmed and humbled themselves to the providence and protection of God. Those who initiated this national holiday intended it to be a day of thanksgiving and prayer; a day in which all of us could offer thanks to the God of the Universe.
This wonderful historical tour by professor Cameron G. Thies adds to the beauty of this historical trip down the US of A’s memory lane (this was originally a LIBERTARIAN REPUBLICAN post, but that blog is no more, sadly):
In 1534, Jacques Cartier of France set off to discover a northwest passage to China. Though encouraged by his discovery of the Gulf of St. Lawrence on his first voyage; and, in a subsequent voyage, his discovery of the St. Lawrence River, he eventually accepted that what he had discovered wasn’t a northwest passage, but was a vast territory inhabited by various tribes of Indians, with a harsh and unforgiving climate. In three voyages, he traded with the Indians, possessing as he did useful things made of metal, that the Indians found to be quite valuable since they had not mastered metal-working. But, because of the harsh winters and Indian raids, the place was less than ideal for colonization.
In 1604, an attempt was made by the French to establish a permanent colony at St. Croix, in present day Maine, on the Bay of Fundy. (The bay is located between Nova Scotia on the east and New Brunswick and Maine on the west.) The site was terrible. The change in altitude from inland to the coast acted like a flue, bringing the freezing cold wind from the northwest down upon the settlement. Half the colony died that winter. The next year, the survivors relocated across the bay, at Port Royal. This became the first permanent European settlement in the Americas north of Florida, following the abandonment or other end of the Viking settlements at the onset of the Little Ice Age.
The first permanent English colony in the Americas north of Florida was established at Jamestown, Virginia, two years later, in 1607. This colony would have failed if not for the assistance of the local Indian tribe, the Powhatan Indians. Even so, the colonists and the Powhatan Indians recurrently warred against each other. To cement the peace treaty ending one of these wars, an Indian princess named Pocahontas married one of the leaders of the colony, John Rolfe. She converted to Christianity and returned with her husband to England where she entered society as a lady. In 1619, the colony organized a representative body, the House of Burgesses, to provide local government.
The Virginia colony had been founded as a joint stock company based on the prospect of discovering gold and diamonds and such. But, as an investment, the company proved to be a complete loss. The king dissolved the corporate charter, and reorganized the colony as with a royal charter. But, eventually the colony began turning a profit with the cultivation of tobacco.
Further to the north, a second permanent English colony was organized in Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts, in 1620. It, like the original location of the French in the Bay of Fundy was unfortunately sited in terms of the local climate. Cape Cod, jutting into the Atlantic Ocean, directed the warming currents of the Gulf Stream eastward, leaving the shores of the bay particularly cold. The first winter proved very harsh, and half the settlers perished. An Indian named Squanto of a local tribe arrived on the scene and helped the survivors with fishing, hunting and planting. The local tribe allied with the colony and became something of a conduit for the exchange of metal tools and such for furs acquired from inland tribes.
The Plymouth Bay colony consisted of religious dissidents, known as Puritans, for whom the Church of England, though a Protestant church, was a backsliding church. Their journey to the New World was a search for an isolated place where their rules would be law. It is possible that their celebration of Thanksgiving was in keeping with the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, an eight-day holiday, that is to culminate in a community-wide dinner. During the week, you are to live outdoors, if this is possible, and eat outdoors, under an open canopy. It is a time to remember the wandering in the desert, when Israel was guided by the Shekinah Glory and God was with his people. It is also a time to anticipate when the Shekinah Glory will return, and when God will again be with his people.
Squanto
The Story of Squanto… WHY the Pilgrims saw God’s providential hand on their lives, and gave thanks to God for this Providence over the course of mankind. Here, Eric Metaxas talks about some of this history in his WALL STREETJournal article (as well as an excellent video by Ben Shapiro):
The story of how the Pilgrims arrived at our shores on the Mayflower—and how a friendly Patuxet native named Squanto showed them how to plant corn, using fish as fertilizer—is well-known. But Squanto’s full story is not, as National Geographic’s new Thanksgiving miniseries, “Saints & Strangers,” shows. That might be because some details of Squanto’s life are in dispute. The important ones are not, however. His story is astonishing, even raising profound questions about God’s role in American history.
Every Thanksgiving we remember that, to escape religious persecution, the Pilgrims sailed to the New World, landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620. But numerous trading ships had visited the area earlier. Around 1608 an English ship dropped anchor off the coast of what is today Plymouth, Mass., ostensibly to trade metal goods for the natives’ beads and pelts. The friendly Patuxets received the crew but soon discovered their dark intentions. A number of the braves were brutally captured, taken to Spain and sold into slavery.
One of them, a young man named Tisquantum, or Squanto, was bought by a group of Catholic friars, who evidently treated him well and freed him, even allowing him to dream of somehow returning to the New World, an almost unimaginable thought at the time. Around 1612, Squanto made his way to London, where he stayed with a man named John Slany and learned his ways and language. In 1618, a ship was found, and in return for serving as an interpreter, Squanto would be given one-way passage back to the New World.
After spending a winter in Newfoundland, the ship made its way down the coast of Maine and Cape Cod, where Squanto at last reached his own shore. After 10 years, Squanto returned to the village where he had been born. But when he arrived, to his unfathomable disappointment, there was no one to greet him. What had happened?
It seems that since he had been away, nearly every member of the Patuxets had perished from disease, perhaps smallpox, brought by European ships. Had Squanto not been kidnapped, he would almost surely have died. But perhaps he didn’t feel lucky to have been spared. Surely, he must have wondered how his extraordinary efforts could amount to this. At first he wandered to another Wampanoag tribe, but they weren’t his people. He was a man without a family or tribe, and eventually lived alone in the woods.
But his story didn’t end there. In the bleak November of 1620, the Mayflower passengers, unable to navigate south to the warmer land of Virginia, decided to settle at Plymouth, the very spot where Squanto had grown up. They had come in search of religious freedom, hoping to found a colony based on Christian principles.
Their journey was very difficult, and their celebrated landing on the frigid shores of Plymouth proved even more so. Forced to sleep in miserably wet and cold conditions, many of them fell gravely ill. Half of them died during that terrible winter. One can imagine how they must have wept and wondered how the God they trusted and followed could lead them to this agonizing pass. They seriously considered returning to Europe.
But one day during that spring of 1621, a Wampanoag walked out of the woods to greet them. Somehow he spoke perfect English. In fact, he had lived in London more recently than they had. And if that weren’t strange enough, he had grown up on the exact land where they had settled.
Because of this, he knew everything about how to survive there; not only how to plant corn and squash, but how to find fish and lobsters and eels and much else. The lone Patuxet survivor had nowhere to go, so the Pilgrims adopted him as one of their own and he lived with them on the land of his childhood.
No one disputes that Squanto’s advent among the Pilgrims changed everything, making it possible for them to stay and thrive. Squanto even helped broker a peace with the local tribes, one that lasted 50 years, a staggering accomplishment considering the troubles settlers would face later.
So the question is: Can all of this have been sheer happenstance, as most versions of the story would have us believe? The Pilgrims hardly thought so. To them, Squanto was a living answer to their tearful prayers, an outrageous miracle of God. Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford declared in his journal that Squanto “became a special instrument sent of God” who didn’t leave them “till he died.”
Indeed, when Squanto died from a mysterious disease in 1622, Bradford wrote that he wanted “the Governor to pray for him, that he might go to the Englishmen’s God in heaven.” And Squanto bequeathed his possessions to the Pilgrims “as remembrances of his love.”
These are historical facts. May we be forgiven for interpreting them as the answered prayers of a suffering people, and a warm touch at the cold dawn of our history of an Almighty Hand?
Story Time:
On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs.
Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible. The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work.
“But this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one. And when the Pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford’s detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness,” destined to become the home of the Kennedy family. “There were no friends to greet them, he wrote. There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves. And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning.
During the first winter, half the Pilgrims – including Bradford’s own wife – died of either starvation, sickness or exposure.
“When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats.” Yes, it was Indians that taught the white man how to skin beasts. “Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they did not yet prosper! This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. “Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of both the Old and New Testaments.
Here is the part [of Thanksgiving] that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share.
“All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well. They were going to distribute it equally. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well. Nobody owned anything. They just had a share in it. It was a commune, folks. It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the ’60s and ’70s out in California – and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way.
Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives.
He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace.
“That’s right. Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism. And what happened?
It didn’t work! Surprise, surprise, huh?
What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation!
But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years – trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it – the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently.
What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild’s history lesson. If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future.
“‘The experience that we had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years…that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing – as if they were wiser than God,’ Bradford wrote. ‘For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense…that was thought injustice.’
Why should you work for other people when you can’t work for yourself? What’s the point?
“Do you hear what he was saying, ladies and gentlemen? The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford’s community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property.
Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result?
‘This had very good success,’ wrote Bradford, ‘for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.’
Bradford doesn’t sound like much of a… liberal Democrat, “does he? Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? Yes.
“Read the story of Joseph and Pharaoh in Genesis 41. Following Joseph’s suggestion (Gen 41:34), Pharaoh reduced the tax on Egyptians to 20% during the ‘seven years of plenty’ and the ‘Earth brought forth in heaps.’ (Gen. 41:47)
In no time, the Pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat themselves…. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London.
And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the ‘Great Puritan Migration.'”
Now, other than on this program every year, have you heard this story before? Is this lesson being taught to your kids today — and if it isn’t, why not? Can you think of a more important lesson one could derive from the pilgrim experience?
So in essence there was, thanks to the Indians, because they taught us how to skin beavers and how to plant corn when we arrived, but the real Thanksgiving was thanking the Lord for guidance and plenty — and once they reformed their system and got rid of the communal bottle and started what was essentially free market capitalism, they produced more than they could possibly consume, and they invited the Indians to dinner, and voila, we got Thanksgiving, and that’s what it was: inviting the Indians to dinner and giving thanks for all the plenty is the true story of Thanksgiving.
The last two-thirds of this story simply are not told.
Now, I was just talking about the plenty of this country and how I’m awed by it. You can go to places where there are famines, and we usually get the story, “Well, look it, there are deserts, well, look it, Africa, I mean there’s no water and nothing but sand and so forth.”
It’s not the answer, folks. Those people don’t have a prayer because they have no incentive. They live under tyrannical dictatorships and governments.
The problem with the world is not too few resources. The problem with the world is an insufficient distribution of capitalism. [1]
(Editor’s note: A recent federal bill memorializing as a National Historic Trail what has come to be known as the Cherokee Indian Trail of Tears is based on false history, argues William R. Higginbotham. In this article, the Texas-based writer delves into the historic record and concludes that about 840 Indians not the 4,000 figure commonly accepted died in the 1837-38 trek west; that the government-financed march was conducted by the Indians themselves; and that the phrase “Trail of Tears” was a label that was added 70 years later under questionable circumstances.) The problem with some of our accounts of history is that they have been manipulated to fit conclusions not borne out by facts. Nothing could be more intellectually dishonest. This is about a vivid case in point.
Happens every Thanksgiving, doesn’t? Some bleeding heart liberal you’re “related to” gets on their moral high Crazy Horse and lectures about how horribly rotten the white man was to the Native Americans. Which is why this year we’re throwing in the tomahawk. Time to scalp the facts about the Indians. Feathers not dots….
MYTH: THE NATIVE AMERICANS WERE A PEACEFUL CULTURE TO WHOM THE CONCEPT OF WAR WAS FOREIGN
FACT: MANY WERE BRUTAL, CONQUERING ***HOLES
Native Americans warred with each other since, forever. Sometimes it was over hunting or farming grounds, sometimes revenge, sometimes to steal, sometimes to kill. I don’t say this to demonize them, they were no different than any other regressive, Neolithic cultures on other continents.
But the truth is that the only way settlers were able to conquer this land was through the help of Native Americans who teamed up with them to settle the score with the other, more assholish tribes. You think Cortes was able to conquer with only 500 Conquisadors. Course not, it took 50,000 ANGRY allied Native Americans who’d had it up to here with being enslaved and forced to carry gold for the other, Native Aztecs.
Some of of the Indian tribes were the most brutal in existence.
They practiced enslavement, rape, cannibalism, would sometimes target women and children, tribes like the Commanchees would butcher babies and roast people alive… and by the way, where do you think we LEARNED scalping?
MYTH: NATIVE AMERICANS WERE AN ADVANCED SOCIETY
TRUTH: NOT EVEN CLOSE
Smell that? It’s your sacred cow being torched. After I scalped her, of course. Unlike Rome, Greece, China, or pretty much any great empire which had already existed at that time, the Native Americans didn’t have advanced plumbing, transportation, mathematics or really… anything that led to the iphone on which you’re currently watching this. That whole beautiful “horseback Indian” culture you read about? It’s a lie because they hadn’t even domesticated horses. Not only that, but they didn’t even use the WHEEL. No really. 1400 AD… no wheel.
Even more reason that, when you’re that far behind, the clash of civilizations is going to be THAT much more drastic when the new wheel-using world catches up to you.
MYTH: THE SETTLERS DELIBERATELY INFECTED NATIVES WITH SMALLPOX BLANKETS TO WHIPE THEM OUT
TRUTH: ONLY IDIOTS COULD POSSIBLY BELIEVE THIS
Think about it. You really believe Europeans waged microbial, biological warfare… long before discovery, mass acceptance or even close to an understanding of advanced germ theory?
So it’s not true. You can look forever for historical accounts of mass smallpox blankets being pajamagrammed to the peaceful Indians, but you won’t find them. But there is SOME truth to the myth, which brings us to our final point.
MYTH: EUROPEANS COMMITTED MASS GENOCIDE. KILLING EVERY NATIVE AMERICAN FOR SPORT
TRUTH: NOT EVEN CLOSE
However, it is estimated that at high as 95% of pre-Columbian Native Americans were in fact killed off by disease, WHY? Because Europeans introduced new diseases to which the Native Americans hadn’t developed an immunity not only with THEMSELVES but now contact with animals like again HORSES which Native Americans hadn’t domesticated. Again, because they were such an archaic, unadvanced society.
Sure there were plenty of bloody, horrendous, unimaginable battles that occurred, and generally when it comes to neoloithic tribes and more advances settlers, the guys with the boom-boom sticks win. This isn’t exclusive to America or all that uncommon.
But Europeans were not hellbent on wiping out Native Americans, they were actually encouraged to bring the people into European culture and convert them to Christianity. Plus, inter-marrying was incredibly common. How else do you explain Johnny Depp, Angalina Jolie, Kid Cudi and even imaginary Elizabeth Warren claiming to be 1/16th Cherokee?
Killing people is bad. But so is milking, misleading and guilting all future generations for crimes they didn’t commit. Yep, Europeans conquered the Native Americans, created a Constitutional Republic, and advanced in mere centuries what Natives couldn’t do for thousands of years here on the plot of land that is America. So close this smartphone window, go enjoy your turkey and tell your social justice warrior cousin at the table to shut that mustached, single-origin-coffee drinking-hole. Or just… hand him a smallpox napkin.
SOURCES
Indigenous Americans didn’t invent the wheel: QUORA
Native Americans were introduced to horses by Spaniards: SCIENCE NEWS
Should Americans celebrate Thanksgiving as a day of gratitude? Or should they mourn it as a day of guilt? Michael Medved, author of The American Miracle, shares the fascinating story of the first Thanksgiving. (See also my MAIN THANKSGIVING DAY POST)
SQUANTO
Dennis Prager interviews Eric Metaxas about his article entitled “The Miracle of Squanto’s Path to Plymouth.” In the discussion what becomes clear is that America had a divine hand in its founding and ultimately the reasoning for this was the overwhelming good in influencing other nations in her history. He has written a book on this a while back:
It is undeniable that Native Americans suffered terribly after the arrival of European settlers, but was this the result of malice or tragic inevitability? Jeff Fynn-Paul, professor of economic and social history at Leiden University and author of Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World, explores what happened when the Old World met the New.
INTREPID EXPLORER OR
GENOCIDAL MANIAC?
“THE COMPLEX CASE
OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
Columbus was a thief, and invader, an organizer of
rape of Indian women, a slave trader, a reactionary
religious fanatic, and the personal director of a
campaign for mass murder of defenseless peoples.
—John Henrik Clarke, Christopher
Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust
In an episode of the TV series Yellowstone, Native American history professor Monica Dutton gives a lesson on Christopher Columbus to a class of mostly white students at Montana State University.9 Professor Dutton reads aloud the following phrases from Columbus’s journal:
“[The Natives] willingly traded us everything they owned…. They do not bear arms and do not know them, for I showed them a sword they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance…. They will make fine slaves…. With fifty men we can subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
Dutton then singles out a white, baseball-cap-wearing “dudebro” named Trent:
“Trent, do you ever feel like making someone do what you want, whether they want to or not? It’s a very European mentality. Stemming from the oppressive political and religious structures of the Renaissance. Kings and priests with absolute power ruling masses who have none. That was the mentality of the man who discovered America. And it’s the mentality our society struggles with today. What you know of history is the dominant culture’s justification of its actions. But I don’t teach you that.”
Professor Dutton has a point about the political uses of history. Most societies do paint a flattering portrait of their past and tend to justify or airbrush their crimes. Historical revisionism is therefore often a necessary corrective.
But it is also possible to go too far in the other direction. Thus, the idea of Christopher Columbus as the carrier of a peculiar European depravity founded on hierarchy, oppression, patriarchy, racism, capitalist exploitation, and a delight in cruelty and torture has become mainstream in the historical profession, and by osmosis among the public at large.
The image of Renaissance Europe as a place of absolutist hierarchy and oppression began with certain radical historians in the 1970s and has mushroomed in recent decades until it has become the mainstream interpretation of European culture. Beginning with books such as Francis Jennings’s 1975 The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest, this story has since made it into mainstream textbooks such as Peter Charles Hoffer’s The Brave New World: A History of Early America, which we will visit in more detail later. Columbus himself has emerged as a symbol of this cultural invasion—the most destructive force ever to propagate itself across the planet.
In this view, Columbus embodies the European penchant for killing and enslaving nonwhite peoples wherever they are found. Throw in the notion that he was also the founder of modern capitalism, the first imperialist, the first colonizer, the bringer of patriarchy to the New World, and the instigator of mass environmental destruction, and Columbus becomes a nearly perfect embodiment of everything hated by the Left today.
On the surface, this vision of Columbus seems consistent with what most people think they know about New World history:
Europeans created colonies that stole Indian land and pushed the Native peoples nearly to extinction; they were racists who engaged in slavery on a massive scale; they set up exploitative proto-capitalist trading systems, were rapacious and careless exploiters of natural resources, and imported alien technologies that lie at the root of modern environmental disaster.
But it is one thing to recognize that the interlopers who followed Columbus caused a great deal of suffering and quite another to suggest that they were the vanguard of a uniquely evil European “system” of oppression that has lasted from that day to this. A system that moreover remains the root of most suffering endured by minorities and women today. According to this view, if only Indigenous institutions and mentalities had triumphed over European ones, rather than the other way around, the world today would be a veritable utopia, where all races and genders live in harmony with nature and one another. Because that, in their idealized view, is what New World society was like before Columbus arrived.
This modern consensus resembles the portrait presented by the editors of the fringe academic journal Social Justice. In the introduction to their 1992 Columbus-themed issue, the editors had the following to say (italics mine):
Columbus and subsequent invaders set in motion a world‑historic process of European colonization, by which a nascent capitalist system expanded monumentally across the earth—in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. It was a process based on human and environmental exploitation, the legacies of which continue to this day. The merciless assault on indigenous peoples served as the bedrock upon which Western culture and the capitalist economy were built in the Americas.
Human society had seen racism before, but nothing could approach the forms it took on this continent as the capitalist process unfolded….
We can also say that the planet had been mistreated before, but nothing could approach its post-1492 fate…. Simply put, today’s environmental crisis results from 500 years of unbridled capitalist exploitation. “Progress” has not come without a staggering price, if it can be called progress at all.
In this view the wellspring of Western civilization is the oppression of Natives. A more radical statement could hardly be made, and yet this is now what passes for mainstream historical opinion. Notice how this view of history is carefully crafted to lump together the hot button issues of the modern Left. Classical Marxism did not give a fig about racism, or gender issues, or environmentalism, but as communism imploded after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Leftists broadened their definitions of “oppression” in a deliberate move to broaden their appeal to these minority and activist groups. The resulting worldview is so rabidly anti-white, anti-male, and anti-European that it challenges the idea of human progress itself.
WHAT DID COLUMBUS THINK OF THE INDIANS?
How do we untangle the truth about Columbus in the face of so much vitriol? Let us begin by unpacking the supposed quotations from his journal that are cited in Yellowstone. This passage may be found quoted all over the internet and has now become widely accepted as a shocking confession of truth about Columbus’s motives. Yet almost every word is misleading, based on mistranslation and distortion of what Columbus meant to convey.
We may skip over the fact that our modern version of Columbus’s journal is an extract from a lost original, meaning that we will probably never know the navigator’s actual words. Even so, the passage in question—which is also cited in Zinn’s influential People’s History—is actually a pastiche of lines that appear several pages apart in Columbus’s original account. Presented as a single passage, they make the speaker look a lot worse than he was.
Dutton quotes Columbus as saying “they will make fine slaves.” But Columbus did not use the Spanish word for slave (esclavo). In the original Spanish, the line she is quoting goes: “Ellos deben ser buenos servidores y de buen ingenio, que veo que muy presto dicentodo lo que les decia,” which most translators render as: “they will make good servants, as they are very clever, and quickly understood everything which was said to them.” Even in the context of an aristocratic system that seems unjust by modern standards, servants are very different from slaves. Moreover, elsewhere in the Diario, Columbus uses the term “servidores” to mean “subjects of the Crown” rather than personal servants. He uses this context because Columbus was addressing the journal not to himself, as modern readers might assume, but to his patrons Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain.
Monica’s monologue neglects to mention Columbus’s glowing appraisal of Indigenous intelligence and their capacity to learn, which can be found in the very same sentence. She also leaves out the passage where Columbus observes how fortunate the Spanish would be to welcome such intelligent people as fellow Christians and subjects of the crown.
It is therefore reasonable to suggest that what he meant was nearly the opposite of what Monica (and Howard Zinn) implies. Rather than consigning the Indians to perpetual enslavement on the grounds of irredeemable racial inferiority, Columbus was advocating their admission into European society as spiritual, racial, and social equals, based on his understanding of them as fellow descendants of Adam and Eve. (On which more appears in chapter 3.)
We know in hindsight that things did not turn out very well for the Caribbean Indians, so this may sound far-fetched to modern ears. But it is an indisputable historical fact that many Spaniards, including well-placed figures such as Columbus and Queen Isabella herself, did hope to welcome the Indians as fellow citizens and subjects at many points during the early history of the Spanish Empire.
Monica Dutton’s quotation also contains the line: “They willingly traded us everything they owned.” This quote appears to support the stereotype of Natives as guileless and easy to take advantage of: innocent, childlike, naive, generous, naturally communistic, ignorant of the evils of private property or exploitative labor hierarchies. In reality, Columbus’s impression of Native generosity underwent a rapid series of transformations. When the first Natives willingly traded pieces of gold for a few glass beads, this was because to them, the beads were so rare and unusual that they were worth more than any gold that they could find. Nonetheless, a few encounters later, we find Columbus deliberately sending his secretary and other reliable lieutenants to oversee trade between his men and the Indians, in order to ensure that the Spanish did not take undue advantage of the Natives. Soon, however, the Spanish were complaining that the Natives had already learned to drive a hard bargain and would no longer part with things the Spanish found precious or useful without charging a high price.
In other words, the Natives quickly showed as much cunning as any merchants, anywhere on Earth. These initial encounters should be seen for what they were: the first exchanges in a market that was not yet fully understood by either side. As modern economists know, a major component of any market is information. What we see in this instance—as in others throughout the colonial period—is the ability of Native Americans to rapidly adapt to changing market conditions in order to maximize their own advantage. They did not stay naive, any longer than the Europeans with whom they traded. Let us move away from the cherry-picked quotations favored by anti-Columbus campaigners and turn to what he actually said about the Native Americans as a people or “race.” In his first weeks in the Caribbean, Columbus was astonished by the lushness of the landscape and the variety of the trees and animals, many of which had never been seen by Old World eyes before. About the Taino Indians he encountered, Columbus said:
They are very well made, with very handsome bodies, and very good countenances. Their hair is short and coarse, almost like the hairs of a horse’s tail. They wear the hairs brought down to the eyebrows, except a few locks behind, which they wear long and never cut…. They are all of fair stature and size, with good faces, and well made. I saw some with marks of wounds on their bodies, and I made signs to ask what it was, and they gave me to understand that people from other adjacent islands [Caribs?] came with the intention of seizing them, and that they defended themselves. I believed, and still believe, that they come here from the mainland to take them prisoners. They should be good servants and intelligent, for I observed that they quickly took in what was said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, as it appeared to me that they had no religion.10
He also reported:
Your Highnesses may believe that there is no better nor gentler people in the world. Your highnesses ought to rejoice that they will soon become Christians, and that they will be taught the good customs of your kingdom. A better race there cannot be, and both the people and the lands are in such quantity that I know not how to write it…. I repeat that the things and the great villages of this island of Espanola, which they call Bohio, are wonderful. All here have a loving manner and gentle speech, unlike the others, who seem to be menacing when they speak. Both men and women are of good stature. It is true that they all paint [themselves], some with black, others with other colours, but most with red. I know that they are tanned by the sun, but this does not affect them much. Their houses and villages are pretty, each with a chief, who acts as their judge, and who is obeyed by them. All these lords use few words, and have excellent manners. Most of their orders are given by a sign with the hand, which is understood with surprising quickness.”11
Columbus’s favorable views about the physical and mental characteristics of the New World peoples were not unique. The Spanish scholar Peter Martyr d’Anghiera collected stories about the Indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean from a number of men who sailed with Columbus and other early adventurers. In their collective opinion, these Caribbean islanders showed a number of admirable traits, including graceful customs and rhetorical sophistication. After reporting on their skills as weavers of cotton, Martyr writes:
It is in the manufacture of [ceremonial stools] that the islanders devote the best of their native ingenuity. In the island of Ganabara which, if you have a map, you will see lies at the western extremity of Hispaniola and which is subject to Anacauchoa, it is the women who are thus employed; the various pieces are decorated with representations of phantoms which they pretend to see in the nighttime, and serpents and men and everything that they see about them. What would they not be able to manufacture, Most Illustrious Prince, if they knew the use of iron and steel?
Peter Martyr, who was a chief tutor at the Spanish Court with a major influence on elite opinion, was convinced that the Indians of the Caribbean would prove equal to Europeans in skill and productivity, if only they were given the same technology and skills.
In sum, the earliest accounts of Columbus and other Spanish adventurers present a complex picture of both Caribbean society and European intentions. Most conclude that at least some groups of Indians were equal or superior to Europeans in terms of physical beauty, intelligence, and potential for future development. They also believed that some groups of Indians were more fearsome, physically uglier in their opinion, and had less praiseworthy customs. Of one thing we can be sure: this complex picture smashes through easy stereotypes like those proffered by the majority of modern pundits.
WHO WAS THE REAL COLUMBUS?
Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa in 1451, as the Italian Renaissance was reaching a crescendo. Contrary to what Monica Dutton and many of her real-world colleagues might claim, Renaissance Europe was no more hierarchical, patriarchal, or oppressive than any other major civilization. In fact, it was a good deal less so. In Columbus’s day, European society was a chaotic patchwork of jurisdictions and political systems. This included dozens of the world’s only functioning small-scale republics. Many scholars have credited this political fragmentation with creating a fertile ground for entrepreneurialism, a crucible of clashing institutions that eventually gave birth to modern capitalism. It was messy, and it was risky, but it created unequalled opportunities for social mobility, along with technological and scientific advancement.
Just a few decades after Columbus landed in the New World, Spain was rocked by a series of urban revolts led by the comuneros, in which citizens demanded constitutional rights, liberties, and freedoms. One looks in vain for similar occurrences in the contemporary Islamic or Asiatic worlds. Moreover, Western Europe was the only major society that allowed women to hold supreme political power: Queen Isabella of Spain and Queen Elizabeth I of England are only the most famous examples. European society gave administrative and economic power to women at every level of society, from duchesses down to tailors’ widows. The female literacy rate in Renaissance Europe far outstripped anywhere else in the world; Catholicism allowed women to become powerful abbesses; some Protestant sects allowed women to become preachers. Western Europe was—already by Columbus’s day—easily the most “feminist” city-dwelling culture the world had ever known.
It was into this world of chaos and opportunity that Christopher Columbus was born, and he took full advantage of it. His father wanted him to become a cloth weaver like himself, but young Cristoforo abandoned the workshop in favor of an adventurous life at sea. As a traveling merchant and budding entrepreneur, Columbus showed good knowledge of the long-distance cloth trade and experienced some early success. In his twenties, he immigrated to Lisbon, where he spent ten years at the heart of Europe’s growing community of Atlantic explorers and married into a wealthy family of Italian immigrants who had been ennobled by the Portuguese crown. His father-in-law—the lord of one of the newly organized European estates on Porto Santo, a previously uninhabited island off the coast of Morocco—served as an example of local lordship and estate management that loomed large in Columbus’s mind.
After many years spent badgering the Iberian monarchs to let him lead an expedition across the Atlantic in search of a passage to Asia, Columbus set sail from Seville in August 1492. Two months later, he sighted land on the other side of the Atlantic, likely an island in the modern-day Bahamas. Two weeks later he was at Cuba, and a month after that, he landed at Hispaniola, a large island that today hosts the nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
It was in these islands that Columbus encountered the Taino Indians, part of a larger group sometimes known as the Arawaks. The Tainos, in turn, were in the midst of being driven off their islands by the ruthless, cannibalistic Caribs, who were working their way up the Leeward Islands chain from South America. It was his encounters with the Tainos that caused Columbus to write the journal entries that we have already examined above.
After losing his flagship Santa Maria on a sandbar, Columbus had no choice but to leave some of his sailors behind. He christened the castaway settlement La Navidad and told them that he would return the following year. By February he was back at the Portuguese-held Azores. He returned to Spain in March, where he received a hero’s welcome.
On his first voyage, Columbus’s main goal was to produce proof that he had reached the great trading cities of Asia, described so lavishly by the Italian traveler Marco Polo some two hundred years before. Columbus was extremely disappointed to find the Bahaman islanders going about naked and “poor in everything,” as he put it. He asked these people for directions to China, but they kept pointing him to the source of their own legends, a great kingdom of gold that lay to the southeast. When Columbus later reached Cuba, he convinced himself (and tried to convince his men) that he had found the Asian mainland.
Also in Columbus’s mind was the hope that, given proper instruction, the Great Khan (the emperor) of China might prove willing to convert to Christianity. This would make him an invaluable ally against the Muslims whose successes after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 threatened to drive the Christians off the face of the Earth.
The question of just how religious Columbus really was has exercised scholars throughout the modern era. On the one hand he was eminently practical, a crass businessman and self-promoter who recognized that the use of religious rhetoric would have a positive effect on the pious Isabella. On the other hand, he himself became increasingly religious as he got older, though this was tinged with a sense of himself as an agent of providence who united previously disparate people around the world.12
In his journal Columbus advocated restraint when it came to introducing the Indians to Christianity, writing that “they were a people who could be more easily freed and converted to our holy faith by love than by force.” Even in late medieval Spain, voluntary conversion was usually preferred. While academics tend to think of Christian missionaries as agents of repression, the fact is Christianity has caused countless individuals to dedicate their lives to bettering the lot of Native groups in the New World, from Columbus’s day through the present.13 Bartolome de las Casas, whom we will meet later, was only the tip of the charitable iceberg in these early decades, a small army of Christian clergy and others whose selflessness and decency are now completely overlooked. Columbus and many others believed that, if shown good treatment, the Indians would accept Christianity in due time. On a pragmatic note, Columbus also recognized that people who did not have their own scriptures, such as Jews and Muslims, had proven historically more receptive to Christianity. In the end, his perception was correct. Throughout his subsequent governorship of the Caribbean, despite his numerous incompetencies and misdeeds, Columbus was never a consistent advocate for forced conversion, any more than Isabella herself.
Upon his return to Spain, Columbus found the Spanish monarchs in Barcelona, where he misleadingly informed them that the lands he had discovered were “infinitely fertile” and contained ample amounts of gold and valuable Asian spices. As William and Carla Phillips put it, Columbus knew that “his reputation and his future success would depend on the profitability of the lands he had discovered.”14More specifically, he hoped to rule over his island kingdom as a sort of count or duke, whose family would share in his prestige. With all the subtlety of a used car salesman, he described Cuba as an island larger than Great Britain, whose interior possessed “great mines of gold and other metals.” He further suggested that his tiny colony of La Navidad was “in the best position for the mines of gold…and for trade with the mainland… belonging to the Grand Khan, where there will be great trade and gain.”
In order to exploit the connections he created with the New World, the entrepreneurial Columbus proposed the creation of a series of trading posts in the Caribbean. The idea was to trade with Natives for their most valuable products, using a string of permanent coastal forts as bases for trade. This was hardly a novel idea: Columbus simply embraced the trading-fort model that the Italians had been using in the Black Sea for centuries. This trading-fort model had recently been exported to the West Coast of Africa with great success. It would soon be adopted by the Portuguese in India, Malaysia, East Africa, and the Persian Gulf.
Many people fault Columbus for setting up these trading forts, as if he should have known that this would soon prove devastating to New World civilization. But in the Black Sea, in West Africa, and in the Portuguese Indian Ocean Empire, these trading forts had only a very limited effect on local peoples. In all these places, Europeans were confined to their coastal enclaves by local rulers for many centuries, and the major effect of the European presence was to enrich both Europeans and locals via the creation of new trading networks. Given European experience throughout the Old World, in which Indigenous populations continued to thrive after contact with Europeans, neither Columbus nor anyone else could have foreseen the collapse in New World population levels that would result from European presence in the Caribbean.
The Spanish monarchs recognized that Columbus was an opportunist and prone to hyperbole, but they nonetheless granted him the title Admiral of the Ocean Sea as the promised reward for his exploits. Enticed by the potential of this New World, and the prospect of opening a direct trade route to China, they sent him out in 1493 with a much larger fleet of seventeen ships, with the purpose of reinforcing the fledgling colony at La Navidad. Columbus’s brother Diego accompanied him on this voyage, with the idea that he could act as governor and help establish a Columbus family dynasty.
Columbus arrived to find La Navidad in ruins, its people having been murdered by the supposedly peaceful islanders. He therefore founded a second colony, which he called La Isabela. But with ships and intelligence reports now arriving in Spain from the New World every few months or so, the Spanish monarchs soon realized that the Caribbean offered less in the way of quick riches than Columbus had promised.
They also quickly came to understand that Columbus was a terrible estate manager. La Isabela was badly situated and had limited sources of fresh water; there was also a lack of domestic animals after the starving inhabitants had slaughtered them for meat. In the end, many colonists either ran off to live with the Indians or sailed back to Spain in disgust. Meanwhile fights broke out among the settlers, and within a few years a full-scale rebellion was underway. Other colonists picked fights with the Indians, leading to a rapid collapse of any remaining goodwill and war with the Taino as early as 1494.
A few decades of Spanish maladministration and repression were sufficient to drive most of the Taino Indians from the islands altogether. Most accounts assume that the Tainos pitifully gave up and died in droves at the hands of sword-wielding Spanish adventurers, but this theory assumes that the Indians were stupid and lacking in agency—which they most certainly were not. Given their proven ability to canoe from island to island, and also to spread news quickly over long distances, it seems likely that most of the supposed “victims” of the Spanish invasion simply fled as Spanish repression got out of hand.
Many Taino women, meanwhile, settled down as wives of the Spanish newcomers, knowing that this would afford them considerable protection. Enthusiastic miscegenation on both sides led to a rapid increase in the mixed-race “mestizo” population of the islands—not to mention a tolerance for mixed-race people that persists to this day.
Desperate to prove that the New World could be profitable for Spain, Columbus allowed his men to enslave some of the “rebellious” Indians on Hispaniola and sell them in the Seville slave market. He accordingly sent several hundred of these back to Spain, though nearly half of them died (along with their European captors) when their ship was lost in an Atlantic storm.
This single incident was to prove the sum total of Columbus’s slaving activities, though even his admirers such as the chronicler Bartolome de Las Casas would regard it as the darkest stain on his entire career. Whether he would have enslaved more Indians or not given the chance to do so, the practice of selling them in Spain was quickly squelched by order of the queen, who regarded the Taino as subjects and therefore ineligible for enslavement. When she learned that about three hundred Tainos had been sold, she had the Indians tracked down, ransomed from their owners, and sent back to their homes in the New World. In fact, she was furious with Columbus, since she had made it clear that he was not to enslave the Natives; after this, she quickly sought ways to limit his power.
Meanwhile, Columbus made numerous concessions to the disgruntled colonists in a misguided effort to placate them, including a fateful decision to replicate the labor-service practice owed by peasants on Iberian estates. This became the basis of the much-disparaged encomienda system, whereby Natives were subjected to forced labor by their Spanish landlords. Moreover, the labor-service concession, which worked reasonably enough back in Iberia, was roundly abused in the Caribbean. Many colonists interpreted it as a license to round up and forcibly relocate bands of Indians, leading to further strife, atrocities, mass flight, and rapid social disintegration.
No one should be under any illusion as to whether the Spanish sometimes treated the Indians with incredible cruelty. According to various accounts, they devised games to determine whether individual Indians should live or die; they tested the sharpness of their swords by lopping off Indians’ heads at random, and mutilated them in any number of ways. At the same time, this needs to be seen in the light of Indian cruelty toward their own captives, both European and Indian, which as a rule was crueler and more torturous than that inflicted on them by the Spanish. It also needs to be seen in the light of the mixed-race relationships—and children —that were already being produced within a few years of the Spanish arrival.
When Isabella’s inspector Francisco de Bobadilla arrived at the islands in 1500, he found open rebellion among Spanish and Indian factions against Columbus and his brother. As he sailed into the harbor, Bobadilla saw that the admiral was in the process of hanging more than a dozen Europeans who had refused to submit to his authority. He immediately ordered Columbus and his brother removed from power and sent them home in chains.
Though he was later released, Columbus was never given another governorship. After a disastrous fourth voyage in which he discovered the mouth of the Orinoco River in Venezuela, only to be shipwrecked for over a year on the coast of Jamaica, Columbus returned home in a state of extreme mental agitation. In these later years he was given to fits of mystical prophecy and religious extremism that lasted until his death.
WAS COLUMBUS A MASS MURDERER?
According to popularly accepted figures, Columbus and the Spanish administrators of the islands are held responsible for the deaths of up to eight million Indians. We will look in greater detail at the charge of Taino genocide in the next chapter. But this is undoubtedly a wild exaggeration.
The idea that Columbus killed millions of people on Hispaniola is an unfortunate legacy of the writings of the aforementioned friar de las Casas, who saw firsthand the mistreatment of the Natives at the hands of Europeans during those first lawless decades. Las Casas’s most famous work, On the Destruction of the Indies, was a polemical tract designed to create maximum sympathy for the Indians in Spain.
It worked, and his persistence paid off with the passage in 1542 of the New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians, which overhauled the encomienda system and led to a gradual stabilization of Colonist-Indian-mestizo relations. By the end of the sixteenth century, most forced labor in New Spain had been replaced by wage labor, with African slaves remaining a small minority of unpaid workers in many Latin American countries.
Las Casas’s sympathy for the Indian plight did not prevent him from being a great admirer of Columbus. He went out of his way to portray Columbus as a protector of the Indians rather than a scourge. This is another inconvenient truth that has been swept under the rug by modern polemical treatments. Las Casas’s main target was not Columbus himself, but the Spanish adventurers and ne’er-do-wells who came after him in search of an opportunity to get rich quick. It was Las Casas who suggested that Hispaniola might have had up to three million people in 1491, a figure that most serious demographers reject as absurd, while modern activists continue to broadcast it as widely as possible.
The Yale Genocide Studies Program is slightly more cautious than many advocates of the island genocide theory, though it still gives credence to the idea that over a million Tainos might have died at the hands of the Spanish on the island.15 Yet even Howard Zinn, who understood the geography of Hispaniola and the limited ability of the Taino to produce food using their system of mound farming, accepted the far more realistic figure of two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants on the island before Columbus’s arrival.16
Furthermore, while it is true that thousands of people died as a result of Spanish maladministration and forced labor (perhaps up to twenty-five thousand over the course of fifty years), the number of Indigenous people killed in military engagements or wanton violence probably numbered about two or three thousand. The total number who were enslaved and sent back to Spain likewise appears to have been in the hundreds. Columbus himself was responsible for a tiny fraction of those killed through direct violence and mistreatment; as governor, he proved as likely to kill a European “rebel” as an Indigenous one. The great majority of those who died—easily over 90 percent—were victims of disease rather than cruelty.
Genetic tests have revealed surprisingly large proportions of Taino Indian DNA among modern Caribbean islanders, a finding that has shocked (and disheartened) advocates of Spanish genocide. Genetic evidence provides irrefutable proof that many more Indians survived and intermarried than is popularly believed. According to a report published in Indian Country Today, up to 61 percent of all Puerto Ricans have been found to have Taino Indian blood.17 This is a huge proportion, compared with only a couple of percent of Indian blood found in the US population at large. It suggests that Puerto Ricans have similar levels of Indigenous blood compared to other highly mixed peoples such as Mexicans, Guatemalans, and Bolivians; more will be said on this in the next chapter.
Moreover, research suggests that Taino genes were not at all inbred, confirming that Taino peoples mixed widely with people all around the Caribbean. Flight, intermarriage, and disease therefore are likely to account for over 90 percent of the missing Indians, and all of this points to the fact that charges of mass murder have been greatly exaggerated.
The reason why the real numbers of killed and enslaved were so low is that the Spanish government viewed the inhabitants of Hispaniola and other Caribbean islands as valuable subjects of the crown. Just as Queen Isabella would never send out an army of extermination against one of her own provinces except in extreme circumstances, so she continually admonished her officials to treat the Caribbean Natives with as much care as possible. Human beings were the greatest source of capital in Isabella’s day. Like other feudal lords, Isabella wanted to maximize the population of her territories, not reduce it. In a world recently depopulated by the Black Death, European lords knew that the only way to reap revenue from an estate was to have it worked by numerous hands in longstanding agricultural settlements.18Geographers and travelers often judged the quality of a city and a kingdom based on how populous it was. Population density was equated with power and good administration.
SLAVES…OR SOCIAL SUPERIORS?
The Wikipedia article on the voyages of Columbus is unfortunately typical of modern bias and sloppiness on the topic.19It suggests, for example, that the seven Tainos brought to Spain by Columbus after his first voyage were brought back as slaves, mere samples of human merchandise. To the contrary, all seven Tainos whom Columbus had captured and kept as interpreters were accorded places of honor in the Spanish court. Many solemn processions were held to commemorate their arrival; they were feasted and paraded with pomp across Iberia like visiting dignitaries In the royal hall at Barcelona, the seven Natives were baptized in a high ceremony, with one being given the baptismal name Fernando de Aragon—the same name as the king of Spain—and another Juan de Castilla, after the heir to the Spanish throne. The king and crown prince also acted as godparents.
The Indian christened Fernando was a relative of the chief Guacanagarix; he was therefore treated as a nobleman by the Spanish court. As we will see, this willingness to treat Indian “lords” as analogous to European nobility—hence socially and biologically superior to European commoners—was a standard feature of European-Indian relations for the first two centuries of contact.
Columbus’s accomplishments as a navigator and explorer are irrefutable and justly catapult him into the first rank of historical figures. For hundreds of years after Columbus, the mapmaking and geography he spurred acted as anchors for countless scientific advancements. It is no exaggeration to say that the European voyages of discovery remain foundational to all modern science and technology. Columbus was the first to bring New World peoples back into contact with the major civilizations of the Old World, and he is rightly remembered as a brash, colorful architect of modern globalism. He was also very much a man of his time and of his culture. He marveled at the wonders of the New World and had some of the sensibilities of a Renaissance artist. He appreciated the physical form and intelligence of some of the Caribbean Indians he encountered. He had the capacity for religious fanaticism, but for most of his life he was a religious opportunist who counseled moderation. He was greedy, to be sure, but like all good businessmen, he understood the need to play fair. He was willing to sell war captives as slaves, but only in some cases and only if circumstances allowed. His primary motive was the creation of a family dynasty, though he also wished to be remembered as an oceangoing successor to Marco Polo. As an administrator, however, he was disastrous. He was not particularly cruel by the standards of his day, but nor was he good at maintaining order or restraining his adopted Spanish allies from making life intolerable for the Tainos.
In sum, Columbus was no saint. He was a self-aggrandizing entrepreneur and a bad administrator who allowed anarchy to break out where some other men might have kept order. This ended up causing thousands of deaths and set the stage for more. At the same time, Columbus was an extremely brave and skilled navigator and a visionary who set the stage for modernity by uniting the two halves of planet Earth. The task of governing first contact between the Caribbean and European peoples was never going to be an easy one, and the fact that New World people proved so extremely susceptible to Old World disease could have been predicted by no one.
One thing that does no one any good is to exaggerate the numbers of Natives who died in the Caribbean, and to exaggerate the level of malice, racism, cruelty, greed, and zealotry borne by the Europeans. On all these counts, the slightest brush with the facts about Columbus and his career shows that the ideas articulated by Howard Zinn and his followers—including the writers of Yellowstone—are gross misrepresentations of what was in reality a complex and multifaceted historical encounter.
FOOTNOTES
9Yellowstone stars and is produced by veteran filmmaker Kevin Costner, whose tendencies to mythologize the American West were previously established in Dances with Wolves-a film to which we will return in due course.
10Christopher Columbus, The Journal of Christopher Columbus (During His First Voyage 1492-93), ed. Clements R. Markham (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2016), entry for October 11, 1492.
11Columbus, journal entry for December 24, 1492.
12 Francis Jennings in his Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest, pp. 5-6, sets up Spain as a “crusading society” that had been shaped by the Reconquista. This view was common in his day, but it has long since been debunked by scholars working on the topic. In the popular mind, this stereotype of Spaniards as religious zealots still has a lot of traction.
13The dominant academic reading of Christian missionizing activity is based on the writings of French theorist Michel Foucault (192684), who is credited with inventing the notion that “all discourse is power.” One implication of this theory is that no missionizing, however well-meaning, is simply “good” or “kind.” It is also an attempt by one group to gain power over another. While cynical, this view contains enough elements of truth to keep a lively debate going.
14William D. Phillips and Carla Rahn Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 185.
Moral standards…presuppose absolute moral standards, which in turn presuppose the existence of an absolute personality. In other words, they presuppose the existence of God. But what God?… Of all the major religious traditions, it is only biblical religion that affirms a God who is both personal and absolute. [Only biblical religion sees] that the idea of absolute personality is closely linked to the ideas of a Creator-creature distinction [as reflected in the imagoDei], divine sovereignty, and the Trinity. Compromise these and you compromise the personality of God. This precise pattern of thought is found only in the Bible and in traditions which are heavily influenced by the Bible. Is it then too much to say that morality presupposes the God of the Bible? I think not. — John Frame
I have been wanting to connect the reason I see gender-neutral pronouns like, they/them, ze/zim, sie/hir, are being used by the post-modern Left. The real — bottom line reason — is it dilutes evidences for God and every human’s “Imago Dei” Norman Geisler notes that “[t]he only ‘common ground’ with unbelievers is that they too are creatures in God’s image and live in God’s world.” Continuing he says,
But there are no common notions or methods; non-Christians approach the world differently from Christians, and they view it differently. We have a common world with unbelievers but no common worldview. The contact point with unbelievers is the imago Dei. But even here the “point of contact” is the “point of conflict,” for “if there is no head-on collision with the systems of the natural man there will be no point of contact with the sense of deity in the natural man.” Conflict is inevitable because of human depravity and sin.
I will emphasize our personal being in our language to bolster the point in this paragraph
Let me explain a bit more. Part of the Imago Dei in us all is that we get our “being” from it [“It” – the Ultimate Being]. In other words, an example I use is “can you refer to yourself in the womb of your mother without using personal pronouns? We have an “I” in our being. But that “I” has not always existed… it itself was brought into being by my, or your, parents. Who likewise had being, but “contingent ‘being,'” as they relied on others for their being.
I know, it is tough. But this “being” I am speaking of is argued well below, and is an excellent apologetic for God and the Christian worldview. Excerpted from my post, “Kalam Cosmological Argument ~ History and Argument“
PUT THUS:
We spoke of the universe as “the collection of beings in space and time.” Consider one such being: yourself. You exist, and you are, in part at least, material. This means that you are a finite, limited and changing being, you know that right now, as you read this book, you are dependent for your existence on beings outside you. Not your parents or grandparents. They may no longer be alive, but you exist now. And right now you depend on many things in order to exist–for example, on the air you breathe. To be dependent in this way is to be contingent. You exist if something else right now exists.
But not everything can be like this. For then everything would need to be given being, but there would be nothing capable of giving it. There would not exist what it takes for anything to exist. So there must be something that does not exist conditionally; something which does not exist only if something else exists; something which exists in itself. What it takes for this thing to exist could only be this thing itself. Unlike changing material reality, there would be no distance, so to speak, between what this thing is and that it is. Obviously the collection of beings changing in space and time cannot be such a thing. Therefore, what it takes for the universe to exist cannot be identical with the universe itself or with a part of the universe.
An excellent short video explaining this all is this one,
Contingency Argument SPEED RUN!
In other words, our “being” has a Cause in His “Being.” Plato saw this dimly in his Theory of Forms:
Plato’s Theory of Forms is a philosophical concept that explains the nature of reality. The basic question goes something like this:
We can see trees, cats, circles and many other things in everyday life, and we can easily recognise each one as the thing it is supposed to be. But, if we look closer, we never really see anything like a “standard cat.” Every cat is different, and so is every tree and every drawn circle. Especially with geometric forms, they are never perfect. Every circle we can see in our world is either broken, distorted, pixelated, or in a myriad of other ways not “a perfect circle.” In fact, a perfect geometrical circle would need to be drawn with a line that does not have any thickness, and so would be invisible!
So how is it, Plato asks, that we are able to identify circles, trees and cats if have actually never seen a “standard” thing of each kind?
There are two worlds, Plato says: the world of physical objects and the world of Forms. The world of physical objects is the world we see around us, while the world of Forms is the world of abstract concepts and ideas. The Forms are perfect, unchanging, and eternal, while the physical objects we see around us are imperfect, changing, and temporary.
Norman Geisler explains this in differing ways with the following. And note, I have more in-depth reproductions of his arguments in the second half of this post — along with the PDF reproductions for download. But I am here desperately trying to dumb the argument down to make the broader point. Which is, the “pronouns” being foisted on us ARE AN ATTACK on the foundation of truth and reality, which is rooted in God’s “Being”, Image, transferred to us in a finite, now fallen way.
This contingent being is caused either (1) by itself, or (2) by another.
If it were caused by itself, it would have to precede itself in existence, which is impossible.
P2) Therefore, this contingent being (2) is caused by another, i.e., depends on something else for its existence.
P3) That which causes (provides the sufficient reason for) the existence of any contingent being must be either (3) another contingent being, or (4) a non-contingent being (necessary) being.
If 3, then this contingent cause must itself be caused by another, and so onto infinity.
P4) Therefore, that which causes (provides the sufficient reason for) the existence of any contingent being must be either (5) an infinite series of contingent beings, or (4) a necessary being.
P5) An infinite series of contingent beings (5) is incapable of yielding a sufficient reason for the existence of any being.
P6) Therefore, a necessary being (4) exists!
Based on the Principle of Existential Causality
Some limited, changing being[s] exist.
The present existence of every limited, changing being is caused by another.
There cannot be an infinite regress of causes of being.
Therefore, there is a first Cause of the present existence of these beings.
This first Cause must be infinite, necessary, eternal, simple, unchangeable and one.
This first uncaused Cause is identical with the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition
A mix of both
Something exists (e.g., I do);
I am a contingent being;
Nothing cannot cause something;
Only a Necessary Being can cause a contingent being;
Therefore, I am caused to exist by a Necessary Being;
But I am personal, rational, and moral kind of being (since I engage in these kinds of activities);
Therefore this Necessary Being must be a personal, rational, and moral kind of being, since I am similar to him by the Principle of Analogy;
But a Necessary Being cannot be contingent (i.e., not necessary) in its being which would be a contradiction;
Therefore, this Necessary Being is personal, rational, and moral in a necessary way, not in a contingent way;
This Necessary Being is also eternal, uncaused, unchanging, unlimited, and one, since a Necessary Being cannot come to be, be caused by another, undergo change, be limited by any possibility of what it could be (a Necessary Being has no possibility to be other than it is), or to be more than one Being (since there cannot be two infinite beings);
Therefore, one necessary, eternal, uncaused, unlimited (=infinite), rational, personal, and moral being exists;
Such a Being is appropriately called “God” in the theistic sense, because he possesses all the essential characteristics of a theistic God;
Therefore, the theistic God exists.
IN OTHER WORDS, our being, the “I” that we experience the world through IS AN APOLOGETIC, EVIDENCE of God!
Our being has a logical argument from Thee Being.
Our being (ways in which something can exist or occur or to be presented, or stand) is rooted in a theistic argument that is much surer in it’s premises and explanations.
That aside, the Marxist [read here atheistic] attack on Western values and truth is rooted itself in negating the Judeo-Christian aspect of historical truth, or knowing Part of this argument is the enquiry into “what we can know.” Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution either state or assume this:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
[….]
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
[….]
“We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States…”
This title of Supreme Judge of the world establishes God not only as the Creator of the world but also as the source of moral law. This statement is in opposition to the idea of Deism, which says that there exists a supreme being or creator who set the universe in motion but does not intervene in human affairs or the natural world. This statement suggests that those writing the declaration believed that the God of the Bible was the ultimate judge of good and evil.
The final mention of God in the Declaration of Independence labels God as the giver of Divine Providence.
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
This is a statement of trust in the divine’s oversight and actions that would result in declaring independence from Britain. These four mentions of God show that the founding fathers had a clear belief in moral truth which originated from a supreme being. In an article for Intercessors for America, Tyler O’Neil states, “The leaders who formed our country based their arguments for independence on the laws of God, and they trusted Him to guide America through its struggles. They looked to faith as a bulwark of freedom, not as its opposite.”
What Role Did Religious Beliefs Play in the Founding of the United States?
Many religious backgrounds made up those living in Colonial America at the time of the Declaration of Independence and the writing of the U.S. Constitution. Puritans, Anglicans, Quakers, Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, and Jewish congregations were all represented within the American Colonies.
It is well documented that 51 of the 55 delegates at the Constitutional Convention claimed to hold Christian beliefs. Even Benjamin Franklin, a proclaimed Deist, gave a call to prayer that contained several references to scripture on June 28th, 1787, when the Constitutional Convention was struggling to agree.
“The Constitution doesn’t explicitly mention God but references frequently concepts central to Christianity like morals, reason, and free will,” says David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, a Texas-based group dedicated to promoting America’s Christian heritage. …
In other words, attacking the foundation of knowledge and beings able to know moral truths and reality is at the heart of the pronoun issue. It is both an attack on our freedoms here in America, as well as an attack on our freedoms discovered via Western culture writ large.
There seems to be little consensus where there was once clarity on what constituted male and female, boy and girl, man and woman, he and she. This is evidenced in the growing number of people who identify as transgender (those who experience gender dysphoria, a condition that describes the “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity”) or those who identify themselves using other nontraditional gender terms. As such, it is becoming somewhat common for people to state or list their preferred pronouns in conversation, on social media, before meetings, or in email signatures. For example, during the 2020 election season, several Democratic presidential candidates put their preferred pronouns on their social media profiles.
In contrast, the Christian worldview asserts that God created people to be either male or female. Genesis 1:27 reads, “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them.” God did not intend for sex and gender (identity) to be separate from one another; they are synonymous. To adopt a different worldview on sex and gender would be to reject the truth. Nevertheless, the culture today is attempting (with some success, unfortunately) to convince Christians differently.
To not call someone by their preferred pronouns, like, xe/xir/xirs, ze/zir/zirs and fae/faer/faers, is liked to a “human rights violations.” In fact, those prouns are an attack on what it is to be human.
Our essence.
Our being.
Dennis Prager says it is a war on human order. Which is a war on God:
Genesis 3:5 has the serpent (the Devil) tempting Adam and Eve. Half-truths are the best the Serpent can come up with, but the commentary I love on this verse will follow. I will highlightsome points in it. 3:5 reads: “In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (CSB).
Here is the commentary:
The climax is a lie big enough to reinterpret life (this breadth is the power of a false system) and dynamic enough to redirect the flow of affection and ambition. To be as God,25 and to achieve it by outwitting him, is an intoxicating programme. God will henceforth be regarded, consciously or not, as rival and enemy. Against this human arrogance ‘the obedience of the one’ and his taking ‘the form of a servant’ show up in their true colours (Rom. 5:19; Phil. 2:7).
So the tempter pits his bare assertion against the word and works of God, presenting divine love as envy, service as servility, and a suicidal plunge as a leap into life, ‘All these things will I give thee …’; the pattern repeats in Christ’s temptations, and in ours.
— On knowing good and evil, see on 2:9 [see below].
25.Or, gods (AV). The word ’ĕlōhîm can be used generically to include the angelic orders; see on 1:26.
2:9
…. The knowledge of good and evil is perhaps best understood in this living context. In isolation it could mean a number of things, many of them with biblical support. The phrase can stand for moral or aesthetic discernment (e.g. 1 Kgs 3:9; Isa. 7:15); yet Adam and Eve are already treated as morally responsible (2:16, 17) and generally percipient (3:6) before they touch the tree. It could be a hebraism for ‘everything’ (i.e. man is not to covet omniscience); yet it can hardly mean this in 3:22. It has often been regarded as sexual awakening, in the light of 3:7; recently R. Gordis suggested that this tree thereby offers a rival immortality to that of the tree of life, in the procreation of a family and a posterity. This too is open to several objections, including the fact that 3:22a is incompatible with it (heaven is sexless in the Old as in the New Testament), and that God instituted marriage after forbidding the use of the tree that is said to symbolize it.
In the context, however, the emphasis falls on the prohibition rather than the properties of the tree. It is shown to us as forbidden. It is idle to ask what it might mean in itself; this was Eve’s error. As it stood, prohibited, it presented the alternative to discipleship: to be self-made, wresting one’s knowledge, satisfactions and values from the created world in defiance of the Creator (cf. 3:6). Even more instructive is the outcome of the experiment; see on 3:7. In all this the tree plays its part in the opportunity it offers, rather than the qualities it possesses; like a door whose name announces only what lies beyond it.
Derek Kidner, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 1, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1967), 67–68, 73.
Yep. It is all a big lie. And the extreme gender confusion with it’s high rate of suicide is literally “a suicidal plunge as a leap into life.”
And another point. Lets say you work at a Starbucks in West Hollywood, and you have 4-people who each have chosen a preferred pronoun[s]. For example, here are some of the choices:
So one person uses “xe, xem, xyr, xyers.”
Another uses “ne, nem, nir, nerself.”
Yet another uses “ci, cer, cer, cirs.”
And lastly this person uses “ve, vis, ver, verself.”
How is one supposed to keep track of all that hogwash so as not to get fired? It is impossible for even these 4 to keep it straight. In Michigan they are making these felonies:
A new Michigan bill would make it a hate crime to cause someone to “feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened.”
The Michigan Hate Crime Act, designated HB 4474 , passed in the state House on Tuesday and now goes before the Michigan Senate. It will replace the existing Ethnic Intimidation Act and expand the categories of people protected by the law.
The new bill would include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity or expression” as classes protected against intimidation.
[….]
If passed, the hate speech legislation would make violators guilty of a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of $10,000.
AMERICAN THINKER notes this religious attack implicitly at the beginning of their article:
God-fearing people recognize that the effort to demolish the two God-given genders is a shaking of the fist at the Almighty. After all, the first chapter of the Bible says: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them”(Genesis 1:27). This paradigm empowers females who are created in the imago dei. They are different from males, but equal to them at the level of essence. Nature and biology confirm God’s binary design.
Unfortunately, we live in a post-Christian society. Sane arguments often fall on deaf ears. The secular elites who control education and the media have marginalized those who provide biblical explanations. Given this sad reality, might there be another way to end the compelled speech of pronoun lunacy in which people can decide by which pronouns they will be referred?
[….]
For example, if someone asked another person about me: “What do you think of Newt?” They would need to respond something like: “I hate Newt. He is a tyrant. He never does what you ask of her.” Note that “he” is used when Newt is the subject of the sentence, and “her” is used at the end when Newt is the object of the sentence. If they failed to honor my preferred pronouns and said, “…He never does whatever you ask of him…” this would be a violation. I would report this, and press charges, if possible.
Mary could likewise insist on her pronouns being “She” and “Him.” Those speaking or writing about Mary would have to write something like: “I appreciate Mary. She is a great friend. I have no better friend than him. She is a great listener.” Or she could insist on “He” and “Her” (as does Newt).
Can you imagine if as many people as possible insisted upon this practice? Might it cause the regime of verbal tyranny to collapse? Though we are in the process of butchering English with the improper use of “they,” the mind can factor in this mutation and get used to it. However, since native English speakers calculate pronoun case automatically and subconsciously, it would be nearly impossible to speak and write in a way that could satisfy those who insist on different gendering pronouns that are case-dependent.
Yep. It is impossible to satisfy such people. This thinking “wresting one’s knowledge, satisfactions and values from the created world in defiance of the Creator.”
SOME APOLOGISTS DISCUSS THE ISSUE:
Douglas Groothuis w/Melissa Dougherty
Today, I interviewed Dr. Groothuis about the craziness we see around us and what we can do about it. Dr. Groothuis holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and is a Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary. He is the author of sixteen books and has also published over thirty academic articles in journals as well as dozens of pieces in publications.
Nancy Pearcey w/Babylon Bee’s Ethan Nicolle
Editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle welcome Professor Nancy Pearcey. She is professor of apologetics and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University and author of several books, most recently Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality. Prof. Pearcey’s books also include Total Truth, Finding Truth, The Soul of Science, Saving Leonardo and How Now Shall We Live? (co-authored with Chuck Colson). They talk about sexuality, gender, abortion, and Christianity’s high view of the human body.
Topics Discussed
Abortion… scientific human life vs modern Personhood Theory
Biological Sex vs Gender
The Christian’s high view of the material world and the human body due to belief in the incarnation of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the new heaven and earth.
Trusting in a design vs individual revolt against nature and biological realities
Language as a front in the culture war
All of our actions endorse a worldview
What about people who identify as “gay Christians” or some other adjective placed before the word Christian?
Nudity in medieval Christian art
Unnamed People w/Melissa Dougherty
There’s a postmodern ideology that is plowing through our world that aims to dismantle all societal and moral norms. This ideology is responsible for how we have gotten to the point in society where language is rebranded and “sex” and “gender” are separate. Now, there are supposedly unlimited genders. If this isn’t disturbing enough, the logical conclusion of this ideology (which really functions like a religion) is that age should be flexible, too. Kids should have the freedom to choose what age they identify as… as sexual beings. This ideology says this is good, liberating, and empowering.
This is completely shocking. And absolute garbage that should be talked about and brought to light.
Megyn Kelly discusses the media lying about the facts in the police report regarding the Pete Hegseth sexual assault allegations, the holes in the accuser’s story, the truth about why Hegseth was never charged, and more.
Trans identified males are taking medals, team berths and sponsorship dollars away from women. And not a single athletic brand is standing up for the protection of women’s sports.– Jennifer Sey’s Substack
Wow. The Democrat Left is cray-cray…. and in all their redefining of fascism, Hitler, and the like as normal thoughts of common sense, they — in the end — diminish real evil. Making it nothing but a passing thought/weapon to emote about something they disagree with rather than a real historical evil meant to warn of actual dangers of man’s nature.
FLASHBACK POST: Female athletes have lost nearly 900 medals to transgender rivals competing against them in women’s sporting categories, an eye-opening United Nations report has revealed. (RPT)
BREITBART fills us in on the latest misuse and diminishing of real evil:
A pair of teenage girls at a California high school are accusing officials in their athletic department of comparing their “Save Girls’ Sports” t-shirts to “swastikas.”
Kaitlyn and Taylor, who play on teams for Martin Luther King High School in Riverside, California, say they were disrespected by school officials when they wore their “Save Girls’ Sports” shirts in response to a transgender player who rarely attended practice and should not have qualified, but who was still placed on a varsity team, displacing Taylor, Fox News reported.
Now the girls are suing their school.
“My initial reaction was like, I was really surprised, because it was like, why is this happening to me?” Taylor said. “There’s a transgender student on the team. Why am I getting displaced when I’ve worked so hard and gone to all of the practices, and this student has only attended a few of the practices.”
The girls allege in their lawsuit that school officials made them remove their activist shirts and were told they were creating a “hostile environment” at the school. They also say that officials said the shirts were the same as wearing a swastika.
[….]
Attorney Julianne Fleischer alleges that the school violated her clients’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights and their Title IX protections.
“We’re seeing more and more women and young girls speak up and challenge these policies that are allowing biological boys to join and participate in these sports,” Fleischer insisted. “And so there’s lawsuits that are popping up all around the country. We’re hopeful that even with the incoming administration and Congress that we’re going to see real positive change to Title IX that actually upholds and safeguards the rights of women to participate in their sports and to be safe and to be able to compete amongst one another.”
[….]
For instance, a girls’ high school volleyball team at a Christian school in Merced, California, recently forfeited a game because they did not wish to compete against a trans player.
The Christian high school is only one of a growing list of school teams that are refusing to play against opponents with transgender players. A lawsuit was filed this year against San Jose State University (SJSU) and the Mountain West Conference for allowing a male athlete to play on the SJSU women’s volleyball team.
To date, five colleges have refused to play against SJSU over the school’s inclusion of transgender player Blair Fleming.
The National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) is also being sued by several groups over its policy of allowing transgender players to play as women.
A Couple Brave Girls Speak Out Against the #WarOnWomen
Daily Caller describes their longer video of the above clip, “Save Girls’ Sports” is now a Nazi phrase? These people will never learn, will they?”
PJ-MEDIA agrees, they haven’t learned what the issue… the real issue is about:
This past week has seen certain LGBT issues take center stage again after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) officially declared that sex-segregated spaces at the Capitol, like bathrooms and locker rooms, “are reserved for individuals of that biological sex.” This commonsense policy that protects women has prompted all sorts of outrage from the radical left. Naturally, the left doesn’t see it this way and is fuming over it.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said the policy is “endangering all women and girls.”
Her response was the epitome of stupid, but she wasn’t the only one distorting the issue.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) offered his office bathroom for Representative-elect [Tim] Sarah McBride to use and declared “There’s no job I’m afraid to lose if it requires me to degrade anyone.”
And then there’s Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.), who said, “My GOP colleagues, who privately tell me they don’t hate LGBTQ+ people, should find the courage to reject the dehumanizing rhetoric. Your silence is deafening.”
Her tweet, dripping with the kind of condescension we’ve come to expect from progressive Democrats, misses the mark entirely. This isn’t about hate. The debate over policies like barring biological men from women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports isn’t about hate — it’s about protecting basic rights and common sense.
Americans have every right to defend spaces and opportunities specifically designed for women. These aren’t trivial issues — they involve fundamental questions of fairness and safety that, for some reason, the radical left has completely abandoned because it’s now owned by the transgender lobby.
Remember, it took a long time for women to get the same opportunities as men. Think about it. Title IX, the landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education, was only passed in 1972. Nearly fifty years later, the idea of biological men competing in female athletics has become the cause du jour of the radical left, completely undermining the intent and spirit of the law.
Men who claim to “identify” as women enjoy biological advantages that cannot be erased with plastic surgery or hormone treatments. It doesn’t matter what a man’s “preferred pronouns” are or if he puts on a dress. He’ll have higher bone density, muscle mass, and lung capacity, giving him an edge that his female athletes simply can’t match.
Allowing biological men into women’s sports effectively robs women of the chance to compete on an equal playing field and, sadly, has stolen accolades and opportunities from real women.
The same principles apply to private spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms. It’s not “dehumanizing” or “degrading” to say that women and girls deserve privacy and safety. It’s not hateful to expect boundaries rooted in biological reality. It’s about respect — both for real women’s needs and for the truth.
Balint’s claim that silence equals complicity is a typical identity politics tactic, demanding moral submission instead of fostering meaningful debate. And Democrats never want to debate the issues. Particularly this one.
The real issue is the left’s refusal to acknowledge that concerns about protecting women’s sports and private spaces are grounded in science and shared by many Americans. Conservatives must reject the false narrative that defending women’s rights is anti-LGBTQ. This debate isn’t about hate but about fairness, dignity, and recognizing biological differences are real and cannot be erased.
In honor of #XXDay tomorrow, please join us in asking @Nike to do the right thing & stand up for girls, by sharing our new ad, “Dear Nike”. pic.twitter.com/af8XeYPhTv
PJ-MEDIA writes about the lawsuit, I will follow that up with a HOT AIR update:
… Luckily, some college athletes have had enough of this type of nonsense, and they’re taking legal action.
San Jose State volleyball player Brooke Slusser, along with SJSU associate head coach Melissa Batie-Smoose, and 10 other college athletes have filed a lawsuit against the school and the Mountain West Conference, the NCAA Division I conference in which the school plays.The women claim that their Title IX rights have been violated by SJSU allowing a transgender athlete on the volleyball team.
“Among the allegations in the lawsuit are that SJSU coach Todd Kress gave the player in question preferential treatment, that the Mountain West amended its transgender athlete participation policy without following conference protocol and that the conference fostered an unsafe environment by allowing the athlete to play,” according to ESPN.
Fox News reported that several female athletes were overlooked for scholarships because of the transgender player’s “physical dominance.” The lawsuit documents also suggest that Slusser felt her personal safety was in danger when the transgender athlete and another player got together and put a plan in place to have the ball spiked right at her head in a match with Colorado State.
Upon hearing about the plan, Batie-Smoose attempted to stand up for the girls on the team by talking to Kress and filing a Title IX complaint, but she was suspended from the program. “They took away the only safe space we had,” Slusser said of losing her coach. She also accused the school of silencing people who were just trying to stand up for what’s right. ….
HOT AIR posts on the growing legal challenge growing in California:
… Last week I wrote about a Title IX lawsuit filed by players and one coach against the San Jose State University women’s volleyball team. The lawsuit was filed because the SJSU team includes a trans woman whose athletic ability exceeds that of other members of her team or, according to the lawsuit, of any player on any women’s team.
During practices in August 2024 immediately before the 2024 season Slusser and Batie-Smoose saw that Fleming was hitting the ball with more force than in 2023 and far harder than any woman they had ever played or coached with or against.
Where Fleming stood out was spiking the volleyball and blocking on the front row due to Fleming’s leaping ability and hitting power, which far exceeded that of any player in the conference and was the most explosive of any player that SJSU’s Associate Head Coach has observed in collegiate women’s volleyball…
Fleming’s spikes were estimated to be traveling upwards of 80 miles per hour, which is faster than a woman hits a volleyball.
Now the University of Utah has filed a motion to join that lawsuit.
Utah State University has filed a motion to join a federal lawsuit against the Mountain West Conference, challenging the organization’s transgender participation policy.
The move comes after the state’s Republican political leaders — including Gov. Spencer J. Cox, Senate President Stuart Adams and House Speaker Mike Schultz — urged the university to join the lawsuit that was filed last week in U.S. District Court by 11 volleyball players and one coach in the Mountain West.
USU volleyball player Kaylie Ray is one of the 12 plaintiffs in the original lawsuit. According to Utah State’s motion, the Aggie volleyball team took an anonymous survey and 11 players, including Ray, decided to not play an October match against San Jose State “due to concerns of fairness and to communicate that they do not agree with the TPP (transgender participation policy) and hold strong personal and political beliefs that transgender women should not be permitted to compete in women’s sports.”
I have recently come across a list of “sexes” pictured to the right. The person posting this noted:
Saw this and wanted to copy it and share it. We love our black-and-white dichotomy because it’s so easy to then label and categorize folks. But it is a LOT more complex than that. Not asking ANYONE to change their conclusions. Just become more aware of the complexities so that you don’t look so ignorant when you post simplistic memes and such…..
A few years back I looked into an example from this list, which I will excerpt how rare these are:
The term Klinefelter syndrome (KS) describes a group of chromosomal disorder in which there is at least one extra X chromosome to a normal male karyotype, 46,XY. XXY aneuploidy is the most common disorder of sex chromosomes in humans, with prevalence of one in 500 males. Other sex chromosomal aneuploidies have also been described, although they are much less frequent, with 48,XXYY and 48,XXXY being present in 1 per 17,000 to 1 per 50,000 male births. The incidence of 49,XXXXY is 1 per 85,000 to 100,000 male births. In addition, 46,XX males also exist and it is caused by translocation of Y material including sex determining region (SRY) to the X chromosome during paternal meiosis.
A great – short – video regarding the most common occurrence from above is this:
HEALTHY MALErecommends this treatment of this most expressive DISORDER:
Infants and children with Klinefelter syndrome should be examined by their doctor at least every two years to monitor their physical development.
They may need support from specialists to manage any problems with speech, learning, behaviour or psychiatric issues.
Testosterone treatment might be prescribed for boys with Klinefelter syndrome who have a very small penis.
Monitoring the growth and hormone function of boys with Klinefelter syndrome in the lead-up to puberty helps guide decisions about testosterone treatment, which may become necessary.
Testosterone treatment is recommended to many adults with Klinefelter syndrome.
If you have Klinefelter syndrome and are not receiving testosterone treatment, your hormonal function should be checked every 12 months.
I emphasized “disorder” because I have been wanting to connect a thought by C.S. Lewis discussing morality. But as you read the below, a substitution of this debate regarding “the binary” view can be inserted.
[T]his Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature). . . .
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining “It’s not fair” before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong—in other words, if there is no Law of Nature—what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?
And an older quote that makes the above point, sorta, for law is this:
…Proponents of gay marriage fail utterly to comprehend the idea that laws are made with society, not the individual, in mind. That is why they also fail to grasp the idea that law is predicated upon averages, not outliers. Interestingly, both libertarians and progressives suffer from this lack of understanding.
[….]
But more often they try to undermine the link between marriage and childrearing by pointing to outliers—marriages in which couples choose not to have children or cannot have them because at least one partner happens to be infertile. But this argument only reveals the weakness of the progressive understanding of the law. Put simply, rules that are justified by the average case cannot be undermined by the exceptional case, otherwise known as the outlier. Thus the old maxim, “Hard cases make bad law.”…
Mike S. Adams, Letters To A Young Progressive (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2013), 81, 82.
Adam and Eve would have been made fully, male and female. Many years later the curse brought mutations into the mix. We do not “add” to god’s ideal, we keep it all the while showing love and respect for the Imago Dei to all without changing societal norms, sports, culture to fit or adapt to outliers… genetic mutations. We treat these disorders.
Treat them.
This is key.
You do not treat the normal, but abnormal.
An article notes that for the first time in the U.K., a major London hospital has launched Europe’s first multidisciplinary clinic for children with the rare genetic condition Klinefelter syndrome.
The centre at the Evelina Children’s Hospital will aim to improve diagnosis of children with the condition, which can cause serious problems including infertility and cardiovascular disease.
Around one in 660 men are affected by the condition.
Males with the condition are born with an extra X chromosome. Typically, a male baby has one X and one Y chromosome and a female baby has two X chromosomes.
Klinefelter syndrome can also cause problems with learning, attention, energy levels and socialising.
[….]
Infertility or relative lack of testosterone can be treated with gonadotrophin-releasing hormone or testosterone replacement therapy, but patients need access to a range of medical specialties including geneticists, endocrinologists, neurodevelopmental and psychological support.
The clinic will bring all these specialties together under one roof.
Because of the political season, I had missed the passing of a giant in the Intelligent Design community passing away a couple months ago. I have used his arguments well in debating I.D. online since the late 1990’s in forums like Space Battles and Volconvo (back in the day). I also have a couple excerpts from his book Zombie Science, that I do not remember what I used them for. Surely it was a debate online somewhere. Those will be at the end.
Jonathan Wells (1942-2024) received two PhDs, one in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley, and one in Religious Studies from Yale University. A Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, he previously worked as a postdoctoral research biologist at the University of California at Berkeley and the supervisor of a medical laboratory in Fairfield, California. He also taught biology at California State University in Hayward.
Dr. Wells published articles in Development, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, BioSystems, The Scientist and The American Biology Teacher. He is the author of Charles Hodge’s Critique of Darwinism (Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), Icons of Evolution: Why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong (Regnery, 2000), The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Regnery, 2006), and The Myth of Junk DNA. He was also co-author with William Dembski of The Design of Life (FTE, 2008). His last solo book, Zombie Science (DI Press, 2017), showed how evolutionary theory — “though empirically dead” — continues to stalk our scientific and educational institutions. Dr. Wells also did research and writing on developmental information in embryos that is outside of, and inherited independently of, their DNA.
The video is the full Icons of Evolution movie, here is the description:
Some of these icons of evolution present assumptions or hypotheses as though they were observed facts; in Stephen Jay Gould’s words, they are “incarnations of concepts masquerading as neutral descriptions of nature.” Others conceal raging controversies among biologists that have far-reaching implications for evolutionary theory. Worst of all, some are directly contrary to well-established scientific evidence. Most biologists are unaware of these problems. Indeed, most biologists work in fields far removed from evolutionary biology. Most of what they know about evolution, they learned from biology textbooks and the same magazine articles and television documentaries that are seen by the general public. But the textbooks and popular presentations rely primarily on the icons of evolution, so as far as many biologists are concerned the icons are the evidence for evolution.
Some biologists are aware of difficulties with a particular icon because it distorts the evidence in their own field. When they read the scientific literature in their specialty, they can see that the icon is misleading or downright false. But they may feel that this is just an isolated problem, especially when they are assured that Darwin’s theory is supported by overwhelming evidence from other fields. If they believe in the fundamental correctness of Darwinian evolution, they may set aside their misgivings about the particular icon they know something about. On the other hand, if they voice their misgivings they may find it difficult to gain a hearing among their colleagues, because (as we shall see) criticizing Darwinian evolution is extremely unpopular among English-speaking biologists. This may be why the problems with the icons of evolution are not more widely known. And this is why many biologists will be just as surprised as the general public to learn how serious and widespread those problems are.
There is a part two to the above, but it is more of a lecture form well-worth the watch as well:
In his latest book Zombie Science, biologist Jonathan Wells asks a simple question: If the icons of evolution were just innocent textbook errors, why do so many of them still persist? Wells gave a presentation about Zombie Science at the book’s national launch party recently in Seattle. (see more about the presentation here https://evolutionnews.org/2017/06/jon…) Watch as Wells explores a new wave of icons walking the halls of science while putting some familiar corpses back in the grave. New topics include DNA, the human eye, vestigial organs, antibiotic resistance, and cancer. Looking past the current zombie outbreak, Wells offers a hopeful vision of science free from the clutches of materialist dogma. Wells himself is something of an iconoclast, railing against the tyranny of science’s Darwin-only advocates. His first book, Icons of Evolution, became an international hit by dismantling the outdated and underwhelming “proofs” of evolution that have littered textbooks for decades. For doing so, he was attacked by Darwin’s defenders and became one of the most hated figures of the intelligent design movement.
Icons of Evolution’s website is here. I pray it is kept up:
Here are those promised quotes, I created them in my Microsoft Word, September 2017:
Eighteen Winged Dragonflies.
UBX is one of a family of genes called “Hox genes,” which affect head-to-tail development. In 2007, Donald Prothero published a book defending evolution. The book included a photo of a four-winged fruit fly to illustrate how “big developmental changes can result from small genetic mutations.”99 The book also claimed that modern four-winged dragonflies evolved from ancient dragonflies that had more wings, and it featured a drawing of an eighteen-winged dragonfly together with a four-winged dragonfly. According to its caption, the drawing illustrated “the evolutionary mechanism by which Hox genes allow arthropods to make drastic changes in their number and arrangements of segments and appendages, producing macroevolutionary changes with a few simple mutations.”100
In November 2009, Prothero (together with Skeptic magazine editor Michael Shermer) debated Discovery Institute senior fellows Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg. During the debate, Sternberg pointed out that eighteen-winged dragonflies never existed.101 A few days later, Prothero responded in a blog post that Meyer and Sternberg had “completely missed the point” of the illustration. According to Prothero (apparently having forgotten the number of wings in his drawing), “the text clearly points out that the twelve-winged dragonfly is a thought experiment, an illustration to show that a simple change in Hox genes allows the arthropods… to make huge evolutionary changes by simple modifications of regulatory genes.”102
But the text in Prothero’s book did not identify the eighteen-winged dragonfly as a “thought experiment.” Instead, it stated, “Experiments have shown that a few Hox genes cause arthropods to add or subtract segments, and other Hox genes can produce whatever appendage is needed.” Thus the “macroevolutionary transition from one body form to another with a completely different number of segments and appendages is a very easy process.”103
In 2013 Prothero published another book, Bringing Fossils to Life, which claimed that “a tiny change in Hox genes can make a big evolutionary difference.” Indeed, “the fossil record confirms this idea that simply switching on or off Hox genes allows abrupt changes not only in appendages and wings, but even in the number of body segments.”104
Two pages later the book reproduced the 2007 drawing of an eighteen-winged dragonfly, with a caption that stated, “Fossils demonstrate that many early arthropods were capable of adding or losing wings or other appendages…. This cartoon of real fossils shows how this multiplication or reduction process can rapidly produce entirely new body forms from a single [Hex] mutant.”105
So in 2009 the eighteen-winged dragonfly was an imaginary thought experiment, but in four years it evolved into a real fossil! Isn’t zombie science amazing?
Jonathan Wells, Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution (Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press, 2017), 72-74.
Four-Winged Fruit Flies
NORMAL FRUIT flies have two wings. Behind each wing is a tiny “balancer ” that vibrates rapidly during flight to stabilize the fly’s movements. In the 1970s, geneticist Edward Lewis discovered that by artificially combining three separate DNA mutations in a fruit fly embryo he could transform the balancers into a second pair of normal-looking wings92 93 To some people, Lewis’s discovery seemed to corroborate the neo-Darwinian theory that DNA mutations provide the raw materials for evolution, and biology textbooks started using photos of a four-winged fruit fly to show students what mutations can accomplish.
But the mutant four-winged fruit fly lost its balancers in the bargain. Worse, the mutant wings do not have any flight muscles. So the four-winged fly has great difficulty flying and mating, and it cannot survive for long outside the laboratory94 95 It is a sideshow freak, an evolutionary dead end.
Yet some textbooks in 2000 featured photos of four-winged fruit flies, and some continue to do so. For example, Freeman’s 2014 Biological Science includes a photo of the four-winged fly, accompanied by text stating that mutations “can turn a segment in the middle part of the body into a segment just like the one that lies in front of it.” So instead of having balancers “the transformed segment now bears a pair of wings.” No mention of the fact that the mutant wings are effectively dead, or that the fly is severely handicapped.96
Jonathan Wells, Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution (Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press, 2017), 71.
