Giving Thanks and Repentance

We call this Thanksgiving Day. It’s mostly a muddle of American mythology to cover up some truly awful things done by our founders.

As with many born in Oklahoma, I have some Native American DNA. A great many tribes which survived their encounters with European settlers were driven to this place before those settlers realized parts of Oklahoma were pretty livable. They drove the Indians here because they thought it was a useless wasteland. When they found it otherwise, they turned around and stole it back, flagrantly violating all the treaties.

I don’t pretend to make grand claims to Native American heritage because I don’t engage the tribes in any way. I respect them as being the original Americans, and I do advocate for fair treatment. For the most part, they are willing to note our atrocious abuse of them, but let it pass and simply work on what we can do today. For my part, I sorrow yet over the lies, destruction and murder my other ancestors dished out.

As a prophet of God, the one thing I am truly called to address here is the awful heresies which gave rise to such evil. As the linked article at SOTT notes, we had two basic groups: dissenters who were Separatists from the Church of England, and dissenters who wanted to reform and purify (“Puritans”) that church. They did indeed flee persecution, but fled first to the Netherlands. The Dutch would not allow them to home-school, and Dutch education has long been relentlessly and hatefully secular. I’ve lived in the Netherlands and learned to speak Dutch. They can be decent, and I’d love to see the place again. What I don’t at all miss is their culture and the hedonistic Dutch way of life. It was no fun for the dissenters from England, so they made a deal with some part of the English bureaucracy to get a royal charter to settle in the New World.

The deal was pretty rough, because they had no leverage, only some wealth. They were to settle the new lands and had a short time to begin sending back goods and raw materials from which the contractors who got them the charter could make a profit. The deal called for communism, in effect. They all ate from the common store of supplies, and everyone was supposed to do something to repay this investment. It didn’t work. Without some help from the natives and truly good fortune, they would have all died like the Jamestown colony. They dropped the communism and went libertarian, every man for himself. It worked and many survived. They gave thanks to God.

But their methods indicate God was not so active as simply tolerant of them, much as He was tolerant with Israel when that ancient nation strayed continually. It was the same basic path of straying, in that the English settlers were utterly contemptuous of the natives and just about everyone else who wasn’t one of them.

Their theology made them the Chosen of their day, the ones who alone truly understood what God wanted on this earth. That in itself isn’t so bad, since it requires a rather strong confidence in what you believe or you won’t act. But they paid mere lip service to the concept of humility. They put on the show of humility before God, but were hostile to every one on earth who didn’t agree with them. Because God had meant for them to prosper above the sinners, the legal system in England was just horrible, because their middle class materialism wasn’t allowed to run free. The land in England was all owned by various nobles, as was the permit for every sort of business. These dissenters were okay with Dutch materialism, they just wanted a particular brand of religion stamped on the outside cover. But the harsh privilege of the English nobility was evil, so they had to leave, since God obviously planned bad things for their homeland.

In their New World, they expected to pay off their debt by their holy industry. But that meant taking control of land from a native culture which believed only their deity (or deities) could own land. The natives were mostly willing to accommodate others who shared the resources, but the European focus of land ownership was utterly incompatible with native lifestyle. The result was the acquisitive settlers were pretty rough with their hosts. The settlers were convinced their God owned the land and wanted them to have it, and the natives were heathens worthy of dispossession, and death if necessary. The settlers simply confiscated native food stores, robbed graves, etc. Their hosts were amazingly restrained in response, but this only encouraged the rapacious behavior of the settlers.

Yes, I believe the natives were pagan sinners. So were the settlers, because their brand of Christianity was a long way from the Bible. While I give thanks for God’s blessings in harvest, and in want, I repent every day for sins by which my hands have been dirtied. I have inherited a very grand legacy of sins from my forefathers on both sides.