*

ave-atque-vale:

queendread:

proud-atheist:

Thanks to Catholic Cultures
http://proud-atheist.tumblr.com

GREAT WORK BLAMING BRUTALLY COLONISED COUNTRIES FOR THEIR OWN COLONISATION JUST TO MAKE A CHEAP POINT ABOUT RELIGION

JUST

REALLY

A+

*cracks knuckles*  Let’s get some history up in here, kids.

People appear to be ignorant about “the vital role Christianity played in the spread of Western empire and the systematic destruction of indigenous cultures and peoples,” so here are a few notes:

• “Of all religions, Christianity has been most associated with colonialism because several of its forms (Catholicism and Protestantism) were the religions of the European powers engaged in colonial enterprise on a global scale.”
  
  
• “ The modern missionary era was in many ways the ‘religious arm’ of colonialism, whether Portuguese and Spanish colonialism in the sixteenth Century, or British, French, German, Belgian or American colonialism in the nineteenth...”
  
  
• “We talked about William Carey, but we didn’t talk about how the British used “protecting missionaries” like Carey as an excuse for imperial expansion in India. We talked about Christianity in China, but we didn’t address the gunboat diplomacy of Britain which was – again – justified as defending Christian missionaries. Or we could turn our attention to the Americas, where Christianity was nearly without exception the primary logic used by the so-called Indian reformers who set up boarding schools in which they took native children away from their homes, forced them to adopt western customs, and punished them for observing traditional practices. (The system they created unsurprisingly made it much easier for whites to steal practically all of their ancestral lands.)”
  
  
• “According to Edward Andrews, Christian missionaries were initially portrayed as “visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery.” However, by the time the colonial era drew to a close, missionaries became viewed as “ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them.” As the colonial government was taking African land, the missionaries were preaching that it was God’s will that the Europeans do so and that Africans should not resist but be patient since their riches await them in heaven.”

A brief review of the Catholic Church’s involvement with imperial projects in Latin/South America:

• “The church acted as a legitimating institution for various colonial projects, at times as financier, and profited tremendously from the revenue generated by its increasingly global presence…”
• “there were ample resources for legitimating the use of force to create social, cultural, and political conditions in which conversion by “persuasion” was more likely to be successful.”
• “The Spanish and English colonial projects both constituted empires on which the sun never set, yet the reach of global Catholicism exceeded them both by constituting forms of colonial relations even where there was no formal colonial jurisdiction.”
• “The identification of Christianity with European cultural norms was therefore itself a historical product of significant cultural transformations in European history and in Christian thought and practice. The necessity of differentiating between what was European and what was Christian became important enough to be codified as instructions to missionaries in Vatican documents by the seventeenth century. Hence Christianity’s views of its own history, attitudes toward other religions, and theological reflections on how God orchestrates history and ostensibly uses empires for his own purposes would deeply affect the ways that the church would interact with various colonial projects.”
• “The Catholic Church played a central role in both cases by sending missionaries to work in Spanish territories from California to Paraguay, and in the Portuguese territories from Africa to Japan. The church also granted ideological and institutional legitimacy to those imperial projects, if not always to what it perceived to be the excesses of the conquistadors.”
• “Yet the extension of Spanish jurisdiction over the New World, accompanied precisely by the use of violence, and ostensibly for the purposes of evangelism,…”.
• The most vocal apologist for the conquests of the Americas as just wars was the Spanish royal historian Juan Gines de Sepulveda (ca. 1490-1573)….[He is] known today almost exclusively for his claim […] that the American Indians were ”natural slaves” and fit to be ruled by ”natural masters” like the Europeans. […] This so-called School of Salamanca became a formidable critic of the Spanish conquests of the Americas, and of the use of coercive force for the purposes of evangelization—both of which Sepulveda vigorously defended.
• The primary difficulty with the just war argument […] was that it simply did not describe the realities of the Spanish conquest nor exhaust the many reasons why the Spanish claimed legitimate title to the Americas—and especially why the Spanish and Portuguese empires continued to receive the support of the Catholic Church quite in spite of their ruthlessness and systematic exploitation of indigenous peoples and expropriation of what one Spanish critic called their ”lands, liberty, and property in exchange for their faith in Christ.” […] the massive Spanish colonial enterprise that nearly covered two continents was self-evidently not about saving innocent Aztecs from human sacrifice or cannibalism. Jose de Acosta (ca. 1540-1600), […] was not alone in thinking the language of just wars […] something of an ideological distraction from the violent effects of the wars of conquest
• “As the consolidation of colonial control was most often the means through which the church sought to ”civilize” indigenous peoples, cultural conflicts continually erupted in most missionary contexts. In some areas colonial administrators forcibly resettled populations, forced indigenous people to submit to religious indoctrinations and attend mass, and used force to ”extirpate idolatry” by destroying indigenous religious sites and prohibiting participation in indigenous religious practices.”
• “Although not all of the missions were amenable to colonial control, most of the religious encounters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tended toward religious paternalism and the affirmation of colonial institutions as the order necessary to both civilize and evangelize indigenous populations. By the nineteenth century, new theories of scientific racism replaced earlier classicizing models of humanity and civilization, creating a perhaps more insidious version of the ”white man’s burden” to civilize and Christianize under the auspices of empire.”

In conclusion: if you blame colonized people for Christianity’s many, many sins, you need to sit down, shut up, and school yourself.

(via flaca-tallanga)

upworthy:

It’s One Of The Craziest Internet Rumors About Guns. And As It Turns Out, It’s True.

It’s a fact so jaw-dropping it’s unbelievable — people thought it was a crazy Internet rumor until Politifact verified it. But it’s true: More Americans have died just since 1960 from gun incidents — suicides, accidents, and homicides — than died in every war in U.S. history. The deadliest war the U.S. has ever had is the war we waged against ourselves. 

(via flaca-tallanga)

seriouslyamerica:

TW: domestic violence

quickhits:

You can stop pretending that guns protect women now.

New York Times:

Early last year, after a series of frightening encounters with her former husband, Stephanie Holten went to court in Spokane, Wash., to obtain a temporary order for protection.

Her former husband, Corey Holten, threatened to put a gun in her mouth and pull the trigger, she wrote in her petition. He also said he would “put a cap” in her if her new boyfriend “gets near my kids.” In neat block letters she wrote, “ He owns guns, I am scared.”

The judge’s order prohibited Mr. Holten from going within two blocks of his former wife’s home and imposed a number of other restrictions. What it did not require him to do was surrender his guns.

About 12 hours after he was served with the order, Mr. Holten was lying in wait when his former wife returned home from a date with their two children in tow. Armed with a small semiautomatic rifle bought several months before, he stepped out of his car and thrust the muzzle into her chest. He directed her inside the house, yelling that he was going to kill her.

What saved Holten was not another gun, but a phone. She dial 911, then hid the phone. “The dispatcher heard Ms. Holten begging for her life and quickly directed officers to the scene,” the report tells us.

“For all its rage and terror, the episode might well have been prevented,” NYT goes on. “Had Mr. Holten lived in one of a handful of states, the protection order would have forced him to relinquish his firearms. But that is not the case in Washington and most of the country, in large part because of the influence of the National Rifle Association and its allies.”

I know that the NRA would argue that Stephanie Holten would’ve been better off had she been armed too. But exchanging gunfire with a lunatic does not guarantee success. And since her kids were present, tragedy would be all that more likely. Gun fanatics live in a fantasy world, informed by action movies, where the “good guy” always comes out on top. But in the real world, criminals aren’t automatically incompetent. Justice is a human construct, not a law of physics. In a gun v. gun confrontation, either party can lose. This is why people with guns are more likely to be shot — if I’m a criminal and someone pulls a gun on me, they’re my primary target. And of course, belief in the “good guys always win” theory promoted by the NRA causes people to take stupid risks.

The fact is that there are people who should not have guns. More guns is not the answer here, fewer guns obviously are. There are situations — and this is one — where meeting the NRA’s definition of “pro-gun” is in reality just pro-crime. Cory Holton is obviously scum. He can live without his guns.

And his ex-wife and kids would stand a better chance of living as well. A woman’s chance of being killed by an abuser increases by 700% if he has access to a firearm. That’s just a fact. And it’s a fact the NRA doesn’t want you to know, because they want to be able to sell guns and ammo to criminals like Stephanie Holton’s stalking, abusive ex-husband.

(via flaca-tallanga)