The Legacy of the Lost Tribes of Israel upon the Puritans, the Mayflower and America's First Thanksgiving Harvest Feast
The "Pilgrim story on the Mayflower" began in England in a small hamlet in north Nottinghamshire called Scrooby. Here in 1606, a group of English religious dissidents, later known as the "Pilgrims" formed their own church covenant independent of the National Church of England under King James I. Included in this community of believers were William Brewster, Richard Clifton, William Bradford and John Robinson. This was an act of treason against the English crown and against the country of England.
They moved to Boston in Lincolnshire but were discovered and imprisoned. They then more successfully moved to Immingham along the Humber River before they made the decision to immigrate to new safe haven with religious freedom in the Netherland in the year of 1609 ... [Anti-immigration guru Geert Wilders would have prevented the sailing of the Mayflower 😂]
The New World called Zion
Understanding Bush: Armageddon
by US expat Ukraine Tue Feb 21st, 2006
Reading through RenaRF's dKos post All Hell Breaks Loose in GOP Land, Mark Crispin Miller's recent interview on Buzzflash came to mind.
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But larger eruptions of hatred and mayhem in America's increasingly divided, uncivil society are driven not by antisemitism or by today's Jews, nor by the riptides of global capital and technology and the desperate migrations and belligerent nationalisms that they accelerate. More than most of us recognize, they're driven by ancient religious passions that figured deeply in Israel's and America's origins. Both nations' professedly "liberal" and civic-republican cultures are profoundly and perhaps fatally conflicted, in ways that prompt not only news headlines but also biblically resonant upheavals, even when the participants don't consider themselves religious at all.
Some of these conflicts have generated the Trump phenomenon, but Donald Trump and his media heralds, political acolytes and allies -- including most evangelical Christians and many Orthodox Jews -- aren't the progenitors of these conflicts; they're carriers of a deeper plague.
Similarly, the belligerent Jewish nationalists who currently govern the State of Israel are accelerants of a doom-eager Zionism that isn't new in history and that some of the Bible's own prophets condemned.
Few of us can bear very much of such realities, whether in America or in Israel. I want to make a few observations about the origins of America's obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The 17th-century English Calvinists who colonized lands that they called New England and Virginia, and whose 18th-century legatees participated in founding the American republic, pursued strategies remarkably similar to those of today's Israeli settlers in the West Bank and today's military invaders of Gaza, some of whom claim a divine mandate and others a "manifest destiny" to impose one ethno-religious identity at the expense of longtime inhabitants.
In retrospect, American Puritans seem almost to have been "copying" today's Israeli Zionists, tactic for tactic and pious justification for pious justification. Even more remarkably, Puritans justified what they were doing not by looking ahead 300 years but by looking back more than two millennia, emulating biblical Israelites' "Hebrew republic" so intensely that they called themselves the "New Israel" and New England their "Zion." They even put the Hebrew phrase Urim v'tumim, -- meaning, approximately, "Light and Truth," or "Light and Purity," taken from the breastplate of the high priest in the Jerusalem temple -- on the seal of Yale College, founded in 1701.
From the diaries ...
American Exceptionalism Good - Neocon Israel Policy Better | 2 Sept 2015 |
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How the Gulf War began: 'The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated'
Understanding Bush: Armageddon
by US expat Ukraine Tue Feb 21st, 2006
The reality-based community, wherein we present logical, rational, reasonable arguments challenging Bush's thinking and politics, is completely wrong in its approach. Calling Bush irrational, a lunatic, a madman, ignoramus, and so on miss the point entirely. Bush, in his own world, is entirely consistent, predictable, and even has more than a modicum of integrity. In his own world. Bush is a fundamentalist Christian theocrat, and within that context he is completely understandable.
There is just a little surprise that Republican linchpins such as Hastert and Frist step up to put up some token resistance. That part is surprising only because it defies belief that either or both of them hadn't a clue as to who and what Bush is prior to Bush insisting opening US doors and ports to known terrorist associates.
You see, Bush is looking for Armageddon
With that one single postulate, all that he's doing and has done makes sense. He's not looking to save or even protect America. He's looking for the end of the world, Armageddon, the great shoot-out in the OK corral with Satan, after which -- and only after which -- Jesus Christ can return and deliver Earth to faithful believers. Not to rational people, but to faithful people, as in blind faith that defies all reason. He believes he is doing God's work, that God is on his side, that God is guiding him with Divine guidance as a Christian believer and special operative.
Calling him irrational, insane, paranoid schizophrenic, or anything else is pointless. Those are, in his mind, characterizations by evil-doers who are doomed anyway because they don't believe The Prophecy of the Word of God as he sees it. His convictions despite all rational, normal, traditional intellectualism from the Enlightenment forward have an anti-rational appeal to the faithful masses who share his faith and beliefs.
The religious right, seemingly nutty to many people, are absolutely sincere and completely coherent in their fundamentalist interpretation and grasp of the Holy Bible. Never mind that the Armageddon part -- the Book of Revelations -- seems to many of us to be indecipherable gibberish. The whole schemata is anti-rational, where rational thought has no more effect and meaning than water off a duck's back.
Worldmaking at the End of History: The Gulf Crisis of 1990-91 and International Law | Cambridge |
Donald Rumsfeld's Holy War: How President Bush's Iraq Briefings Came with Quotes from the Bible | Mail Online - 20 May 2009 |
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was sold as a fight for freedom against the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.
But for former U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his elite Pentagon strategists, it was more like a religious crusade.
The daily briefings about the progress of the war that Mr Rumsfeld gave to President George W Bush were illustrated with victorious quotes from the Bible and gung-ho photographs of U.S. troops, it has emerged.
One of the top-secret 'worldwide intelligence updates', which were hand-delivered to Mr Bush by Mr Rumsfeld, includes an image of an F-18 Hornet fighter jet roaring off from the deck of an aircraft carrier.
On it were the words of Psalm 139-9-10: 'If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast, O Lord.'
The cover of another featured pictures of U.S. soldiers at prayer with a quote from Isaiah: 'Whom shall I send and who will go for us? Here I am Lord, Send me.'
Related reading ...
A European perspective on Booman
by Frank Schnittger Sat Sep 27th, 2014
But it is with Booman's (often implicit and perhaps unconscious) embrace of American Exceptionalism that I have generally had the biggest problem: I simply don't believe that America has some God given right or grace to impose its beliefs and values on others, or that it is in some way an inherently more moral nation.
Up until the mid 1960's this would not have been a major point of departure for me. The USA had been born as a genuine revolution against colonial oppression, had fought a civil war (in part) against slavery and continued forms of colonial oppression, had struggled against continued racism, and had sought to promote personal freedom against more totalitarian ideologies abroad.
