 "It is
impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for
John Hathaway-Bates A Little Bantering ~ Just for Fun Bantering is a non-serious, very serious, conversation, usually between friends. The purpose of bantering may at first appear to be an offensive affront to the other person. However, people engaging in such a conversation are often signaling that they are comfortable enough in each others' company to be able to say such things without causing any offense while they are attempting to educate or good-naturedly challenge a friend's beliefs and understanding.For thousands of years most people have accepted as unquestionable and have diligently professed the religion of their parents; most people also follow in the political footsteps of their parents; and they associate with, vote and base their beliefs on the community within which they live, and they are convinced that the country of their birth is the greatest or the worst country in History. Problem:~ as long as they do so - progress and advancement dies. A Bantering is designed to make the reader think. To make them
question their beliefs, or challenge the accepted wisdom of the day,
to look behind the words to assess how they were used to camouflage
the truth in a way that would benefit the speaker who uses those
words. A Bantering can at first be seen as offensive or whimsical,
humorous or ridiculous; but the reader who is used to such
challenges of their long held beliefs must read between the lines
and try to find qualified fault with the writing, knowing that it is
meant only to promote thought. Written in April 2005 It fascinates me how certain cultures seem destined to succeed, no matter what calamities befall them, while others seem just as destined to fail, no matter what natural advantages are given to them by Fate. Bearing in mind the old adage that "statistics" come well behind “damned lies”, it can still be a very interesting hobby to banter based upon such “facts”, understanding that one should always be willing to hear counter-arguments when such are put forward. Put another way, when Galileo put forward the “bantering” that he thought that "statistics" seemed to indicate that the Earth went round the Sun, rather than the other way around, he was in fact just challenging the Political Correctness of the day. As when Columbus stated that he thought it might be possible to sail far enough to the West to circumnavigate the globe and end up in the East Indies – for which logic most people wrote him off as an idiot and refused to invest or participate in the venture, which of course was based upon his belief in his own "statistics" of the day. Note: The Ancient Greeks knew a thousand years previously what the Vatican refused to even consider in the 15th Century. Eratosthenes proved by experiment the statement of Aristotle about the spherical shape of earth in the following way: During the summer solstice at Aswan and at Alexandria of Egypt, he at the same time had measured the shadow of two sticks vertically placed in the earth. At Aswan there was no shadow from the stick, but at Alexandria the shadow had a length equal to the 1/5 of the stick. Knowing the two sides of the right angle triangle and the angle of 7 1/5 degrees, he calculated the result 1/50 of the 3600. So, if we multiply the distance from Aswan to Alexandria by 50 we get the perimeter of earth as being 25,000 miles. Of course in the 20th Century using satellites we were able to prove that Eratosthenes was off by about 50 miles! What this preamble is leading up to, is that the present grouping of “statistics” seems to predict something I would very much like to see proved wrong. This worry of mine is very simple, and is as follows: What if civilization as we know it, is based upon the concepts, morals and beliefs of a particular and singular culture that is fast disappearing from a position of power in our civilization, which it seems to be doing according to all the prevailing “statistics and predictions” of our time? The End of Protestant Civilization as we know it? In the United States of America most people talk about the Founding Fathers as if they were some divinely inspired creators of a Renaissance in Political thought – that just manifested itself to them without any previous cultural conditioning, like any other flash of immaculate inspiration. Most people in the United States and places like Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the countries of Scandinavia and a few countries in Northern Europe, also seem to think that they were somehow gifted with civilization as a God given right one Thursday afternoon in Ancient Times! So my question is: What if that Renaissance in Political thought that led to the creation of the United States, actually descended upon those old Protestant men who created it only because of the cultural controls imposed upon them by the world they were descended from in Northern Europe? Note: Records from 1790 show that 50 percent of the American colonists could trace their heritage back to England, 19 percent to Africa, 15 percent to Scotland or Ireland, 7 percent to Germany, 9 percent to Wales, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Spain or Portugal. That culture in Northern Europe had produced a concept that women and children were NOT just property, but were in fact equal to men as human beings, with real feelings and, perhaps, even intelligence – and therefore deserved Rights. (Even if not voting rights immediately - at least far more Rights than their feminine contemporaries in other cultures could even dream of back then, or can dream of today in many countries even in the 21st Century). The Founding Fathers also had Real Estate Property Rights built into their cultural thinking. For that they could thank the Vikings - who had raped, looted and pillaged, and then intermarried with, (in that order) their ancestors. No culture or religion, before the Vikings invaded Ireland, could claim that their King, tribal chief, Sultan, Emperor, Caesar, or even their Church leaders had ever proposed such a “revolutionary” idea before. The Vikings had decided that it was a good idea to allow individuals to own property in their own right, with inheritance rights, and then promptly made it a Law that even the King could not overrule. (The fact that the Vikings who invented Property Law did it with land that they had just taken from the original inhabitants of Ireland bears no never mind. Or that the descendants of those Irishmen (a.k.a. Vikings) did so well in the Real Estate business when they left the Old Country.) Name me a culture in Africa, Asia or the New World other than the northern swath of North America that had any vestige of Real Estate Property Rights for ordinary citizens prior to having it forced upon them (or or used against them) by Baltic-Germanic Europeans. What few people in the world know today is that the English refused the rule of the Pope in Rome almost as soon as the Roman Catholic Church ventured back into Britain in the 5th Century, several centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. In the Severn Valley the Hwicce nation (pronounced: hih-witch-ee) like most Baltic-Germanic peoples, gave their women very similar rights to men in such matters as inheritance, divorce and property ownership. This so perturbed the Holy Fathers that they promptly declared the Hwicce women must have placed the men under some form of an evil spell for them to accept such ridiculous ideas – which is why the most evil women in the world in the Catholic Church's eyes are still to this day called “witches”! Somewhere in this piece I have to insert a possible "twister" to the logic being developed here. In my experience it is the culture that you live in for a long period of time that conditions you into the adult person you become, and not necessarily the culture that you were born into and think you belong to. For example: one of the most "British" people I know is a Hindu women who was born in India; and one of my first partners in America was a Roman Catholic who tried to attend Mass every day, and yet proclaimed agreement with the most Protestant of views on women, children and birth control and then up and married a Jewish woman. To add to the "twister", I know someone from just about every race, nationality and religion that have adopted many of the very "Protestant" views of the Founding Fathers; not as a "coat they wear in public" but as an overlying belief system that can countermand all of their other "cultural views" in everyday life. My grandfather once gave me some great advice; (it went something like this; "It is not a good idea to credit other people with your experience, knowledge or morality - they just may not have it!" He also told me not to be a bigot and I was brought up to believe that "You can never judge a person by what race they belong to; but only by who they are. No-one chooses what skin they are born into, they can only choose who and who they wish to be. You inherit your skin color, but you can personally choose your culture - so I will continue to be angry at having to identify myself and others in the United States by race or color - or in the case of Semitic people as either Jewish or Muslim." Every school child over twelve in the English speaking world has “heard” of the Magna Carta – but they probably have never been encouraged to read it and so they do not know that it demands independence for the English Church from the Pope in Rome. It also pointed out a "Constitutional Right" of Englishmen to the due process of Law and the rights of "Life, Liberty, et al". All of which found their way into the writings of the descendants of those same Englishmen in the Americas. Similarly, most college graduates have heard of Martin Luther and his rebuke of the representatives of the Pope in Rome in 1517 (though today many in America know more about Martin Luther King than the man he was named for). But how many of our children are taught that King Henry VIII of Merry Olde England (of the many wives fame) first attacked the teaching of Martin Luther (and was given the title of "Defender of the Faith" by the Pope); but then went on to change the development of Western Civilization when he actually took a whole Country away from the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church with the Act of Supremacy in 1534 and made England Protestant; and thereby, although you will read it in few American history books, paved the way for the United States of America to exist? For without arrogant, gluttonous, lecherous, old King Hal there would have probably never been a United States of America or a flag composed of Stars and Stripes! My children are quite often taught such a politically correct version of History that at times it leaves me either absolutely horrified, completely amazed or just laughing out loud, proving that no Country in the world is above embellishing its own History. For example: my youngest son thinks that the defeat of General Custer was the greatest Native American victory ever - because he has never been taught about Little Turtle and the Miami and how the Founding Fathers immediately set out to build their own Empire after they had got rid of the British Empire ruling them. But then, both of my sons have also been separately informed by their teachers that New England was a "Region" and not a Colony! That one I like - as my family must then have settled in the early part of the 17th Century in a Colony that did not exist, if we are to believe the people who teach my sons. Keeping it fair however; there are also very few Protestant Priests, Preachers or Pastors who tell their followers that the Pilgrims and the Puritans often left England to escape being jailed for merely refusing to read the King James Bible (which is actually an Anglican Bible for a Church led by a Monarch, rather than a "truly" Protestant Bible). The original immigrants to the English colonies in the Americas actually used the Geneva Bible which is a Protestant Bible; as did William Shakespeare - who despite much academic conjecture of late on Public Television, was no Catholic - trust me, we are related by marriage; he married the sister of my great (9th) grandfather). I guess that means that all the Television Preachers we see on television, who claim to be Protestants, should immediately give up the King James Bible, which they know by heart, and start learning the Geneva Bible - or they could, if they wished, announce to their flocks that they have decided to convert to being High Anglicans? If you are interested by the way, Americans are allowed today to buy and read a Reproduction Copy of the Geneva Bible; which had the Puritans and Pilgrims been so allowed to do, their descendants might have died in the Indian Mutiny, at the Battle of the Somme, or in the London Blitz, rather than in the American Civil War. Also, I wonder how many people today who own a King James Bible realize that any King James Bible you buy today at the local Christian Bookstore is not the original 1611 version. The spellings have been revised, and some words changed, in almost every printing done since 1769, and fourteen entire books plus extra prefatory features have been removed from almost every printing done since 1885! Reproduction Copy of the original King James 1611 Bible. In fact many English Citizens and Puritan Colonists in America (despite Hollywood epic movies stating otherwise) considered the Old Testament to have actually been replaced by God with the New Testament since back in the days of the Crusades. In fact some Protestants, in the 17th, 18th and well into the 19th Centuries, accepted only one version of the New Testament, claiming that the others had been produced by the Vatican to change the way they could govern members of the Catholic Church; (my lot only believed in Saint John's Gospel back then). This is of course the sort of background that the Founding Fathers came of age with. Truth be told they were really only concerned with the "Rights" of "Englishmen", (and for the great part, Protestant English Gentlemen at that, which is what most of them saw themselves as) - and I believe that it is a fallacy to believe that by using the word "men" in general in the Declaration of Independence - 1776 meant that the signers considered all human beings to have "Rights" - it was merely the ultimate arrogance of righteous Protestant Englishmen superiority. It should also be pointed out that the War of Independence could have also been called the War to Continue Slavery in the American Colonies for the first disagreements between the colonists and King George III began when he proposed abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire. Also most Americans have never heard about the sanctions banning the sale of goods produced by slaves; which is in fact why the Boston Tea Party was organized by John Hancock (another relative of mine) whose fortune depended upon selling cotton and sugar to Great Britain.
There is a statement in the
I would guess about as many American college graduates know the "facts" that I refer to in the above paragraphs, as would also know that one of the main reasons for the Declaration of Independence was the fact that King George III had just allowed Roman Catholicism as the State Religion in the British Colony of Quebec where the majority of citizens were of French Roman Catholic descent and they were allowed to impose the French version of a Civil Legal Code there; which terrified the property owning Protestant English colonists living next door, as they stated in their Declaration of Independence. (“For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies”) Quebec of course was not the only one of the British Colonies in North America that did not join the “United Colonies of America" in rebellion/civil war against the British Crown. In fact it could well be that the actions of George III in Quebec, were without a doubt one of the main reasons for the concept taken up by the revolutionaries in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” King George also refused to go back on existing Treaties Great Britain had with some of the friendly Native Americans, in what is today the States of Indiana and Ohio, who had fought with the British (Americans) to drive the French Crown out of North America - in fact he sent Officers to help these Native Americans defend themselves. That is probably what led to the clause in the Declaration of Independence that stated: "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." But the point of this bantering is actually the following: What if only a group of old Protestant men could have come up with the concept of: “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.” (Bearing in mind that they probably thought and meant "all Englishmen" - for example, the Declaration as you will see was written in English-English, not American-English - which has to mean something!) As far as I can see no other Country, Colony, Religion or culture was even playing with this concept at that time outside of Northern Europe and North America (British Section only). Obviously the French, a few years after the American Revolution, could not pull it off (French Revolution 1789-1815). Instead, they took to murdering every aristocrat and priest, and almost anyone who could read and write they could lay their hands on as soon as they gained power. It was said in the rest of Europe back then that any Frenchman with a horse or a boat, most likely changed his nationality between the years of 1789-1795. Napoleon, himself a product of the French Revolution, even went so far as to actually imprison two Popes and then crown himself Emperor – in direct contrast to the English Protestant General Oliver Cromwell (English Civil War 1642-1646) or the American Protestant first President George Washington, who both had the opportunity to take the Crown but chose not to be King, Emperor, Sultan, Fuehrer, or anything else dictatorial. In fact, strange as it seems, "statistics" would seem to suggest that there never has been a Protestant Dictator of European decent - anywhere! Therefore, accepting (or not) that only a Nation with a Protestant majority of Baltic-Germanic descent would be able to ensure the continuance of the concepts of the American (or English, Australian, New Zealand, Scandinavian, Dutch, etc.) Founding Fathers; what can we expect to happen in these countries which today lead the world in everything civilized, when during the next 50 years the Protestant majorities of many of these countries could well disappear? Largest Religious Groups in the United States - Religious Majorities by State in the United States The United States is the only "Protestant majority of Northern European descent" country left in the New World (at just over a 51% Protestant population) - what happens when it loses another five percentage points? Or Australia, where they now also have only a 51% Protestant majority? Even England, which started it all, is down to a 64% Protestant majority! So what happens? Do we finish up with less of what the Founding Fathers fought for – or will we get more - when Protestants become the minority? Or will New World Protestants all have to move to New Zealand? For example: When one talks about civilization and standard of life, one great measure is how do countries value their own people? Comparing countries according to what the US State Department reports upon whether or not they “comply fully with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking of human beings?” or the percentage of their people living below the Poverty Line, sort of says it all when you are considering buying real estate and raising children!
My old “whimsy piece” - The Viking Effect upon World Freedom is starting to move from being just silly bantering, where I was playing with some "statistics" (like Economic Freedom Ratings and GDP, Transparency International's Perceptions of Corruption Index, FATF Money Laundering Index, etc.), to the point where it has moved into the realms of dark humor, which is not at all what I intended. So what if Religion and Culture actually do play a major and very important part in the survival of Western Democracy as we know it? What happens to countries that lose the balance that the Protestant culture has enforced upon them for the last four centuries? Looking at some of the places where that has already happened does not exactly give one confidence. What if a little more discipline than you would normally volunteer for is not always a bad thing? Do we go back to a world as it was in 1500 (or like it is still in some parts of the world today where the Vikings never raped, pillaged and looted)? Imagine it: the Middle Ages with electricity, fast food, global warming. video games, computers and Big Brother? As for the United States of America; well the religious factors of American life are "statistics" that are well worth playing with, if only for “what if” predictions and whimsical conjecture that will cure insomnia in anyone.
The Original Thirteen Colonies As my justification for this piece: One tries to be Politically Correct, but occasionally one just has to drop the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons – and then one cannot help but wonder just how the neighbors will react. Then again, I may just be a Reactionary fool, as Stalin would have said. But in truth it does worry me that pretty soon we may well not have one single White Anglo-Saxon Protestant severing on the Supreme Court of the United States.
John Hathaway-Bates You can
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