Peaceable Kingdom LOST: Paxton Boys and Destruction of Penn's Holy Experiment by Professor Kevin Kenny

from Amazon:

"William Penn established Pennsylvania in 1682 as a "holy experiment" in which Europeans and Indians could live together in harmony. In this book, historian Kevin Kenny explains how this Peaceable Kingdom--benevolent, Quaker, pacifist--gradually disintegrated in the eighteenth century, with disastrous consequences for Native Americans."

"Kenny recounts how rapacious frontier settlers, most of them of Ulster extraction, began to encroach on Indian land as squatters, while William Penn's sons cast off their father's Quaker heritage and turned instead to fraud, intimidation, and eventually violence during the French and Indian War."

"In 1763, a group of frontier settlers known as the Paxton Boys exterminated the last twenty Conestogas, descendants of Indians who had lived peacefully since the 1690s on land donated by William Penn near Lancaster. Invoking the principle of "right of conquest," the Paxton Boys claimed after the massacres that the Conestogas' land was rightfully theirs."

"They set out for Philadelphia, threatening to sack the city unless their grievances were met. A delegation led by Benjamin Franklin met them and what followed was a war of words, with Quakers doing battle against Anglican and Presbyterian champions of the Paxton Boys."

"The killers were never prosecuted and the Pennsylvania frontier descended into anarchy in the late 1760s, with Indians the principal victims."

"The new order heralded by the Conestoga massacres was consummated during the American Revolution with the destruction of the Iroquois confederacy. At the end of the Revolutionary War, the United States confiscated the lands of Britain's Indian allies, basing its claim on the principle of "right of conquest."

"Based on extensive research in eighteenth-century primary sources, this engaging history offers an eye-opening look at how colonists--at first, the backwoods Paxton Boys but later the U.S. government--expropriated Native American lands, ending forever the dream of colonists and Indians living together in peace."

PEACEABLE KINGDON: LOST By Kevin Kenny, Professor of History at Boston College

Blessing, Not Killing

Waiting by their front door,
For their romantic hug,
He's expectant,

Her eager lover,
Next to their 3-year-toddler;

Returning with groceries,
She enters front-packing Huggies

Above her plump-growing belly;
Blessed, expectant

3 years ago, 2 became one equals 3,
Ago

And now 4
'Amore'

What a wonder conceiving each new life, humans get to experience in marriage!
Such a powerful, blessed photo of an infant in the womb at about 16 weeks.

What a contrast to the U.S. modern delusion of "abortion rights."

HOW ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS?
Especially for the youngest, tiniest humans, the infants in the womb.


What also needs to be emphasized is that the mother is the individual to decide (NOT the GOVERNMENT) in tragic cases of her life being endangered, of biological errors such as her infant having severe physical deformity, and, of course, in worse cases involving rape and abuse.


In the LIGHT of PRO-LIFE,

Daniel Wilcox

Transcendence--Part 2

‘Liberal’ Christians admit Jesus and the NT authors were mistaken, but in so doing they are trying to pole vault up a steep incline while sliding down the slippery back slope of increasing doubt and skepticism. If the NT isn’t historically accurate about such a key doctrine as the return of Christ, many ask, how could one rely on Scripture's accounts of Jesus rising from the grave, ascending into heaven, etc.

How can the Christian religion be true and accurate about anything else?

After all, the bar of requirements for historical writing has been set very high in the modern age. All things, people think, need to be factually accurate, inerrant to be of real value. So religion, the spiritual, and the transcendent all need to be judged with the measuring tools of science.

A compass of accuracy needs to discern the geometric lines of theology and faith, to eliminate and banish any heresy that deviates from the factual.

What a very high raising of the TRUTH bar for us thinking humans to catapult over!

The nature of truth is a difficult subject bar none (to throw in a word play to lighten this heavy post;-)

The difficulty of hope versus illusion-delusion (false hope) and reason versus despair (false reason) is a very high bar indeed. Can any hope of the transcendent be found at all?

Millions of humans think not. So they quit 'pole-vaulting' and settle down on the ground of Materialism/Atheism/even Nihilism and Subjectivism/Relativism. Such thinkers include Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Yuval Noah Harari, Sean Carroll, Brian Green, etc.).

In striking contrast, many other thinkers and scientists created the ENLIGHTENMENT/Deism/generic theism, etc. Their new outlook based in reason and the scientific method--Not revelation--managed to clear the bar of required evidence.

All of them strongly hold to modern evidence--evolutionary biological, geological, astronomical, rational--but don't think such evidence proves that Reality is meaningless, subjective, etc. Instead, they think that Reality is ultimately transcendent, moral realism is true, all humans have inherent worth, etc. They state they base their hope in reason and cosmic regularities, Life itself, etc.

In the LIGHT of the True, the Good, the Just, the TRANSCENDENT,

Daniel Wilcox




SIDE NOTE:
on more historic difficulties for Christianity, Judaism, and Islam-- 'revealed religions' of doctrinal claims Another difficult raising of the bar of religious hope came 1,500 years after Jesus, in the time of Galileo and Copernicus.

The Creedal Church claimed supreme understanding and control in all matters. Yet a minority of scientists contradicted the teachings of the Church and, allegedly, the Bible. They claimed to have proved that the sun doesn’t round the earth each day; indeed, the earth is not the center, not the focal point of all creation as Genesis claims.

Soon science increased its evidential findings--our sun is actually only a very minor star, Not the Center of Reality.

Contrary to the Scriptures’ statement, “God made the stars also,” in actuality, those stars are cosmically vast than our puny solar system. We are on an edge of a galaxy, which is one of millions of other galaxies!

So much for the literal understanding of the Jewish Bible, the New Testament, the Quran, and common sense!

Scratch!

Of course, multi-millions choose to twist the plain text in the sacred scriptures. They argue Genesis describes the creation of the sun on the fourth day from the perspective of God’s Spirit at the level of the surface of the planet looking up!

So God looking up from planet earth's surface does make it seem like the sun comes after the earth rather than before. What has happened? A dense, heavy cloud of vapor had hidden the sun during the first 3 days. The sun finally appeared above the earth on the 4th day.

There is a very bad case of Not only 'scratching' but of cheating!

But the verse in Genesis doesn’t speak about the sun appearing from behind fog on the fourth day; on the contrary, it says: “And God said, 'Let there be light in the vault of the heavens to light up the earth.' And so it was. And God made the two great lights…” (Genesis 1:14-16)

Other religionist wrote of a dualistic existence, where science concerns itself with the observable and the factual but religion concerns itself with the spiritual and moral. Many theists of the present time manage to make this philosophical leap.

Then the discoveries by Darwin and many other scientists that life proceeds not by a sudden miraculous creation 6,000 years ago, but by a combination of cosmic luck and survival of the fittest over millions and millions of years.

Later in succeeding years, other scientists tabulated their technical findings and showed the earth came about 4 billion years ago, not 6, 000, and the universe has existed at least 16 billion years! This setting of the sacred bar careens outrageously high so that only the most blind, or most compartmentalized, or the most irrationally determined can leap the bottomless chasm up and over the cosmically high bar of hope.

Good grief, what convoluted hypocritical rhetoric!

Multi-millions of human beings have 'scratched'. Been Disqualified.

Pole-Vaulting into Transcendence

When a young teen in P.E. one year, I ran and jumped the pole vault a few times. The anticipation for and mild fear of that run and leap, tensed us up. The vault didn’t rank with the sheer frighted fearfulness of the high dive in swimming, but it sure beat the boredom of doing pushups.

As difficult as it was to run and leap up balancing on the wobbly rise of the limber pole, in its back arch and then its swinging forward, up, and over the cross bar, I did manage to clear the bar at low levels.

The eventual goal was to set the cross bar higher and higher and yet still achieve the swinging leap up and over. But the higher the bar the more difficult the leap with the rise of the pole and the more dangerous the fall, even if one succeeded in clearing the bar.

Fortunately, pole vaulting lasted only a week for us P.E. students, was not required on a regular basis.

However, metaphorically I've been "pole vaulting" for at least 70 years (an unusual analogy similar to a poem by the metaphysical poet John Donne, the famous 17th century English writer).

Donne wrote very unusual analogies in his poems such as a romantic poem to his wife comparing his deep love for her to a geometric compass!.

In this case now, I'm comparing the all-pervasive meaning seeking action of humans of the last 200,000 years to the action of pole-vaulting--attempting to leap for hope in the mysterious cosmic reality.

Wikepedia photos

--
In the actual sport of pole-vaulting, if one doesn't scratch or cheat, the bar keeps being raised higher and higher--eventually incredibly high. Similarly, in humans seeking answers to the Mystery of Life, trillions of stars in the cosmos, and troubling confusions about what is true, what is morally good, what is fair and just--this spiritual seeking has been increasingly difficult.

For instance, one of the most difficult high raisings of the bar came for Christians when Jesus didn’t return in the ‘soon’ time of Paul and John (I Thessalonians and Revelation), but Christians attempted to adjust the bar down and up at the same time! Biblical theologians reinterpreted the word ‘soon’ to mean ‘rapidly’ rather than in the common sense definition of ‘in the near future.’

They said the return of Christ could happen thousands of years in the future, but when it did it come, it would be ‘rapid’. This seems a very dishonest scratching of language and history. It is more than an accidental rule violation, but a situation of dishonesty and delusion--straining the gnat and swallowing the camel.

To be continued in 2 days,

In the LIGHT,

Daniel Wilcox