Debunking the Pilgrims

Some malcontent has decided to rain on everyone's Thanksgiving parade by exposing THE TRUTH about the Pilgrims. Among the horrors that are revealed are that the Pilgrims believed the Indian depopulation of the area preceding their arrival was providential and that the Pilgrims insisted on church membership as a prerequisite for a seat on the General Court that governed the colony.

The scales have fallen from my eyes! I repent of ever having had the slightest shred of respect for these people. From now on, I will condemn anyone having the nerve to celebrate Thanksgiving who has not first ritually secularized the holiday and denounced the Pilgrims as evil, genocidal maniacs. Singing a hymn to nature on behalf of the Indian victims could even make the celebration a virtuous act.

Oh, and apparently the transatlantic crossing took eighteen years, since we're told that the Pilgrims boarded the Mayflower in 1602 and arrived in America in 1620. That's some voyage!

Yankee Secessionists

The decentralist paradigm has spread beyond the old Confederacy, it seems. Here's an article about the Second Vermont Republic, an organization trying to get Vermont to secede from the United States. God bless 'em; at least they can't be smeared as being simply apologists for slavery and/or racial segregation. The article cites Don Livingston of Emory at length. Livingston argues for "the politics of the human scale," a localism derived primarily from Aristotle and classical republican theory.

Ethics and Natural Law

"I conclude that . . . the answer to our question is no; ethics cannot be derived from nature." So says an ethics professor at George Washington University. He's thrown down the gauntlet; are you Aristotelians up to the challenge?

Lisbon and Voltaire

Today is the 250th anniversary of the famous Lisbon earthquake, which is thought to have killed tens of thousands of people and left many thousands more homeless. Coming as it did in the context of rising skepticism among the "Enlightened" elites of Europe, the earthquake became a rhetorical weapon in the arsenal of deists, agnostics, and atheists.

Voltaire made use of the earthquake in Candide and also referred to it in several of his letters. Here's one from just a few weeks after the quake.

It's interesting, although not surprising, to see the unbelievers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina trot out the same arguments as Voltaire and the other philosophes: "If there is a God, how could he allow such a catastrophe to take place?" It's just another example of how the study of the past sheds more light on the present.