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Originally Posted by Antithesis  No, but that's the usual claim of the religious right. I just assumed that's what you thought. What I know you said is that the religious right are not in control, which anybody with eyes and a brain can clearly see is false.
The Puritans came to America partly because they were persecuted and partly because they wanted nothing to do with the Church of England. Interestingly enough, the first thing they did after setting off for religious freedom was limit religious freedom. If you weren't christian, you weren't worthy to live with them.
The point I've been trying to make is when they arrived their system was fundamentalist, even by the standards of the time. I never said they weren't opressed. |
Basically, the Puritans came to the Americas after they'd lost their short tenur of rulership of the goverment in England.
For a short time, they were the ruling power, based on the grounds that the English were entertaining a retreat from the 'laviciousness rulership' that had been going on previously within the country...In otherwords, they'd gotten into power there temporarily, because people were feeling that their country had turned to 'godlessness'. And the new movement's name? Puritans...
They managed to keep control of British goverment (and enforce their rigid principles) for a number of years, until the people got tired of it. Basically, they came to the conclusion that policies had went from one extreme (heavily sexual explotation within the ruling classes, greed, overtly pagan traditions being practiced under the guise of Christianity) to the other extreme (sex except for procreation heavily dissuaded, no practicing of holidays with pagan roots, and rigid controls on it's citizens)...
So they booted the Puritans out of office, tried to establish a middle ground, and the Puritans left GB claiming religious prosecution and headed for the Americas where they could start their own colonies practicing their own religious beliefs...
I find this discussion interesting because it was just last month The History Channel ran a program about Puritans and their fight against paganism...  |