Social Studies

Making sense of life, it’s what I’ve spent, well, nearly a lifetime trying to do. I’d like to think that both my right and left hemispheres work in tandem, communicating with each other to help me be both logical and relational. But, history and religion, intertwined as they are, have baffled me, until lately. And it makes sense to me to create a new word -religistory to tell the stories of our world religions, because they are history, and stories, combined, with numerous authors, translated numerous times, and it seems, as in the case of later Christianity, some of the last ‘translators’ like Luther and Calvin were not particularly good people.

This is part of the story that I was never told, from around the time that Christopher Columbus sailed.

Initial contacts between Europeans and the first Americans were for the most part friendly. (OK, this part I was told; Thanksgiving, right?) The various peoples of the New World had much to teach the explorers who landed on their shores. But engulfed in a haze of alphabet-generated, monotheistic dementia, the Europeans categorized their reunited brothers and sisters as subhuman savages, largely because they were not Christians. (Meanwhile, the “civilized” Europeans back home were busy hacking and broiling each other in a frenzy of unparalleled savagery.) What followed was genocide on a scale unprecedented in world history. More than 80 million people are estimated to have been living on the southern and northern continents of the Americas in 1492; within three hundred years, the “explorers,” “conquistadors,” “colonists,” “settlers,” and “pioneers,” --exterminated the majority of the native population: their current number is approximately 10 million.(The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain, 1998, pp. 349-350.)

70 million missing people. Did you learn this in history class? Makes you think, doesn’t it? About how we are still treating people in our culture, about why so many peoples are struggling with having basic dignity about who they are and where they’ve come from. About who was really being barbaric to who. About who is in power and why. It seems like for most of my life I have been brainwashed to respect barbaric men who had nothing like being Christ-like at all behind their motives to rule and conquer. I was told stories of conquering heros, not understanding that the conquering part meant torturing and killing and taking people’s lands. My right hemisphere was silenced, my tears scorned, and my questions laughed at nearly every step of the way. Perhaps I am recovering from a lifetime of Stockholm Syndrome.