Asteroid captu or whatever

I forgot, in my haste to sputter (not flame!), to say anything at all about the role of the missions in their service to native peoples. It's too enormous to begin to talk about. It is true that Europeans brought disease (and so will we risk that going out into space, by the way, and some people use that for an argument not to go) but they also brought too many gifts to say that native peoples suffered from their conversion. If you scratch the surface (beyond the liberal rhetoric of, How Dare They Convert the Indian from His Wonderful Natural Religion!) you will find a history of enormous sacrifice and service toward native peoples on the part of enough Catholic European people to make it matter. Notice I didn't say Protestant, nor everybody. The Protestant take is way different, bound up as protestantism itself is with the worst of capitalism, and resulted in wholesale slaughter, not the path followed in Catholic regions, where they converted and organized into modern but benign cooperative economic units and protected natives from the worst exploitation. It's the truth! We even used to study it in the Black Panther Party back in the day, how slavery, you can use that as a litmus test, was completely different in northern American from southern regions where the Spanish influence affected its implementation. Even the communists admit the Church protects the poor.

They did--they hardly do now, compromised for a minute. We're getting it straightened out.

Wasn't one of the earliest, best sf novels, based on the literal kidnapping of a 'native' from a planet (because his people would never have allowed him to be taken) who ended up, at the end of the series, saving the universe precisely because he got kidnapped, and trained in the new technologies, and brought his own talents to it, and that was the magic? It's cruelty, not exploitation, to leave
natives to be nothing but natives.(And don't say, 'fine to technologies and teaching people that, no to religion': dear hearts, religion is another technology, maybe the most powerful one. A coherent religion unifies a society from the interior and that's why 'freedom of religion' is a blood-sucking social suicide.) The leftist state did this in Mexico--it actually charged the Church in court with 'teaching the native not to be native.' And the state won. And do you know what the native is doing now in Mexico? He is squatting by the roadside begging, and the state is just fine with it, because the tourists like it. (It's enough to make you cry, to see.)

The Catholic Church saved the native, as a general flat-out statement. And my family, thank God for it. I had five crazy alcoholic half-breed aunts and uncles, and my mother, too, and if it had not been for my Catholic school, I'd not have survived.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "janet_baker76"

wrote: