Thanksgiving is not a Christian holiday in the USA

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by mac mini

White eurocentric culture very much had a cultural reverence for nature at 3000 or 4000 BC, e.g. cave paintings. The institution of law and the advancement of agriculture killed it.

You're right and I knew I'd made a mistake after I posted. I think, however, that the rise of agriculture and later of cities (law) aren't what changed things. There were civilizations that practiced agriculture and had laws, even a written language that still revered and attempted to preserve nature because they literally worshiped it. The Mayans are a good example.

No, it wasn't Europeans or Eurocentrism that did it. It was monotheism. The great monotheistic Abrahamic religions pretty thoroughly wiped out all the other advanced animist and pagan religions and replaced them with a big sky god that told the people that the earth was theirs to do with as they pleased. What ultimately happened to the earth was of secondary importance because the only real purpose of their lives here was to be as obedient to the sky god as they possibly could in order to join the party up there when it was all over here.

John

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by bobabode

Those Giant Bison would have inspired a crap your pants moment in anyone meeting up with one suddenly!

They were only a foot or so taller than the plains bison but they weighed twice as much. And then there were the horns!

That didn't stop Paleoindian hunters from taking them on. Did you see the atlatl point in that vertibra? The atlatl was a spear throwing stick with a socketed end into which the butt end of the spear was fitted. It effectively made your arm about 50% longer so that you could get a lot more force behind the throw. It was still a close range weapon so those ancient hunters needed to get right in there close to get a kill.

Amazing!



John

[bobabode]

Filet mignon as big as a dinner plate! No growth hormones and not geezed up on antibiotics. That was a nice pic of the spearpoint stuck in the vertebra. Haven't they found the same in mastodon?

[Zeke]

Then again, there were Great Lakes tribes that just fished (like mine).

[BlueStreak]

Originally Posted by Zeke

Oh, we'd have -- eventually -- screwed this place up ourselves.

You know where the bulk of that whole "Constitution thing" came from, right?

France & England?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by BlueStreak

France & England?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire

There are some folks who maintain part was European.

[Boreas]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_L...s_Constitution

[bobabode]

Another wiki with regard to American history that white-eyes should know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois_Confederacy

[piece-itpete]

They gave Thanks - to Budda? and invited their friends.

Part of their thanks was undoubtably for their new friends, assuming the story was true.

Today, not so much, the giving Thanks part.

Pete

[finnbow]

FWIW, virtually every country has some sort of Thanksgiving or harvest fest. For example, the Germans have Erntedankfest (Ernte = harvest, dank = thanks, fest = fest). They don't surround it with all the gauzy pseudo-wonderfulness that characterizes many of our holidays. Sometimes I think we've subcontracted out all our holidays to Madison Ave. and Hallmark.