Pro Rege Papers

I’m tired of people saying that Christianity is against science because Galileo was killed by fundamentalists. That is a commonly perpetrated lie that many people who don’t know the history believe. Thankfully Axinar seems to know the true story, but maybe some of you don’t.
After many years in the Christian Church, with the development of the hierarchy, and other things that departed from the clear teaching of the Bible, the Roman Catholic church as we know it today came about. This organized church at Rome, with the pope as its head, embraced the teachings of Aristotle, Plato, (to a certain extent) and other Greeks. Aristotle, as is widely known, set forth formally the theory of geocentrism. The Papists accepted this view, and made it an official doctrine of the Church.

However, nowhere in the Bible does it say that the earth revolves around the sun. It implies it several times, (e.g. in Joshua) but God did that so that people before Galileo could understand what He was saying. It would sound silly to an ancient Eastern man to say, “the earth stopped rotating, and therefore the day became longer.” It wouldn’t make any sense. Even we today say the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. We don’t say, “2 hours after earthturn I’ll meet you at the park.” We say, “2 hours after sunset I’ll meet you at the park.” We say it even though the sun isn’t actually moving, we are. The Bible contains other references to facts that were not widely believed then. For example, Isaiah 40:22 speaks about the Earth being round.

Anyway, Galileo provided further proof that the Earth orbits the sun, not vice-versa. He published his works, and was nearly executed by the Papists for “heresy.” The Roman Catholics persecuted heliocentrists without discussion or consideration, just stating the official position of the church. Evolutionists are academically persecuting creationists without discussion or consideration, just stating the official position of secular science. Makes you wonder.

Roman Catholics are by no means fundamentalists. They are (in my opinion) not even Christians. Johannes Kepler, a key heliocentrist and proposer of the Planetary Laws of Motion, was a fundamentalist.
So don’t say anymore that Christianity and the Bible is opposed to science.

Sometimes I wonder why people still cling to communism. Since its earliest days, it has been disproven over and over and over again.

One of the earliest instances I can think of is with the Jamestown colony. The settlers there set up a “common warehouse” system. Everything that was produced or acquired was distributed equally among all the colonists. Thus, no one was rewarded for hard labor, and no one had any incentive for providing food, because they would be fed anyway. You see the result in the many famines and near-death winter experiences. In spite of the failure, this method was tried with many other colonies in the 1600s as well. Communism doesn’t work well.

A few more examples can be seen with the many experimental settlements in the mid-1800s. These attempts were largely communistic in nature, and likewise failed. You always hear these stories about so-and-so founding a communal village somewhere, and it failing soon after beginning. Communism doesn’t work well.

Then you come to the BIG experiments of the 20^th century starting with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. The czars were overthrown, and the U.S.S.R. was founded. This big experiment also deteriorated and rotted until its collapse in 1991, being unable to compete with the free United States under Reagan. Communism doesn’t work well.

China was also overcome by communism, and continues to this day as a communist state. China; however, is an odd case. When Mao Zedong instituted the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, things didn’t go so well. Deng, his successor, had to send students to Western universities to learn how to clean up the mess. After the 1989 event, the Chinese were given more economic freedoms, and China ceased to be communistic. Today China is a convoluted form of a capitalistic state with a dictatorship. Communism doesn’t work well.

The only true communistic states out there today are North Korea and Cuba. Even those aren’t so much communist as t dictatorships. They’re not that successful either. The “worker’s paradise” is a delusion that has never been achieved.

With all these failures, you would think that people would give up on communism, but they still cling to it like an infant to his blanket.

Have you ever wondered why Patrick Henry never ran for President? There is (believe it or not) a reason.

In the making of the Constitution, the Southerners and Northerners were disagreed (of course) on slavery. They didn’t want to make it a big issue, so they make a bad, behind the scenes, no good, shocking, sneaky, deal: no one would talk about it. All they said was that slaves would count as 3/5 of person in elections, and that no one could outlaw the importation of slaves until 1808.

This under-the-radar deal so angered George Mason and some other Christians that they left the convention. This is another reason (among others) why Patrick Henry opposed the Constitution. If he hadn’t, he could have easily won a presidential election. (Well, in my opinion).

The cotton gin hadn’t come around yet, so slavery wasn’t as firmly established in the South as it became in the 1820’s. Many people were able and willing to free their slaves if the time came. But the chance was passed up because a few men didn’t have the guts to mention the issue at the convention.

Today in 1846, the U.S. declared war on Mexico in what is now known as the Mexican-American war (hmmm, I wonder how they came up with that title). The protesters for equal rights to illegal aliens say that we stole California and the Southwest from the Mexicans, and thus we are the aliens, not them.

That’s just a plain lie. The Mexicans invaded Texas and attacked our troops stationed there in April of 1846. They were beaten back, but war tensions had already been brewing for a while, (the Mexicans had broken diplomatic relations) so President Polk declared war.

We had a three-pronged plan of attack: conquer California and New Mexico, and then move on to intimidate the Mexicans into surrender by invading the Mexican frontier. Colonel Stephen Kearny subjugated New Mexico (which then included Arizona, Utah, and parts of Nevada) early in the war. Commodore Robert Stockton declared California secured by August 17. Despite a rebellion afterwards, California was firmly in American hands by January 10, 1847. Mexico had been invaded by General Taylor, and the northern part of it occupied by December 1846. However, in the face of these defeats, the Mexican government still did not surrender, and General Winfield Scott had to invade Mexico City by amphibious landing. The army entered Mexico City on September 14, 1847; and the marines stood guard over the “halls of Montezuma.”

The Mexican government finally made an overture for terms. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ratified by both countries, had the U.S. pay $18¼ million for California and New Mexico, even though they rightly belonged to us and we already occupied them. It also acknowledged the Rio Grande as the official border between Texas and Mexico.

Thus, we overdid ourselves in making sure that we rightfully owned the land. The illegals are incorrect in their denunciations of the U.S. Not to mention that if they really want to be recognized as citizens of this country, they shouldn’t accuse it of being a horrible dictatorship. Waving Mexican flags, chanting anti-American mantras, and mocking the national anthem is not going to endear you to the people of this country.

People say that this country was built on immigrants. That’s true. But those immigrants at the turn of the century filled out the forms, and came to this country legally. The controversy is over illegal aliens; we have no problem with productive immigrants who come to this country by the due process of the law. If the aliens did want to get recognized, they should push for less bureaucracy in the immigration process instead of demanding that they get citizenship rights. If anyone can become a citizen, the status loses its value and purpose.

We should all remember the ones who died to keep this country free on this, the 160^th anniversary of the Mexican War.

George Washington was one of the greatest leaders this country has ever had. He stood strong in battle, he persevered and was an encouragement to his troops in hardship, he was wise in government, and for all indications; he was a Christian.

Many attacks have been leveled against Washington. Yes, some of them are valid that he wasn’t the greatest of generals. But he wasn’t the worst either. Some have said that he was a price gouger, for example charging $10,000 to feed someone’s horse. Other statistics and prices have been recorded in certain books, with the intention of slamming Washington. But you have to remember that that those prices were in Colonial dollars, not modern ones. This currency had so flooded the economy that its value went down to almost nil. It was once remarked that a wagonload of paper money could hardly buy a wagonload of supplies. The attacks on his character are unfounded. Many who witnessed his courage were strengthened. You don’t win an impossible war by shrinking back and not doing anything.

As president, he ruled our country well. He helped the fledgling republic become a nation that could defend itself and be an example of free society. He advised, in his Farewell Address, that the U.S. should continue to expand trade and peaceful diplomacy in the world community; but that it should stay out of “entangling alliances.” In other words, peacefully influence the world for good, but don’t get involved in European wars or imperial conflicts. That’s good advice for any country, including ours then and today.

One interesting thing about George Washington’s vision for this country was his plan for the capital. He planned it on the Potomac for several reasons:

1. It was on a river, thus trade and economic growth.
2. It was geographically central to the country at that time, thus unity.
3. It had mineral resources fairly nearby, thus industry.
4. It was on the border between the slave South, and predominantly free North.

Washington envisioned a bustling commercial capital, central to the country and industrialized. He didn’t want a showy, opulent area for tourists, like France’s Versailles. He envisioned a center of industry with factories that would be an example to the South of the profit and potential of free labor. The South, which hadn’t become addicted slavery at that time, (cotton was not as profitable) could have been reformed. At any rate, Washington had a noble plan that was not carried out. Jefferson differed from Washington in his dream of the capital, and set out to build what we see today: a showy, more or less opulent place for tourists.

We should respect this great leader of our country for the great man he was, and not revile him because he didn’t fit in with modern views.

Now I am very aware that this is a very touchy topic. Some people I know seem to think that Appomattox was only a ceasefire. They hang pictures of Lee or Grant on their walls and do homage to their respective sides. In my opinion, both sides had their faults and their favors; but that position was reached only after long, hard hours of meditation. (Not really, but I thought that would sound nice) The positions on the war are evident in the many names for it. You have the Civil War, (which I’ll use) the War Between the States, the War of Northern Aggression, the War of Southern Secession, etc. What I am actually going to do in this post is not talk about the war itself, (I hope y’all covered that in high school) but the situations, debates, and positions taken by people and regions before Fort Sumter was fired on.At first, the main controversy between North and South was on the issue of state’s rights. The South believed that states should be able to nullify acts of Congress that were believed to be unconstitutional. It also held that States should be able to secede from the Union, and that the Union was not perpetual. The North (mostly New England and the mid-Atlantic states at this point) did not think that the states had that power. They also held that the Union was perpetual. These issues arose between the two regions as early as 1799, in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions drafted by those states in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts. It reached open debate on the Senate floor with the Webster-Hayne debates of 1830. These issues continued to grow in power and sentiment along sectional lines until the election of Lincoln in 1860.

Then, slavery gradually came to the forefront as the distinguishing line between North and South. This issue was held off for many years, starting with the Constitution itself in 1787, extending through the Missouri Compromise of 1820, to when it came to a head in the debates leading up to the Great Compromise of 1850. The origin of this compromise started when California applied for admission into the Union. This time, unlike any other time, there was no slave state to balance the free California. New Mexico, which would probably become a slave state, was not yet ready for statehood. Henry Clay, a Kentucky Senator, attempted to resolve the problem by drafting a compromise. Its final form, drafted by Stephen Douglas, said that California should be admitted into the Union, that New Mexico would be admitted as slave or free when the time came, and that fugitive slaves could be taken from free states by their masters, even after they had run away.

There were great debates all through this time and up to the Civil War with the Kansas-Nebraska Compromise, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, and other things that aggravated both sides into passionate speech. Most of the debating went on in the Senate, because that was where the two sides were the most equally represented. The main points that both sides insisted on and argued for were the following:

John C. Calhoun of South Carolina stated that the North was aggressing and should grant the South equal rights.

Daniel Webster of Massachusetts said that the South had good cause for complaint against attacks leveled by abolitionists at the region. But he also stated that the North also had good cause for complaint against the South’s aims to expand slavery into other states and across the western frontier. Webster also said that their criticisms against the North for its industrialization were just cause for complaint. However, he declared emphatically, the talk of peaceful secession should cease. There could be no such thing while the sun still rises and sets. Unfortunately, Webster was right.

William Seward, an abolitionist from New York, said that there was a higher law that men were bound to. This law forbade slavery. (And thus, its expansion) This appeal to a higher law became common among abolitionists.

Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy, stated that the North was trying to te the South, and should back off from meddling in the affairs of states.

Stephen Douglas held to the unpopular view of popular sovereignty concerning slavery in the various states. In other words, the people in each state should decide on whether slavery was to be allowed or not; and to if so, to what extent.

Abolitionists continually harangued the South that slavery was a sin, and that they were sinners. Southerners maintained that their cause was just, and that they were holding to the Constitution.

In hindsight, several conclusions can be reached: The South was wrong for wanting to expand slavery and maintaining that it wasn’t a sin. The North was wrong for continually pressing the issue and for virtually forcing the slave states to secede. The South shouldn’t have pressed for equal rights with the North. They were a minority region after 1850; they shouldn’t have tried to force the rest of the country to make allowances for them to have equal representation. The South was Presbyterian; the North was Unitarian. In that sense, the South was more Christian than the North, but the Southern Christians should have realized their sin and put a stop to it. (See my post on racism) The abolitionists should have waited for slavery to die out from natural causes and used the due process of the law to make slavery unprofitable; instead of forcing the South to do something it wasn’t ready to do yet. Stephen Douglas’ idea of popular sovereignty was probably the best idea in terms of slave vs. free states and the numbers of each. I don’t think it was good to have Congress decide the issue for the states. Both sides could have used a little more moderation and al lot less hot-headedness in their denouncements of each other.

All in all, the Civil War was not a shining moment in our history. It’s a little embarrassing. But nevertheless, it is part of our history, and we should learn from it.

In the 1850s, railroads were becoming popular in America. The railroad had presented itself as a reliable, efficient, and (relatively) cheap way of transporting goods. Canals had become too expensive; not to mention that almost all the commercially feasible canal routes already had canals by the mid 1840s. Roads were unthinkable as an economical way of moving things. (Remember, they didn’t have trucks) Thus, railroad building became popular in the 1850s.

Much of the financing for railroads was done by local, state, and federal governments. These were ted by people who were developing sectional tendencies to tie the Northeast to the Midwest. These officials wanted to keep the Northeast’s old nce in the Union. They feared that the Midwest would be tied to the South, since much of the Midwest is drained by the Mississippi River. So, the New England big-whigs made a massive effort to make the Great Lakes the major outlet of Midwestern goods. First, they made the Cumberland Road, tying Baltimore, Maryland to the Ohio River. That didn’t catch on too well, so they tried the Erie Canal, tying the Hudson River to Lake Erie. That was a great success, so some people in Pennsylvania thought they’d try it. They built a canal from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Now wait a second, anyone who has driven across Pennsylvania on I-80, or has taken basic U.S. geography knows that Pennsylvania is not the flattest place in the world. As you probably thought, the “Main Line” wasn’t a huge success.

So, in comes the railroad. Once government officials saw the possibilities of railroads, they jumped on the bandwagon without thinking for another second. Governments on all levels went into debt in their financing of railroads from everywhere to somewhere else. Philadelphia went into a debt of $8 million (which was a lot back then, believe it or not) for the construction of railroads. Ohio passed a law requiring the state to supply one-third of the capital for any new railroad project in the state. And so on and so on. Pretty soon, railroads criss-crossed the Midwest, bringing the region’s produce to the Great Lakes, New England, and the Mississippi. (But mostly the former two)

The North was now tied together firmly. But the South hadn’t been as eager as the North in railroad building. The South didn’t have a very pressing need for construction of railroads. Nor was there any political motive to do so. Besides, any extra capital in the South was more likely to be spent on land or slaves than machinery or ultra-ambitious projects. The ideal life for the Southern man was to get a solid plantation and settle down as a Southern gentleman.

As I mentioned before, the Northern governments financed a large portion of the companies that built railroads there. They did this because they were focused on trying to link West and East together. Thus most of the roads were built with their endpoints at the Great Lakes or ultimately an Eastern city, such as New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore. This drained a lot of traffic from the Mississippi River ports, such as St. Louis and New Orleans. That is not say that the transportation on those Rivers was completely stopped. Those port cities continued to grow. But the railroad traffic did take away from the level to which those cities grew and received the Midwest’s produce.

If the Northern Sectionalists hadn’t been so focused on tying East and West together and maintaining New England’s influence on the Union; it is possible that New Orleans would have become the major port city of America, thereby tying North and South together which would have been more important in the long run. New Orleans would have grown, its influence would have increased over the Southern states, and it would have been more reluctant to leave the Union when the time came. It is also possible that the example of free labor to the South by the Midwest and through New Orleans would have influenced Southerners to not be so adamant for the expansion of slavery. When South Carolina seceded, the rest of the South might not have followed.

But this is all speculation. However it is interesting to think about the possibilities.

The main point: State-sponsored activities often have something that’s not completely kosher going on behind the scenes.