Re:Checking out of 'Hotel America'
by abstractbill on Monday August 03, 2009 @03:08PM
(#739884)
I sometimes joke that we (the British) sent all our criminals to Australia and all our puritans to America, and of course there's some amount of historical truth to this. So if the Americans remain fervently religious, why isn't Australia really a nation of criminals today?
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That's because folks forget that Puritans were just one of a number of oppressed religious groups in England who shipped out to the colonies - or, for that matter, that Georgia was a penal colony, too.
It's always strange and interesting to hear people harp on one particular minority group of colonists as exemplars. Contemporary conservative religious groups have little or no connection to Puritanism at all.
Perhaps the causes or whatever drives people to be religious or criminal are not the same? Perhaps removing criminals from British society was enough to 'reform' a lot of them.The puritans chose to go to the US, I believe.
If we had sent all the criminals to the US and all the puritans to Australia then perhaps the results would have been switched.
A lot of the "criminals" were really just poor people and the puritans chose to go the US largely because nobody in Europe wanted them around.
Re:Checking out of 'Hotel America'
by antipaganda on Tuesday August 04, 2009 @08:19AM
(#741053)
What makes you think we're not a nation of criminals? We're just really GOOD criminals, so no-one's caught us yet.