Replies

They are frozen in time while we keep evolving?

The evolution of American indians is over. It stopped when they were relegated to reservations. They don't do the nasty stuff any more, because Americans put a stop to it.

But that's not the point here. The point is that you were trying to make an equivalence between behavior of Europeans versus American indians, that they were the same because both groups were just people. My point is that this may be true, but that the cultures of the two were quite different and that the European culture had mostly evolved past a lot of the barbarity that you pointed out by the time they settled the Americas. Certainly the American culture had evolved past that point, as a whole, by the time most of the Indian Wars occurred.

One last thing - yes the indians were frozen in time before the Europeans arrived. They hadn't even invented the freaking wheel, and there was no reason to believe they ever would.

My point is that this may be true, but that the cultures of the two were quite different and that the European culture had mostly evolved past a lot of the barbarity that you pointed out by the time they settled the Americas.

You originally said, "by the time the USA came into existence." That was centuries after Europeans settled the Americas. Read about the conquistadors, pretty brutal guys.

One last thing - yes the indians were frozen in time before the Europeans arrived. They hadn't even invented the freaking wheel, and there was no reason to believe they ever would.

You were talking about moral evolution, now you're talking about technological evolution. There were a variety of cultures in the Americas. They weren't all one identical thing.

Some of those cultures were higher on a moral scale than others. That means some kind of moral evolution had happened. Or at least some kind of development or differentiation.

No, the Indians weren't saints or moral paragons, but when you look at what horrors the rest of the world was capable of doing in the 20th century, I wouldn't lightly dismiss them as barbarians.