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To: fr_freak
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.

79 posted on 10/12/2017 10:03:52 PM PDT by x
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To: x
Sure, the 20th century had some nastiness, but it was the exception, not the rule. We look down on the Nazis because they did some fairly heinous things that were already unacceptable, even in war, by the 20th century. As for the rest of the stuff done in the various wars. War is war. I don't pass judgement on what anyone does to survive in those circumstances. What they do when survival isn't on the line, for example, with POWs, is another story. So, indians scalping guys in battle doesn't faze me. Indians slaughtering and enslaving non-threatening neighbors, red or white, and torturing them for fun does faze me.

I used the example of wheelless indians to show their lack of change and progress towards anything different. It has nothing to do with their moral values, per se, but it shows their cultural stagnation. If Europeans had never come, I have no doubt indians would still be doing the same stuff they were doing 700 years ago.
80 posted on 10/13/2017 12:27:45 AM PDT by fr_freak
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