Your history lesson for today

“Well, I never give the matter no more’n what you’d call passin’ notice when I read it in the hist’ry books, so there might be some abstruse theological p’int I missed. But as I rec’lect it there was several schools of thought back there in England an’ on the continent regardin’ the proper road to salvation—one faction holdin’ out fer sprinklin’, an’ another fer dunkin’, an’ a third fer purgatory, an’ a fourth fer instant damnation. All designed primarily to prevent folks from enjoyin’ the primrose path to hell. Sech was the fervor of the adherents to these momentous propositions that they backed up their faith with jailin’s, beheadin’s, burnin’s, an’ torturin’s. Well, after standin’ about so much of it these here Pilgrims and Puritans decided it wasn’t no place fer underprivileged minorities, so they sailed acrost the ocean an’ landed there in New England where they could be free to worship God in their own way, accordin’ to the dictates of their conscience—an’ which they done by shootin’ all the Siwashes they seen, stealin’ their land, an’ buildin’ churches on it in which to praise God fer their deliverance.”

“Was these folks s’posed to be Christians?”

-American history according to Black John Smith & Lyme Cushing
in Justice On Halfaday Creek