For centuries, certain W European Great Powers have been guilty of piracy, sailed around the world exploring, settling down in far off lands and trading - mostly uninvited! It led to coercion, exploitation, slavery, empire building and countless wars where the blacks got the rough end of our supposed 'white, democratic, Christian based civilisations'. Yet, remarkably, our subjugated subjects still helped us fight our wars in the last century!
Every English monarch, in recent centuries, has had these words said to them as part of their vows:
Our gracious Queen/King:
to keep your Majesty ever mindful of the law and the Gospel of God
as the Rule for the whole life and government of Christian Princes,
we present you with this Book,
the most valuable thing that this world affords.
And the Moderator shall continue:
Here is Wisdom;
This is the royal Law;
These are the lively Oracles of God.
But the monarchs sanctioned piracy, colonisation and warfare. From the white peoples of Western Europe who colonised N America, the native American tribes succumbed to "God, guns and germs". God because the believers thought that the Lord was paving the way for them in the New Promised Land when the inhabitants fell like flies - no immunity at all - to the diseases that the new settlers, unwittingly, had brought with them.
"We see asylum seekers washed up on the beaches dead. Held in inhumane conditions behind barbed wire around Europe. What does our message say to them? What should the Gospel be to them?" John Neale - talk on Sun 22 Nov 2020
SELF: From the terrible way that our ancestors treated strangers and foreigners, you would think that we would now be more empathetic and compassionate and even wanting to help the descendants of those we treated so poorly. Really poorly in capturing, enslaving and deporting them to work in foreign fields under the baking sun to make us as wealthy as we are now. And, without even paying them a cent for their manual labours in atrocious conditions. Any employer or business would be successful on that basis!
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