Christopher Columbus - how can Catholics admire him and name organisations after him?

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You have spoken truth… I must reevaluate my Religion and Life. I have lived a lie 😞
Please don’t. I have a feeling the God who loves all and made us in His image and Likeness, probably has a lot better answer than anything I could possibly post.
P,S. - I overcooked my steak and am in a bit of a snarky mood.🤨😮😑
 
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Has anyone mentioned how the inadvertent introduction of European diseases killed most of the Natives?? Disease took more lives than any explorers could.
 
Forcibly taking someone’s land? Much of the land in the Americas was empty. Much was sold through trade deals.
I dare say that if the other culture involves barbarism then it is a good to impose your own if it is against such evils and violence.

There are evils associated with imperialism, but I dare say it is not intrinsically evil nor disordered, especially if it is to bring better values that appreciate human life, etc.
 
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So imperialism without killing and enslaving is fine?
I don’t think so. But at the same time, I do not think it was in accord with the natural law or moral code for Americans, to participate in the human trafficking of millions of Africans and to put them on the auction block to be bought and sold to the highest bidder, just as you would buy and sell pigs at an auction. And with regard to the colonization of America, it is just as true that native Americans were enslaved and forced to work as slaves under the orders of the white European colonialists.
 
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Yes, encomienda, slave trading, bond servants, etc were all things done.

But I think you are conflating things not intrinsic to a thing as if it were intrinsic to a thing.
 
But I think you are conflating things not intrinsic to a thing as if it were intrinsic to a thing.
Unfortunately, whether it be intrinsic or extrinsic, the enslavement of the American Indian after the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus was a cruel injustice and that is why many Americans are taking a second look at whether or not they should admire him.
 
columbus had no clue about colonization

he was trying o find find a shorter to get black pepper & cinammon
 
Well, then we must look at the intention, not abuses. Slavery is not inherently wrong if it is just, unjust slavery may be.

For instance, becoming a slave for a couple years in times of hardship so that you retain shelter. This was actually a vital thing throughout history.

So one must look at the intentions of the thing. Not the abuses or what came after.

I am not saying his enslavement was not immoral; it may have been. I don’t know enough about it however. Far too often we ask for understanding today’s immorality, but how harshly do we judge historical figures with an entirely different mindset?
 
i don’t get your post

columbus was a navigator, explorer & essentially an astronaut

his intention was to find a “shorter route” to the spice world of the east indies

the abuses that followed were not his fault

the native populations were not exactly innocent of moral crimes

they killed, scalped stole from each other
 
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Slavery is not inherently wrong
So according to you, it is OK to put a young woman on the auction block and to sell her like you would sell a horse?
 
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No. Slavery=/=chattel slavery.

Chattel slavery is most likely inherently wrong.
 
Chattel slavery is most likely inherently wrong.
Most likely, but not absolutely?
I see putting young women in chains on the auction block and selling them to the highest white male bidder as absolutely wrong. I would not go along with anyone who says that maybe or most likely it is wrong.
 
Yes, I am pretty sure it is intrinsically wrong. I was taught in school to not speak in absolutes so in try to avoid it, especially in areas where I am not sufficiently knowledgable. Don’t read too much into it.
 
white males bidding for slave women?

“bidding” implies an open, government sanctioned market place
eg race horses, orange juice, porksides; or any commodity

where does “bidding for women” happen?

praise jesus, not in the USA
 
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Yes, forcibly taking someone else’s land and forcibly imposing your outside culture on another people is wrong.
You do realize that this happened in Europe, the Middle East, and almost all of the rest of the world, literally hundreds, maybe thousands of times since the beginning of Christian history?

“Forcibly taking someone’s land” for centuries was the way kingdoms grew economically.
A huge part of the entire Old Testament is about the Jewish people forcibly taking the land of other peoples, with God’s help, or the Jewish people forcibly defending themselves against someone else taking their land, with God’s help.

When you have a primarily agrarian culture, land and the stuff on it - sources of water, fish, crops it produces, gold and silver and copper that you mine from it - is how you acquire wealth. You don’t have the option of taking a bunch of money and investing it in a manufacturing plant.

This is how life was lived, for everybody, for thousands of years.

Your comments are making no sense because you’re ignoring what my old college history professor would have called “the social construction of Columbus’ reality”, meaning that behavior that looks terrible to us by our standards and like it is violating people’s human rights all over the place may actually have been pretty reasonable according to the value system in force back in the past era when a historic person was acting. Being from Europe, Columbus was eager to claim new land for his country, just like every single European country, ruler, explorer, guy who wanted to get rich would have loved to have some new land. Every settler who came from Europe to USA on a land grant from their government was doing the same thing on a smaller scale. And there were plenty of past eras where people from one country in Europe or the Near East moved into some other area that had been occupied by a different group of humans and took over the land, bringing their culture with them and transforming the area. In some places the land has gone back and forth dozens of times.

Bottom line is, if taking someone’s land were to be grounds for posthumously disavowing someone, huge numbers of people in addition to Columbus, including many of the main characters in the Bible, would be on the naughty list, and we also wouldn’t have the world as we know it today.
 
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