😂 Okay, I am laughing for all the wrong reasons, but before I dive into a couple hours of novel-writing, please enjoy this document from Massachusetts Bay, 1697 with me.
Yeah, yeah, it's a list of brutal punishments outlined for anyone who denies, curses, or reproaches god/Christianity...
But look at that last part. How can you *not* laugh at the attempt to show restraint?
"We'll do all of these terrible things to atheists, but only two at most for the same offence! What are we, monsters?!" 😂
Oh, and for anyone struggling with image quality and/or the older text - in which a long curly "f" is actually an "s" - here's the text transcribed on the Wikipage:
The US was colonized by outcast, wackos, religious nuts, and debtors. They almost didn't make it. Only the amazing bounty of food and natural resources saved them. They were exiled for a reason. They were narcissistic exploiters of everything they touched.
And now we are here, having learned little.
This is the grief of brief lifespans: how little time we have to absorb the past before we repeat its errors.
I remember watching Bush talk about going to war - his enthusiasm ill-befitting a world that claimed to honour the horror of war every Veteran's and Memorial Day. But as a teen then, it dawned on me that *of course* he could be excited. He hadn't lived out those mistakes himself.
So long as we need firsthand experience to believe, we will heap horror upon horror ad aeternum.
Language is the mediator between our passed follies, and our current dilemmas. Keep writing. It's kinda important.