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Checking out of 'Hotel America'

news.bbc.co.uk

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Re: Checking out of 'Hotel America'

#41

Post by dmm »

nvn1 wrote: post #38
abstractbill wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes joke that we (the British) sent all our criminals to Australia and all our puritans to America, and of course there's some amount of historical truth to this. So if the Americans remain fervently religious, why isn't Australia really a nation of criminals today?

Perhaps the causes or whatever drives people to be religious or criminal are not the same? Perhaps removing criminals from British society was enough to 'reform' a lot of them.The puritans chose to go to the US, I believe. If we had sent all the criminals to the US and all the puritans to Australia then perhaps the results would have been switched.

A lot of the "criminals" were really just poor people and the puritans chose to go the US largely because nobody in Europe wanted them around.

Re: Checking out of 'Hotel America'

#42

Post by Semiapies »

abstractbill wrote: post #24
kragen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that so few Europeans believe that diabetes can be cured via prayer? People whose religion is sincere will inevitably come into conflict with religious and secular authorities from time to time. Over several centuries, most of them left Europe and went to the US, where there were no religious authorities, and the secular authorities were much more hands-off. It's not particularly surprising that their desce…

I sometimes joke that we (the British) sent all our criminals to Australia and all our puritans to America, and of course there's some amount of historical truth to this. So if the Americans remain fervently religious, why isn't Australia really a nation of criminals today?

That's because folks forget that Puritans were just one of a number of oppressed religious groups in England who shipped out to the colonies - or, for that matter, that Georgia was a penal colony, too.

It's always strange and interesting to hear people harp on one particular minority group of colonists as exemplars. Contemporary conservative religious groups have little or no connection to Puritanism at all.

Re: Checking out of 'Hotel America'

#43

Post by frossie »

ShabbyDoo wrote: post #13

Why is it that so few Europeans believe that diabetes can be cured via prayer? Is it that state-run religions aren't as market-savvy as the "free-market" churches in the US? Are Europeans better educated? I presume the author probably is also referring to an embrace of creationism as well. What is it that went right in Europe (or just didn't go awry)?

Why is it that so few Europeans believe that diabetes can be cured via prayer?

It comes down to optimism again I think. A European devout Christian would certainly pray for their sick child - but they would not expect their prayer to be necessarily answered, so they would also take the kid to the doctor. If the doctor cured the child, they may attribute the good luck to a form of divine intervention whose instrument was the doctor.

The problem in the US is that many local forms of Christianity have set themselves in opposition to science - either/or - and so the doctors are not instruments of God but His antagonists. I don't have a really good explanation as to how this came about.

Re: Checking out of 'Hotel America'

#44

Post by Semiapies »

I'm a bit thrown by the mention of Kara Neumann. It's as if he's trying to suggest it was some major trend that wacky American law allows, as opposed to a freakish event that lead to her fanatical parents being convicted of reckless homicide.

Re: Checking out of 'Hotel America'

#45

Post by Semiapies »

tc wrote: post #3

That piece resonated with me. In the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America), sometimes it takes a fascinated outsider to draw a properly nuanced picture of what it really means to be an American.

I think the opposite - it strikes me as much more an insight into the ideals of English culture than anything about the US. Particularly the stereotypical assumption that you can understand a vast country by living for a while in Charleston and the District of Columbia. :)

To be fair, it's from the POV of someone who's managed to spend eight years in a society without learning how to tell a joke to a stranger, but there's a reason why they say, "Americans think 100 years is a long time, and the English think 100 miles is a long way."

Re: Checking out of 'Hotel America'

#46

Post by Semiapies »

abstractbill wrote: post #7

This sums up pretty much exactly how I feel about America having lived here for 6 years. I both love it and hate it here. This bit was particularly good: A nation which will one day mass produce a cure for type one diabetes, could not, would not, save little Kara Neumann from the bovine idiocy of her religious parents.

Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.

I don't believe any society has managed to prevent murder; all they manage to do is try and sentence the guilty when they catch them, as the state of Wisconsin did to the girl's parents.

Re: Checking out of 'Hotel America'

#47

Post by pyre »

noss wrote: post #34
abstractbill wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to know the real answer to this. I suspect it has something to do with how easy it is to form a church here and get it tax-exempt status (I have no experience in this area of course, but from what I've heard it's much easier in the US than it is in Europe).

ShabbyDoo is definitely onto something with his guess that European government-connected churches market themselves less. From what I understand you will be quite left-out of society in most of US if you don't go to church. Here in Sweden, as a member of church, you can have funerals, marriages and baptising at church, but the church will never really bother you to come to the Sunday service. The Swedish church was s…

> From what I understand you will be quite left-out of society in most of US if you don't go to church. Here in Sweden, as a member of church, you can have funerals, marriages and baptising at church, but the church will never really bother you to come to the Sunday service.

Not really. I don't. Maybe you're talking about people that belong to a particular church being pressured into regular attendance? But I belong to no church and even when I have in the past the only times I went regularly were when I was forced to as a child.

{edit} Maybe I've just managed to avoid areas like this but I've lived in the Detroit, Portland and Toronto (Canada, which I guess doesn't count). {/edit}

Re: Checking out of 'Hotel America'

#48

Post by tc »

Semiapies wrote: post #45
tc wrote: post #3

That piece resonated with me. In the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America), sometimes it takes a fascinated outsider to draw a properly nuanced picture of what it really means to be an American.

I think the opposite - it strikes me as much more an insight into the ideals of English culture than anything about the US. Particularly the stereotypical assumption that you can understand a vast country by living for a while in Charleston and the District of Columbia. :) To be fair, it's from the POV of someone who's managed to spend eight years in a society without learning how to tell a joke to a stranger, but th…

He does reveal quite a bit about his own biases, but he walked away with the realization that the things he would criticize most about America are also what make America possible.

Re: Checking out of 'Hotel America'

#50

Post by lallysingh »

domodomo wrote: post #8

This article was strong because it balanced critique with commendation. It's an interesting observation that America's "bigness" in many things is simultaneously it's largest advantage and disadvantage. I've often felt that Americans tend to have a kind of naive optimism compared to folks from other countries. In fact, while living abroad I've felt judged by Western Europeans in particular for that quality in myself…

Remember there's been some self-selection here. What other than naive optimism can explain packing up everything you own and jumping across the atlantic or pacific to lead a new life in a new country?

Yet it explains almost all of our parents, grandparents, or great(^n)-grandparents. That's going to bias the culture.

And it's a wonderful thing :-)

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