Let's not generalize "people like yourself", when people like myself hold a much more nuanced view of U.S. history and progress than your post suggests.

Yes, we have made a lot of progress over time and will continue to do so. However, I think you need to read my comment in the context of the original post, which was "do Americans even know why the country was even founded anymore?". I think a perfectly reasonable response to a question like that is to put the founding of the country into perspective.

Not sure how you can compare something to the past, but only look at the positive sides instead of the negative. Or at the very least, not provide just a understanding of an interpretation as you have done, except towards the present.

Gp was refuting a claim that the American State was formed on an "anti state oppression" platform. He is not claiming the people were bad, but that their ideals were not what was being claimed of them

> Tom Holland... argues the separation of church and state can be traced back to the Bible and it been a steady progression to secularism from there

This is basically what's known as survivor bias. I think if you look at history you will find that power shifted to and from faith (and the church) in many waves. But true secularism was not, to my knowledge, seriously suggested for the first thousand years or more of Christian history. In a way this view of theological history suggests that there is a "true meaning" of the Bible that people didn't happen to notice for over a millennium - that the principles of modern society was always there in waiting, waiting for us to understand it. What this Tom Holland might refer to are sayings such as the phrase "Render unto Cesar the things that are Cesar's, and unto God the things that are God's", which does sound like advocating some form of secularism - to modern ears! But of course these verses had many different interpretations over the years.

Personally, I think a much better explanation is that the interpretation of religious texts always happen in a context. Like any text, I don't think it makes sense to claim that there is an interpretation of any religious text that could be called its true meaning, because meaning always arises as a dialogue between the text and its reader, which happens in a certain context, a certain point in material history. You might be able to say that there is the original intention of the authors, but this is not accessible to us. "Render unto Cesar" can perhaps easily be used as an argument for secularism in a Christian context, but I don't believe the phrase can fully explain its inception.

The Bible, like any religious text, contains the blueprint for an infinity of societies. This idea that any part of modern American society, or Hegel's 19th century Prussian society, for that matter, is the natural consequence of what's in the Bible is very strange when you look, both at everything that came before, and also the fact that a very different progression happened in many parts of the Christian world, like Ethiopia or Coptic villages in Egypt. I don't think the theory of "steady progression" holds much water unless you're extremely selective about your facts and perspective.

I didn't read it as character assassination. I read it as a reminder that we're should not romanticize and fill in details that were not there.

People interpret history differently, and it is a problem when those interpretations differ too much and lead to fundamentally different expectations.

> People like yourself

You mean people who are interested in analysis of history? You don't want to consider it. That's fine...oh wait...what about:

> Some argue the separation of church and state can be traced back to the bible

Some people argue people rode Dinosaurs. That's about as compelling, as well. For the most of the cultures that contributed to writing portions of the Bible, religious text was law.

> remind people that things were less than perfect in the past

The point is about intent, which is relevant. "less perfect" or whatever that's supposed to mean to you, is irrelevant. This is history, not a relative comparison of ideals.

> You cannot judge people of the past by the standards of today.

Sure you can. Confusing Moral analysis and Contextual analysis is noise.

> the need to character assasinate

Characters are caricatures (incomplete) if you ignore known qualities. Interestingly enough, while you are objecting strongly to the characterization you could have noted that bladegash might have been wrong about the Patrick Henry quote.

Maybe spend more time researching, instead of emotionally posting.

To be fair, the person you're responding to only brought up this viewpoint in response to another poster who seems to hold the view that the founding fathers were just as progressive as we are today.

A lot of these "wrongs" are not really as far in the past as you imply there.

For example the political landscape in the US, is still very much dominated by economic elite interest groups. [0]

People are still actively disfranchised from participating in the democratic process, having their right to vote taken from them over a criminal history. After they came out of the literally largest incarceration system of the planet. Locking people up under circumstances that in most of the developed "Western world" are bluntly considered torture [1].

But torture is apparently a-okay as long as it's described in euphemisms like "enhanced interrogation", just like assassinating US citizens is a-okay [2] as long as it allegedly keeps the "homeland safe".

Just like involuntary servitude, aka slavery, is still very much a thing in the US, it the race based variant of that may have been abolished as an "institution" but the practice still very much exists as punishment for crime.

That's just domestic, that whole can of worms only gets nastier foreign policy wise with wars of aggression and the casual and regular disregard for other countries sovereignty.

As such, these are not events from some far-flung past we judge with completely different standards, these are very current and still on-going events being judged with the current standards.

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rights-un-usa-torture-idU...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2017/01/30/obama-killed-a-16-year-o...

This is true, but you need to consider the context of the debate. The problem with political discussions is that every person (or every side) is actually debating something else.

That said, there are three common contexts to "bringing up the wrongs of the past:"

1 - It's a counter to traditionalist/revivalist/restorationist sentiment and/or mythology. In this case, the myth is that all freedoms come from and are rooted in the infallible founding. Any change is a corruption or a regression and reduces freedom.

The true history is that abolition happened first in the empire. The moral change which made the term "freedom" applicable in any meaningful sense came from outside the empire. The conclusion (should be) exactly what you laid out. Freedom, and a lot of other things we value are really the result of societal progression.

IMO, it's essential to make this argument.

2 - To make analogies to the present.

"In the past, people thought it was OK to X. Today, we don't."

3 - It's a baid faith argument. China suppressing traditional minorities because "the americans did it." This context is just a character assassination attempt and it's bad.

> Much like many things society progresses, generally in the western world that progression has tended towards greater liberty (in most respects) of its citizens

There is no natural trend in history towards any cultural viewpoint, much less towards modern progressivism. And honestly, the very notion that there is such a trend is almost inevitably followed by an attack on opponents by casting them as, well, barbaric.

To pick one obvious example, consider the democratic-autocratic scale. In Western history, the first (recorded) height of democracy was in Classical Antiquity, with Rome and the Greek city states being democratic. But by Late Antiquity (around the AD/BC changeover), these democratic states changed into autocratic states, and they remained as such for nearly 2000 years. Even in the past 100-200 years, when Europe has been "generally" democratic, there has been some dramatic see-saws between democracy and autocracy of various flavors.

> I don't know the history of the events or the characters that led to American indepedence (I am not an American) but what I do find when people feel the need to character assasinate important figures of the past is that they do massively over simplify events and the people involved.

Judging from your choice of words here, I suspect that you are equally as guilty of oversimplification as the people you criticize. People are complicated; motivations are complex and interrelated; trying to understand the motivations of people through evidence that is deliberately deceptive is frustrating. But putting people in the past on pedestals and worshiping them is as destructive as vilifying them is.

Again, an example; this time, the role of slavery in colonial and early US. It is definitely a mistake to consider slavery to be the primary motivation for American independence, as the 1619 Project did (for starters, it begs the question as to why the more-intensive slave Caribbean colonies explicitly rejected succession at the same time). But the cognitive dissonance of combining slavery with appeals for universal liberty needs to be noted, even if you're judging from the standards of the time. Contemporary British opponents to American independence castigated the Americans for preaching liberty yet owning slaves. Some states and individuals did emancipate slaves during the revolutionary period, so we can fairly judge their contemporaries (like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) for failing to do so.

Bringing up "the wrongs of the past" is entirely appropriate in response to a comment asking about why America was founded.

There is no such thing as progress, just shifting societal norms. This cannot be seen as “progress” except retrospectively.

This is actually a really interesting point/question, and it's one that doesn't have an easy answer. It's true that, overall, most slaves (in pre-civil-war US) were owned by a small number of plantations. But in some southern states, nearly half the White families owned at least one slave. In those families, obviously the women and children didn't themselves "own" any slaves, but they nevertheless controlled that person's labor. Similarly, wealthy plantation owners frequently rented their slaves to poorer whites. So even a relatively unprivileged class of White people benefited from slave labor directly despite themselves getting a raw deal relative to the land owners.

But ultimately, the south fought a civil war in order to preserve the institution of slavery because it was the fundamental organization of society on top of which the economy was built, and many non-elite white men nevertheless allied themselves with this effort.

As for projecting the past, I don't know. It's certainly plausible that White people today are still reaping the benefits that were established by slavery and racism in a broad, systemic sense. As far as I know, my relatives didn't own slaves, but my relatives did do things like get mortgages that Black people couldn't do. That doesn't seem fair does it? It's a little bit like inheriting stolen property. But if you go back far enough, what isn't stolen property?

That is a great point and I wish I had added that in! It definitely wasn't comparable with that of those in power, and much of the Anti-Federalists' fading into nonexistence was due to that power imbalance. However, I would say white men lower in socioeconomic status still held far greater rights than that of, for example, slaves and women.

It's understandable that you have been misled in this way; enforcing this particular myth seems to be the primary purpose of USA public schools. I recommend historian Gerald Horne. He has identified Somerset v Stewart as an important event in inspiring American slaveholders and their sometime lawyer John Adams to start the Revolutionary War. That is, they fought a war in large part so that they wouldn't have to give up the practice of slavery.

Fair point, was trying not to make it seem like I was hiding the original error, but your suggestion does that in a much clearer way. Thank you!

Yeah, that was a huge oversight on my part and thank you for bringing it up! I added an edit to the original comment to correct it/apologize (based on another comment mentioning the same thing).