On May 9, 2012 ~ the Mille Lacs Messenger, a Minnesota county newspaper, published the following letter of mine. ****************************************************************************************************************** Our founding fathers' act of establishing this nation of ours was fundamentally opposed to the gospel of Jesus. The United States of America was established on a bigoted religious doctrine, the Christian Doctrine of Discovery, a doctrine that denied, and still denies, this land's indigenous peoples/tribes their fundamental human right to own land and to be complete independent sovereign nations. The Doctrine of Discovery was a series of fifteenth century papal doctrines that were used to create the international laws of Western Christendom. These laws were used to regulate and guild colonizing European Christian nations. After crossing the Atlantic ocean and setting foot on Guanahani island, Christopher Columbus, acting under the international laws of Western Christendom performed a ceremony to "take possession" of the indigenous people's island land for the Christian nation of Spain. Then, Columbus and his men, by an act of thievery, forcefully took possession of their land and enslaved them. The international laws of Western Christendom asserted that Christian nations had a right, based on the Bible, to claim absolute title to and ultimate authority over any newly "discovered" Non-Christian inhabitants and their lands. In the Inter Caetera papal doctrine, Pope Alexander stated his desire that the "discovered" people be "subjugated and brought to the faith itself." By this means, said the pope, the "Christian Empire" would be propagated. Because the World Council of Churches recently denounced the Doctrine of Discovery and declared it to be "fundamentally opposed to the gospel of Jesus", more and more U.S. Christians are becoming aware that, both, Columbus' act of taking possession of indigenous people's land for Spain and the founding fathers' act of establishing the United States of America were "fundamentally opposed to the gospel of Jesus". In 1823, the Doctrine of Discovery was adopted into U.S. law by the Supreme Court in the celebrated case, Johnson v. McIntosh. Writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice John Marshall observed that Christian European nations had assumed "ultimate dominion" over the lands of America during the Age of Discovery and that upon white Christian "discovery" the red pagan Indian peoples had lost "their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations," and only retained a right of "occupancy" in their lands. Marshall also observed that upon the establishment of the United States of America, this nation acquired ownership of the indigenous peoples' lands (stolen lands) from Great Britain, and that it also acquired the right to subjugate and have "dominion" over this land's pagan indigenous peoples from this same Christian nation. This land's indigenous peoples are still being held hostage in their own homelands; it's time to set them free from our nation's Christian bigoted laws and oppression. Thomas Dahlheimer Wahkon, Minnesota [/SIZE]
