We have noticed that Poul Anderson's Technic History features Catholics, sometimes "Jerusalem Catholics," and OrthoChristans and that there is a single mention of "Christian variant" but no explicit reference to Protestants. Until now. Nicholas van Rijn uses the phrase:
"'...you damned Protestants!'" (p. 108)
- when replying to condemnations and insults from the Lannachska Council. He follows this up with:
"'Perbacco...'" (ibid.)
- but the latter turns out to be merely an Italian word expressing surprise.
Unfortunately, my upbringing was one in which the word, "Protestant," had negative associations as sometimes also had the word, "Jews." We need to champion a different kind of education.
2 comments:
Human beings are instinctually tribal. "My tribe good, your tribe crap, kill-kill-kill."
This is illustrated by traditional names in northern Canada.
The standard French-Canadian fur-trading tactic there was to leave a trapper with a friendly village of Indians and have him learn the language, marry locally and then start asking about the neighbors so he could tell his friends.
That got responses like: "Oh, you mean the -Dog- People." Or: "Oh, that's the Slave Tribe".
For that matter, the tribal name "Sioux" is an English mispronunciation of a French mispronunciation of an Ojibwa term something like "nadiwisioux", which means "Treacherous Little Snakes".
(The Iroquois League were the "Big Snakes". )
The Ojibwa were the people who drove the Sioux out onto the plains and out of the Great Lakes country.
Mind you, the Pawnee didn't call them Sioux -- the Sioux killed about half the Pawnee in the first half of the 19th century.
They called them "The Torturers".
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I believe in being polite to Protestants but I'm never going to believe Protestantism to be anything but erroneous, that the "Reformation" was contrary to the will of God.
That said, it was interesting finding even one mention of the word "Protestant" in the Technic stories. I long thought the "Christian variant" mentioned in "The Game of Glory" was the closest Protestants were mentioned in Technic "history."
Mr. Stirling: Ha! Amusing, the hostile names tribes and nations give to each other. A universal constant of human history.
Ad astra! Sean
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