The Old World Charm of a Bull Fight

Perhaps you've never heard of the bull fight that raged in the Age of Discovery. It involved two popes placing bets on different Bulls. Pope Nicholas V favored the bull of Portugese dominance in his "Romanus Pontifex" of 1455. Pope Alexander VI countered with his "Inter Caetera" of 1493 doubling down on the Spanish favorite of the time. These official church documents, known formally as "The Doctrine of Christian Discovery", guaranteed that European conquest of indigenous lands and peoples would be a fight to the finish.

But residents of the New World can thank U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall for the 1823 Supreme Court decision, Johnson v. M'Intosh, that promoted the bloody spectacle in North America. The Fathers of our New Republic sealed the deal, or dealt the death blow to bullish Native Americans, with their paternalism that established Indian tribes as "domestic dependent nations" instead of independent states of the Union.

The red carpet, used as a cape, spread for America's Indians to move westward was already stained by "Cherokee Nation v. Georgia". It was just a matter of time, and the international precedent of Christian doctrine, before domesticated animals, like bulls and buffaloes, would fall by the sword of manifest destiny.

The self-righteous claim of a Christian right of dominance over non-Christians is found in the conclusion of Voltaire: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities".

Will the recent U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples be any match for the reigning Doctrine of Discovery? Will a belated concession be enough to resist so much bull? Will the sleep of reason, as Goya claimed, continue to produce monsters?

Perhaps you've not read David Morse's The Iron Bridge and his futuristic charge that the pitfall of fundamentalist Christianity is the belief that Christ will come to save the same people who messed things up on this earth.