A current (current/ancient) squabble between the Irish and the Church goads me:
I don't accept King George III's sovereignty in the Americas in the 18th Century, I don't accept it in the British Isles either.
We "white" "Americans" threw George and his redcoats out. Good, I approve. Except we didn't throw him out so people could be free of his sovereignty, we threw him out so our own King George, and his cronies, could be sovereign in his place. Take Palm Beach, Florida, for example: a nice stretch of Atlantic coastline. Natives lived there, and who wouldn't, given a choice? So we sovereign white people, sent our army, at the combined suggestion of JP Morgan and Henry Morrison Flagler: who wanted to develop and sell the other people's turf.
Gee, if I like Donald Trump's real estate, and if I were a sovereignty like George's England, or the other George's US (or like the Pope's Vatican!), could I send an army to chase Donald Trump off of 57th Street, so I could develop it?
If I had an army, the answer is, Yes: I could try. And if Trump yielded, I could claim sovereignty.
(But would it be true?)
My attitude toward sovereignty as divulged above is not new, not recent. It's acuity is chronic: across time. But here's a related change of pk attitude: once upon a time, for most of my life, since childhood, I would have conceded sovereignty to God. More recently I would have conceded sovereignty to god. Now I'm not sure I concede sovereignty to any entity.
I'm afraid that needs a lot of explanation: in this culture. I was raised to believe that the universe belonged to God. That he made it, that he hadn't sold it, or given it. Or, if he gave it (or sold it), the way he gave Israel to the Jews — "Israel" being occupied by Phoenicians the Jews called Canaanites — it still really belonged to him: so God could give, and God could take back: an Indian giver! (Of all the insults and injuries we visited upon natives — short of murder, genocide, etc. _ is any worse than still calling them by Columbus's mistake: "Indians"? Yes: maybe calling giving-with-strings-attached "Indian giving"!)
Let's concede that God owns the earth and the sky and the Jews ... and Israel. Let's concede that he owns you and me ... and every wog: every poor bastard born in the ghetto, every poor bastard born in Bangladesh, every poor bastard born in the New Guinean highlands, people who till recently had never heard of Africa let alone Europe let alone the US. Do we really concede that God has a right to torture the souls of those people for eternity if they don't get baptised? If God is sovereign, then he does. Just as if the US is sovereign, then we have the right to drop napalm on little girls, and bombs any damn where the President pleases! And the Vatican doesn't have to cooperate with charges brought against its priests! Sovereign!
It's been a long time since I've accepted the beliefs I was taught as a child: that the universe was magical, that it needed a creator to exist, that magic, not physics, determines things ... that the big magician owns everything, that he can give things to his special creature, man. Today I don't believe that humans are competent to have opinions probable of truth on any of these matters. Individuals are capable of learning, I see that, but I've become unconvinced that human society is capable of learning: short of a catastrophe so catastrophic that any shred of the species that came through the catastrophe would no longer be the same species: oh, please, I hope.
See? That last little reservation? Whom am I praying to? To a good god, to a progressive god, to a potential evolution, to something ... better.
But not to a god who owns anything!
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