Jseal: you're flat out wrong here.

The Puritans were in no way seeking religious freedom.

What they were seeking is the ability to impose on the Church of England, their own fairly strict view of Protestantism.

When that didn't work, yes, they emmigrated to Holland, claiming "persecution" by the very Church of England they were trying to impose upon.

When that didn't work, yes, they emmigrated to North America, seeking the right to worship as *they* chose.

This is NOT a matter of mere semantics, it is a very different statement. To present it as the same thing is a flat-out lie.

The Puritans explicitly claimed the right to set up a theoracy in the "New World", and further claimed the right to impose their religious view on anyone living within their colony, regaqrdless of whether or not a given individual was originally an emmigrant from England, a Native American caught within their area, or a slave imported by force from elsewhere in the world. Oh, they also claimed the right to expand their colony at the expense of the Natives living in what later became Massachusetts.

The fact numerous societally-accepted histories have repeated the lie about "religious freedom" impresses me not at all. To accept these various accounts as the "truth" is merely to participate in the concept advanced by Goebbels of the "big lie".

(Side note: this is not me indirectly accusing you of being a Nazi. There's no guilt by association I'm trying to push here).

Question: have you read, for example Zinn's "A People's History of the United States"?

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