https://www.thedailybeast.com/queen-elizabeth-ii-statue-dragged-down-as-canadians-protest-mass-grave-discoveries?ref=scroll

In recent weeks, over 1,000 unmarked graves for Indigenous children have been discovered at former residential schools in Canada—and a wave of anger is sweeping over the nation as it confronts its dark past.

On Thursday, it was Canada Day, which is usually a day of celebration to mark the founding of the nation in the 1800s. But, this year, it was a day of protest and unrest, which saw prominent statues of the British monarchs—Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II—pulled from their pedestals.

*July 1st is Canada's independent day.

I do not regard religion very highly and do not have one either.

But I do take good things in it. It has been controlling the people by deception.

Fortunately, it is separated from the government in most countries.

But in Mideast, religion is still an ideology for governance.

Once it establishes "implicit obedience" of the public, the authorities can do 

anything they want. People will think "whatever they do is right". However 

I think people have a sort of religious brain function that creates and believe 

it. I wonder human brain has a"religious center".

https://news.joins.com/article/24097084?cloc=joongang-home-newslistleft

악령과 병에 시달리다 낫게 된 몇몇 여자도 그들과 함께 있었는데, 일곱 마귀가 떨어져 나간

막달레나라고 하는 마리아, 헤로데의 집사 쿠자스의 아내 요안나, 수산나였다.”

(누가복음 8장 2~3절) 

[출처: 중앙일보] 예수, 총각일까 유부남일까…'다빈치코드'가 놓친 빌립보 질문

About Dr. Ohn's "The theory of the religious center" in the human brain...

I heard about it somewhere else before. It seems to be true.

Some people very easily fall into religious belief and stay there

despite all the distracting nonsenses and disappointments.

However, someone like me just cannot get into the religious belief,

even if I tried very hard to blindly trust what the religion says.

This phenomenon was explained by a scholar before.

According to him, I was born with no religious center in my brain

while others have a very good dominant religious center in their brains.

The lack of such a religious center could be a genetic and hereditary trait

and I have gladly accepted it a long time ago.

I feel pretty good living like an SOB with no religious faith or sense.

Here, I am giving all of you my sincere apology. It's not an excuse.

I wish you accept my fault as there's nothing much I can do about it.

... Amen, Insh-allah, 나무아미타불, So be it, So mote it be, Blessed be...

Trudeau denounces church burnings, vandalism in Canada

World Jul 2, 2021, 4:58 PM EDT

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday denounced the burning and vandalism of Catholic churches that have followed the discovery of unmarked graves and former schools for Indigenous children.

Several Catholic churches have recently been vandalized or damaged in fires following the discovery of more than 1,100 unmarked graves at the sites of three former residential schools run by the church in British Columbia and Saskatchewan that generations of Indigenous children had been forced to attend.

The nation also saw a series of attacks Thursday — Canada Day — on statues of Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth, and other historical figures.

Trudeau, himself a Catholic, said he understands the anger many people feel toward the federal government and the Catholic church. The government has apologized for the schools and Trudeau has called on Pope Francis, too, to make a formal apology.

“It’s real and it is fully understandable given the shameful history we are all become more aware of,” he told a news conference.

“I can’t help but think that burning down churches is actually depriving people who are in need of grieving and healing and mourning from places where they can grieve and reflect and look for support.”

On Thursday, statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth on the grounds of the Manitoba legislature were tied with ropes and pulled down by a crowd.

The statue of Queen Victoria was covered in red paint and its base had red handprints on it. On the steps behind the statue were hundreds of tiny shoes, placed there to recognize the children who went to residential schools.

READ MORE: Pope to meet with Indigenous survivors of Canada’s residential schools amid demands for an apology

Arlen Dumas, grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, was at a separate event at the time but said he was shocked at what happened.
‘I personally wouldn’t have participated in that,” he said, though he added, “Mind you, it has been a very triggering time over the past few weeks.”

“It’s unfortunate that they chose to express themselves the way that they did. But it’s actually a symbol of the fact that there is a lot of hurts and that there’s a lot of frustration and anger with just how things have happened,” Dumas said.

Premier Brian Pallister called vandalism “a major setback for those who are working toward real reconciliation.”

“Those who commit acts of violence will be pursued actively in the courts. All leaders in Manitoba must strongly condemn acts of violence and vandalism, and at the same time, we must come together to meaningfully advance reconciliation,” he said in a statement.

In other incidents on Canada Day, a statue of Queen Victoria in Kitchener, Ontario, was doused in red paint.

In Victoria, British Columbia, a statue of Captain James Cook was dismantled and thrown into the harbor. The statue was replaced with a wooden cutout of a red dress — a symbol representing murdered and missing Indigenous women — and its base was smeared with red handprints.

In St. John’s, Newfoundland, and Labrador, two prominent buildings and a statue dedicated to the local police force were vandalized with bright red paint.

Earlier this week, a First Nations group in British Columbia said it had used ground-penetrating radar to find 182 human remains in unmarked graves at a site close to a former residential near Cranbrook, 525 miles (845 kilometers) east of Vancouver.

That followed reports of similar massive findings at two other such church-run schools, one of more than 600 unmarked graves in southern Saskatchewan and another of 215 bodies in British Columbia.

Some 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools, which operated for more than 120 years in Canada. More than 60% of the schools were run by the Catholic Church.

This Canadian-genocide-thing seems to get out of control.

Just, so let it be. Don't try to suppress.

However, whoever did the destruction and vandalism, it means there is still a good human

conscience and courage remaining among the people living there.

I just don't know why the secret has been hidden so long. Were the natives afraid to talk?

Some people need to express their rage and frustration against the big religious authority

that totally ignored and betrayed humanity under the name of their god.

Couldn't agree more, doc but I still don't get it right!

Shamefully, I have such limited knowledge as well as interest in Canada through these many years so that I feel like I am totally out of touch on this new(?) story. Indeed, all I know about Canada is so limited based on the contacts with Canadian colleagues through the meetings and a few private trips to Canada, mainly to the Canadian Rockies so that I was really shaken by these indigenous children's massacre(?) with much confusion.

So, I still couldn’t figure out how much and why Catholic churches got involved in this tragic event we hear now. I have no desire to blame the religion per se but the peoples who exploit the religion like Southern Baptists or so-called Evangelists here in the U.S. to take advantage of it.

But this incident is so odd to me!  Why did Catholic Church take the initiative among many Christian groups? How about Anglican church?  After all, Canada is such a proud(?) former British colony to remain in British Commonwealth and the Queen of Canada is still a constitutional monarch!

BB Lee

The toxic legacy of the British empire in Canada’s residential schools

David Stirrup and James Mackay on Britain’s responsibility for systematic abuse and mistreatment of Indigenous children

A statue erected to honour all the children who attended Indigenous residential schools, in front of St Eugene’s mission school in Cranbook, British Columbia. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Fri 2 Jul 2021 11.48 

Your editorial on the atrocities against First Nations children in Canadian residential boarding schools (1 July) bore the subheading: “The discovery of hundreds of graves of Indigenous children is forcing a deeper reckoning with the country’s past.”

I have to ask why you are fixing only on Canada’s history. All of the schools where human remains have been found were set up when Canada was a British dominion within the empire. The project of illegally expropriating Indigenous lands previously guaranteed under treaty goes back at least as far as the 1783 treaty of Paris, and one can draw a direct line from that act of dispossession to the eventual formalisation of the project of genocide in the boarding schools.

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The destruction of Indigenous lifeways was necessary for the British corporations whose interest in timber and other natural resources drove many of the actions of crown officials in that era, and it was British money that funded much of the early missionary work that eventually became the religious institutions that would go on to bury children in unmarked graves. Maybe a little more reckoning with the UK’s own past is in order. 
James Mackay 
Assistant professor of British and American literatures, European University Cyprus

 It is so deeply important that the British press, including the Guardian, is covering the finding of unmarked graves at Canada’s residential schools. I am glad to see that many of these articles are by Indigenous writers and that attention is being drawn to the various ways in which state violence against Indigenous peoples in settler colonial states continues.

I have just one question: why are these things being reported as if Britain bears no responsibility? The oldest residential school in Canada – the Mohawk Institute – was established in 1831, 36 years before Canadian dominion and 48 years earlier than the Carlisle Indian industrial school in Pennsylvania, the so-called “blueprint”. This was British colonial policy, and it laid the foundations for all that was to come. It would be good to see this acknowledged and for pressure to be brought on the British authorities to take that history – and the ongoing obligations it establishes – seriously. 
David Stirrup 
Professor of American literature and Indigenous studies, University of Kent

Thanks, Dr. HJ, to share this article written by David Stirrup, which helped me a lot to clear substantial parts of my cloudy perception on this tragedy.

So, it was another footprint of evil-minded British Empire’s systematic abuse and mistreatment of indigenous children in Canada.

No wonder to find more than 1,000 unmarked graves of these indigenous children at the sites of former residential schools and many directed their grief and anger at the Catholic church, which ran more than half of the schools across the country.

So it shouldn’t be a big deal after all with no surprise in comparison to enormous damage Brit Empire made in such vicious and malicious execution throughout the world!

Nevertheless, what about similar or rather much worse mass massacre of Indian tribes here in the U.S. through the 19^th Century? We still have Indian Reservation throughout North American continent as a stark evidence of ‘unfinished(?)’ mission? It reminds me of ‘똥묻은개가 겨묻은개  나무란다’ after all!!!

Indeed, when I made a first visit to Macon, Ga to deliver the lecture to Mercer Univ Med School in early ‘2000 soon after I got back home from Korea, I had a unique chance to visit some museum and library to commemorate Cherokee Indians which I vaguely thought to be a minor Indian tribe in North Carolina and I was so shocked to learn such tragic history involved to the forced movement all the way to Oklahoma to newly designated reservation for the internment. So many women, oldies and children who were not able to move along were literally executed by the U.S. troops and some of the photos showed really heartbroken scenes I still recall. It was indeed a real tragedy, I later learned more through Cherokee tribe’s ‘Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation written by John Ehle.

BB Lee