I'm an atheist as well and went to a UU church for a little bit in my mid 30s.

I enjoyed it. It was a nice third place. The people were all over the place with regard to their beliefs.

Really it was what I think church should be in the 21st century. Scripture is read but it was pretty much only positive messages and relevant to current events. The minister was wildly liberal and progressive. We sang. Scripture and songs were from all the major religions, not just Christianity or even Abrahamic. Really it was treated more of a "history of religion" than preaching. Religion itself has some positive messages and a very important place in history.

That is super interesting. I had no idea that there was decent, non-judgemental denominations like that. Especially ones that are so old. It's still, not for me, but its nice to know that, occasionally, 'Christian' churches can actually be cool like that.

Thanks for sharing!

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were born in Virginia. Ben Franklin was born in Pennsylvania. 48 of the 56 signers of the declaration were born in America. Only two were born in England.

Please tell us how these men fled from the British empire.

They rebelled against the empire because they wanted lower taxes. The freedom from tyranny narrative was concocted to get buy in from the lower classes who had to actually die for the revolution to succeed.

The rehtoric never matched reality - "All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights".. except all those slaves and Indians.

You know, that definition of flee where you stay put and don't go anywhere. I like that definition of the word too. ;)

Well, more broadly, the age of imperial colonialism was bad for pretty much every civilization said empires came into contact with. The Spanish and Portuguese were doing heinous shit for centuries. Later, the Dutch, French, Belgians, Germans, Brits, the US (don’t forget the Native American genocide and the Monroe Doctrine, amongst other things), and others got in on the action (Japan is in this club too, largely taking their inspiration from the Portuguese and the Brits, but for mostly contextual reasons of “they seriously pissed off two much bigger empires right as they were getting into the positive economic feedback loop” - aka the Pacific Theater of WW2 - had their imperial colonial era substantially truncated).

More pointedly: empires existed before the age of European colonialism, but what with the advent of the age of sail, the Europeans unfortunately went down a road that was on average (arguably) far more nakedly exploitative and obviously unsustainable in the long run than any empire in history (excepting the Mongol empire, of course, which was more or less just Genghis doing a huge zerg rush with early-game cavalry and mounted archery units).

TL;DR: any reasonably-stable country in Europe (plus the US) with enough scratch to put together a halfway decent navy was getting in on the action for literal centuries.