Re: Struck off?
"Except they weren't persecuted in England."
In fact, many of them returned to England from the colonies. It cracks me up every time you Brits claim the US was founded by the Puritans. In reality, the Puritans were a fairly unimportant sub-culture by 1776. If you look at facts, not a single one of our Founding Fathers was a Puritan. In fact, many of them spoke out against organized religion partially because of the Puritans ... If anything, the American Revolution happened in part to rid ourselves of such bullshit (sadly, we're not done yet).
On the other hand, and apropos of ElReg's science oriented crowd, seven of the ten initial core group that became The Royal Society were Puritans. The Puritans never ran the United States, but they DID run England for many years. The effects are still visible.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
