Re. Israel: Israel was conceived of as a homeland for those who were Jews in the ethnic sense of the word rather than the religious. The most influential movement in the early Jewish settlements were socialists who founded the kibbutzim. In fact one extreme Ultra-Orthodox faction, the Neturei Karta, actually opposed Zionism on the grounds that only the coming Messiah can establish the "true" Israel, and regard the current state of Israel as a secular counterfeit.
Your friendly neighbourhood Regent
Can we change the first two bullets of the Real Life section? Currently they claim the Pilgrims and the Puritans were 'persecuted'. The problem with that is that it implies that the Pilgrims were being oppressed, killed and imprisoned for their religious beliefs and not, as was actually the case for the Pilgrims, for being of the same political group as Oliver Cromwell (i.e. wanting to overthrow the government and kill the monarchs).
And even if the persecution claim for the Pilgrims is kept, the Puritans most certainly weren't persecuted. They were, instead, terribly upset that the Church of England was getting far too liberal and refused to conform unilaterally to their own stricter form of Christianity. Which included the idea that any kind of comfort was sinful, that sex even withing marriage was sinful and generally that any way to spend your time that didn't include hard work or prayer was sinful.
Essentially, both streams were only 'persecuted' in their own eyes. To everyone else they were minorities who wanted to control and dictate the beliefs of the Church of England as a whole and when they couldn't have it their way, they left for the Americas and set up Colonies there which were just as oppressive of dissent as they claimed the Anglicans were towards them.
Angry gets shit done.
The description reads like this is specific to space colonization, but the examples include a number of terrestrial examples. Can we decide and clarify whether this is necessarily interplanetary?