There are fundamentalists who claim they are the only Christians and that the Constitution mandate against the establishment of a church only bars the government from controlling their churches. They insist that the government is obligated to abide by the church law of their own sect whichever one it is. Actually, the ban against an established church has precedent in the intertwining of church and state in the history of Europe during the middle ages. Every facet of life was controlled either by the church or the state, and one enforced the authority of the other. There was no room for independent thought. So when pagan knowledge was brought back from the Middle East by the Crusaders, there was a Renaissance of thinking and culture that allowed people to question everything about life. The king's religion was continued through the Protestant Revolution, but the Enlightenment that came with the Renaissance still separated peoples' religious thought from their secular though...
I find the Divine to be a poor excuse for demanding what anyone should agree to. If you have to force your beliefs on someone else, how do you know they really believe what you say? In ancient times, it was enough for the tyrant to declare how the Divine favored his (or her) regime. It really didn't matter to the poor guy at the bottom of the ladder what the monarch said. Life was not any better for believing it. It was only blasphemy against the tyrant that got anyone into trouble since the tyrant was always the Son of the Divine. It is not only in North Korea that the tyrant was considered God. Even the Roman Emperors were considered Gods which is the reason for the Greek word "blasphemy" was used in the Christian Gospel for the Sanhedrin deciding that Jesus committed blasphemy. They weren't saying that he declared himself their God. They were saying that he had declared himself a God equal to the Roman Emperor. The Western term God is derived from...
I am dumbfounded by the demanding question, "Do you believe in the Bible?" For one thing, there are more documents that are the Bible for other religions besides the Bible of Christianity and Judaism that I know. There is certainly more understandings of that Bible I'm familiarized with besides just that understanding of the person demanding an answer. There is also the Muslim understanding of the Bible as demonstrated in Muhammad's Koran that is not the same. But what really confuses me is the mystical entity that the person demanding if I believe in the Bible is really asking about. The word "bible" means "library." The New Testament is really the books that Christians wrote in Greek. The "Old" Testament is really the books that the Jews or Israelis wrote in Hebrew or Aramaic. The Jewish Bible were documents what the Jews decided to declare special, and the Greek Bible were documents that the Christians decided to declare special...
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