The State- by which I mean the bad guys who try to control your life while claiming they are "government"- has used religion as a tool, a wedge, against people like you and me for as long as there has been both church and state.
Rulers figured out they could do all sorts of horrible things to individuals and, as long as the violations were what religious people thought their church and/or deity wanted, they faced no serious opposition. All sorts of anti-sex "laws" and prohibitions against ingestion are clear illustrations of this fact.
Of course, then religious people also figured out that they could become "government" and impose their religious notions on those who didn't share them- thus gaining even more power for the religion and for themselves- with the willing complicity of almost everyone of the same religion. The "conservative Christians" have gotten this tactic down to an art. But they don't have a monopoly on it, either. (It just seems that way where I live.)
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Rattle, rattle...
It would be interesting to know the actual history that has bound the leaders of organized religion with the tyrants of organized state into that incestuous relationship that has permeated the entirety of human history. It is obvious that "church" and "state" are twin sisters.
ReplyDeleteLast Sunday, July 20, was the 81st anniversary of the concordat between the potentates of the Roman Catholic church and the nascent lunatics of a place called Germany, who became what they called The Third Reich. It is still in force to this day.
It was orchestrated and signed by a Eugenio Pacelli, Secretary of State of the "Vatican" -- supposedly a legal entity called State. Pacelli later became what was known as Pope Pius XII.
That agreement gave rise to the slaughter of between 60 and 85 million human beings, depending upon how and by whom the calculations are derived.
Very little pious about Pius.
Sam