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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (362450)	12/12/2007 5:15:57 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1586777

For much of history before the founding of this country, the only one with God-given rights were the monarchs. No one else had any rights to speak of. Even during the age of Christian monarchies, royalty was considered to be accountable to God. That was an improvement over the pre-Christian condition in which the sovereign usually WAS God. And the whole checks and balances thing wasn't a Christian idea at all. Where do you see checks and balances coming from? It certainly fits in with the idea that humans are fallen. Both of these grew out of the Enlightenment, not Christianity. And the Enlightenment was all about decreasing the traditional power structures like the nobility and the Church and elevating reason as the primary authority. Locke is the enlightenment figure who influenced our ideas of government and he was a Christian and he founded his beliefs about religious and intellectual liberty on religious arguments, namely that salvation is by faith and faith requires belief which cannot be compelled: Now that the whole jurisdiction of the magistrate reaches only to these civil concernments, and that all civil power, right and dominion, is bounded and confined to the only care of promoting these things; and that it neither can nor ought in any manner to be extended to the salvation of souls, these following considerations seem unto me abundantly to demonstrate. First, because the care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate, any more than to other men. It is not committed unto him, I say, by God, because it appears not that God has ever given any such authority to one man over another as to compel anyone to his religion. Nor can any such power be vested in the magistrate by the consent of the people, because no man can so far abandon the care of his own salvation as blindly to leave to the choice of any other, whether prince or subject, to prescribe to him what faith or worship he shall embrace. For no man can, if he would, conform his faith to the dictates of another. All the life and power of true religion consist in the inward and full persuasion of the mind; and faith is not faith without believing. * * * In the second place, the care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force. Confiscation of estate, imprisonment, torments, nothing of that nature can have any such efficacy as to make men change the inward judgment that they have framed of things. ..... thenagain.info