Religious Secular Power

Privacy Deserves Privacy, but Always Question Authority

I think most pious folks in our world today would agree that religious beliefs are a private affair of the soul and the heart. It is the deeply personal relationship between a person and their god, however they may define it. People outside the Faith are there by their own choice. People inside the Faith may ask others to join, but could certainly not force their beliefs on them. I think most people would agree that it would not be right for a religious institution to force a person to join their religion.

Religion, being a deeply personal act of devotion to one’s own higher power, does not belong in the secular world. This is why churches don’t pay taxes. This is why we have, supposedly, a separation. If a religion stays out of politics and government and other facets of civil life, no one would nor should have the right to question the tenets of that religion. Privacy deserves privacy.

But when any religious institution becomes intertwined with politics and policy, then everyone has the right to challenge the credibility of that institution. In other words, each individual has the right, and maybe even the duty, to question and thoroughly investigate the integrity and moral base of all institutions that seek to impose its will on society. This cannot be denied.

This is so important it bears repeating. If religious institutions ingratiate themselves within government structures, then people who belong to other belief systems (or not) have the right to examine those institutions as closely as they feel they need, just as we have the right to this sort of information about a candidate for public office. We then have the moral right and duty to read, study, fully comprehend, and question the foundations of these religions and philosophies that can form the moral base of the laws of the land by which we must obey and be ruled by. Again, this cannot be denied.

Christianity is used as the moral and ethical platform for the transformation of humanity into a global culture, “a new order.” It is who we think we are as we battle and war for what we think is good and pure. Of course, other religious cults are likewise being used as the moral base to promote ideas and political agendas, but Christianity is the most prevalent and influential. How Christianity truly evolved is a subject that many prefer to ignore and just pretend not to think about too much.

The Pagan Religions

In Cultural Vision, I trace the history of our culture from its earliest inception. It was the mindset of ancient agriculturalists of the Middle East that wrought the idea that life forms and the planet’s surface could be claimed as property. From there you could postulate that we needed the righteous and divine blessing for such a claim. Human populations bloomed exorbitantly as we created a new world-view. But the new world-view (that God made creation for man and that we are apart from nature) came at a price: We lost our primal spiritual connection to reality.

To compensate for this loss, we began to create new myths that supported our new sedentary totalitarian agricultural ways, and these eventually spawned many religions that spread through out the world, and comingled with other belief systems, some of which were entirely contrived systems of controlling the burgeoning masses. Whether we know it or not, these systems live on today in our modern religions -- the first of which is Christianity. But before there was Christianity, there were the Pagan Religions of the Old World which heavily influenced the evolution of the soon-to-be global institution.

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