by David Arthur Walters

Created on: February 12, 2009

In Re Conjoining Church and State in Unholy Matrimony to live in Theocratic Sin.

The sort of religious fundamentalism that would really or virtually conjoin church and state in unholy matrimony that they might live in the sin of theocracy is obviously the greatest threat to human liberty and world peace today. From that ungodly constitution certain legitimate Chistian fundamentalists disqualify themselves by rendering unto Caesar his worldy due and unto their god their spiritual faith, wherefore we exclude them so that we may speak only of the monstrous offspring of the marriage of church and state, called by Thomas Paine a "mule-animal."

"All religions are in their nature kind and benign," quoth Paine in Rights of Man, ".... How is it that they lose their native mildness, and become morose and intolerant? ... By engendering the church with the state, a sort of mule-animal, capable only of destroying, and not of breeding up, is produced, called the Church established by Law. It is a stranger, even from its birth, to any parent mother, on whom it is begotten, and whom in time it kicks out and destroys."

Paine thus voiced his objection to the "antipolitical doctrine" of the father of modern conservatism, Burke, who was preaching tradition over reason and chanting "Church and State." Then as today the regressive fraction ignored history or lied about it to maintain their tyrannical way. The ill effects of the satanic doctrine over the centuries were horrendous, and disgraced Christianity even after what Heinrich von Treitschke identified in his Politics as "the great deed of Martin Luther."

Treitschke was a premier propagandist of the doctrine that led Germany into the Great War and its sequel; despite the prejudices of his day, and the patriotic duty of German historians to express them, he was in many respects a good historian with considerable insight into politics. As far as he was concerned, a modern state is by definition secular - it cannot be Christian. Of course a nation of people without religion had never existed, and Germans were a Christian people - he said the slight admixture of Jew counted for nothing. Furthermore, he points out that the superiority of the Church over the State was once "neither inconsequent nor unnatural. It met, however, with the opposition of every sound secular state."

"In the freedom which followed upon the great deed of Martin Luther," wrote Treitschke, "the old doctrine was broken with forever, and not in Protestant countries

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