On Wednesday, 14 February 2018 06:37:52 UTC+1, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Tue, 13 Feb 2018 21:12:00 -0800 (PST), Quadibloc
wrote:

That the whole sad history of the Inquisition leads many to believe that the
First Amendment is the only right way - churches should be private
associations of people sharing certain personal beliefs, not having the
ability to make and enforce laws on everyone else - does not at all seem
unreasonable to me.

Nor to be exempt from any secular law, however. There's no difference
between a church and any other club.

Our current task, in the post-9/11 era, is to make this a reality in the
Islamic world so that non-Muslim minorities are protected there.

That will only happen with the loss of theocracies. After all, the
history of Christian brutality far exceeds anything we see in the
Muslim world. What fixed it? Secular government.

You give the religious political control, you're handing everything
over to dogma. And religious or secular, dogma turns into despotism.

Despotism is the failure to guard against the inadequate being allowed to rule well above their pay grade.