| 7572 | Power is ordained by God, so anyone who resists power resists God, and will be damned [Paul] |
| Full Idea: Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained by God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. | |
| From: St Paul (06: Epistle to the Romans [c.55], 13:1-2) | |
| A reaction: This notorious passage was used to justify the Divine Right of Kings in England in the seventeenth century. It strikes me as being utterly preposterous, though you might say that violent resistance to an evil dictator only brings worse evil. |
| 19933 | If religion is law, then piety is justice, impiety is crime, and non-believers must leave [Spinoza] |
| Full Idea: [In the first Hebrew state] religious dogmas were not doctrines but rather laws and decrees, piety being regarded as justice and impiety as crime. Anyone who defected from this religion ceased to be a citizen. | |
| From: Baruch de Spinoza (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus [1670], 17.08) | |
| A reaction: Presumably speeding offences count as impiety, and failing to pray is a crime. A critical question will be how far religious doubts must extend before one actually has to leave. Mere doctrinal differences, or full atheism? |
| 19938 | Allowing religious ministers any control of the state is bad for both parties [Spinoza] |
| Full Idea: How pernicious it is both for religion and the state to allow ministers of things sacred to acquire the right to make decrees or handle the business of government. | |
| From: Baruch de Spinoza (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus [1670], 18.06 (1)) | |
| A reaction: Interesting that he holds it to be bad for the religion as well as the state. In Britain we have bishops in the House of Lords. |
| 19849 | In early theocracies the god was the king, and there were as many gods as nations [Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: At first men had no other kings but gods, and no other government than a theocratic one. ....By the mere fact that a god was placed at the head of every political society, it followed that there were as many gods as there were peoples. | |
| From: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract (tr Cress) [1762], IV.8) | |
| A reaction: He must be thinking of the Old Testament histories here. (see Spinoza on that!). He says that the modern idea that these were all really the same god is ridiculous. |
| 7339 | Because human life is what is sacred, Mosaic law has no death penalty for property violations [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: Where other codes provided the death penalty for offences against property, in Mosaic law no property offence is capital; human life is too sacred, where the rights of property alone are violated. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt I) | |
| A reaction: We still preserve this idea in our law, and also in our culture, where we are keen to insist that catastrophes like earthquakes or major fires are measured almost entirely by the loss of life, not the loss of property. I approve. |
| 7337 | In Mosaic legal theory, crimes are sins and sins are crimes [Johnson,P] |
| Full Idea: In Mosaic legal theory, all breaches of the law offend God. All crimes are sins, just as all sins are crimes. | |
| From: Paul Johnson (The History of the Jews [1987], Pt I) | |
| A reaction: This would seem to define Josephus called a 'theocracy'. Not just rule by a priesthood, but also an attempt to make civil law coincide with the teachings of sacred texts. But doing 80 m.p.h. on a motorway at 2 a.m. hardly seems like a sin. |
| 7825 | The politics of Leibniz was the reunification of Christianity [Stewart,M] |
| Full Idea: The politics of Leibniz may be summed up in one word: theocracy. The specific agenda motivating much of his work was to reunite the Protestant and Catholic churches | |
| From: Matthew Stewart (The Courtier and the Heretic [2007], Ch. 5) | |
| A reaction: This would be a typical project for a rationalist philosopher, who thinks that good reasoning will gradually converge on the one truth. |