Dear Loudmouth,

The Manichaeans had their fling and disappeared. That's what they did for us. Other religions could do the same.

Hi David,

But they might have done a lot more for China. I have vague memories of stories about a string of Manichaean monasteries across central Asia and China, and the possibility that the monks might have had some influence on what became the Ming Dynasty (?1344-1643?). Or maybe I dreamt it.

Cheers,

Joe

I have withdrawn from this discussion because its initiator, Shadow Minister, expressed their wish to keep it about science, especially physics.

Yet others, rather than discussing science, keep using this place to smear religion based on the despicable violence of criminal impostors who were not even religious.

David f,
I never stated the Roman Church invented virgin birth. No! they just defied Mary in line with the mother goddess of paganism. Mary was a typical Jewish girl not a Mother of God as they claim. The humanity of Jesus was not divine. Virgin insemination was used in ancient Egypt to produce priests in worship of the sun. The New Testament does not make Mary a deity or give emphasis to how Jesus was fathered. None of his close disciples give Mary any mention more than that she was Jesus mother nor does James his brother.

Dear Loudmouth,

From Gernet’s “A History of Chinese Civilization”.

“However, it could be that the influence of Manicheism (sic) was perpetuated in China until the fourteenth century: the name of the Ming Dynasty (Ming = light) (1368-1644) may have been suggested to its founder by the persistent memory of Manichean traditions in the secret societies of the Mongol Age.”

There are many references to that religion in Gernet but no mention of a string of Manichaean monasteries. However, there was a string of monasteries along the Silk Road that had a great influence on history. It was the custom for Buddhist businessmen to retire to a monastery while they were still young and spend the rest of their life there. Merchants would travel along the Silk Road with their silk, sheep or whatever and stop in the monasteries over night. One of the businessman monks had an idea. They would give the merchants a document for his goods at a discounted value. He could leave the goods at the monastery and continue down the Silk Road without having to worry about being robbed or something happening to his goods. At some monastery further down the road he would present his document and they would give him goods equal to the value specified on the document. If he judged it right he could sell those goods in that area and make a profit. That was the origin of commercial paper. This idea was picked up in the Islamic world which was at the western part of the Silk Road. The Crusades were not all fighting. In the intermittent periods of peace there was trade between the Crusader states and the surrounding Muslim states. The Crusaders got the idea of commercial paper from the Muslims, and the idea came into European banking.

Dear runner,

Stalin was no secularist. He wanted to wipe out religion. Secularists want religion and government to be separate not wipe religion out. Religion should be no business of government. Some secularists have been religious and even have been ministers of religion.

continued

Roger Williams, a Baptist minister in the English colonies in North America, was the first to use the phrase, separation of church and state. Williams was a secularist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Williams tells about him. From the site:

"Williams' own experience of persecution by Archbishop Laud and the Anglican establishment, as well as the Baptists' writings and the bloody wars of religion that raged in Europe in that era convinced Williams that a state church had no Scriptural basis. His criticism of the Massachusetts Bay system for mixing church and state immediately after his arrival demonstrates Williams had arrived at this conclusion before landing in Boston in 1631. Williams declared that the state could legitimately concern itself with matters of civil order only, but not of religious belief. He rejected any state attempt to enforce the "first Table" of the Ten Commandments, those initial commandments dealing with the relationship between God and individuals. Instead, Williams believed the state must confine itself to the commandments that dealt with the relations between people: murder, theft, adultery, lying, honoring parents, and so forth.

Williams considered any effort by the state either to dictate religion or to promote any particular religious idea or practice as forced worship. He declared, "Forced worship stinks in the nostrils of God." Williams also wrote that he saw no warrant in the New Testament to use the sword to promote religious belief. Indeed, Williams called Constantine a worse enemy to true Christianity than Nero, because the subsequent state support corrupted Christianity and led to the death of the Christian church. In the strongest language, Williams described the attempt to compel belief as "rape of the soul" and spoke of the "oceans of blood" shed as a result of trying to command conformity. While the moral principles in the Scriptures ought to inform the civil magistrates, Williams observed that well ordered, just, and civil governments existed even where Christianity was not present. Thus he knew that all governments had to maintain civil order and justice, and decided that none had a warrant to promote any religion."