Ron Paul? What does he have to do with anything?

And Harnack? Are you kidding?!?! Talk about pagans! Harnack was a heretic who denies the divinity of Christ, asserts that the Ebionites were the true Christians, rejects miracles (see his 'Das Wesen des Christentum' for these), was famous for coming up with a bizzarre theory for everything, and was a Hegel-influenced kook just like Strauss, F.C. Baur, and the other German scholars of the turn of the century. No scholars take Harnack seriously now--they merely read things like his Dogmengeschichte as an example of where historiography was at his time. No wonder you're so cofused...you're relying on more than a century-old, discredited, heretical German scholarship!

Again, you name handfuls of people (and mostly you just name people back to me I already said), but you are not considering that you are speaking of a period of 300 years and a geographical area much larger than the US, and when you consider this all, you see that indifference was the norm toward Christians more than persecutions, and by no means did 'presecution' always mean death. There were minor punishments as well.

And you're confusing emperors--again, a caricature--this time that all the emperors commanded worship. It was very few. After Augustus the Roman pantheon was to be closed of any more gods. That's why Caligula was assassinated for making himself a god. Few emperors made demands about worship--again, local authorities.

Marcus Aurelius didn't order an empire-wide persecution; he consented to some individual ones.

I am reading primary source documents--the ones you're not reading like Tacitus, Pliny, Trajan, Suetonius etc.

Which primary sources are you referring to, or are you just throwing words around?

Well if we're talking about Obama's bible (namely Das Kapital), the book is full of that teaching!

Vic says: "Is he not confusing the compassion of the Church with the oppression of the state??"

Well put!
So many people fail to make that distinction and come out thinking, for example, the gov't. has a duty to impose universal healthcare and other socialist agendas.

Election2008--

Shapeshifters, you say, eh?

Did you know Obama is a shapeshifter too? It's true. One time I saw him shapeshift into a turtle, then a duck. You should've been there it was great. Then he shapeshifted into two planes and crashed himself into the WTC! Not a lot of people know that. Let me know if you come accross any other shapeshifters. Gotta keep our eyes open, you know.

Secondly, you have utterly confused 'libertarian' with libertine. The libertarian ideal is that government (like man) is fallen, and therefore should not too trusted too much, and should kept small. Furthermore, the idea is that where freedom abounds, the gospel dan do its work. These are very Christian philosophical precepts, and were agreed upon by all in the founding.

And the idea that the Revolutionary war was about taxation is the oldest, tiredest, liberal historian's cliche. Seriously, when in history have any colonial outposts vehemently prosecuted a Revolution against the most powerful empire of the world--over taxes? The revolution was motivated by a million religious, philosophical, and material factors I can give you if you like (limited space for posts)--in no way simply taxes, no matter how much it gels with the interpretation of Paul on authority you give.

Nonetheless, this is an outrage. 'Om' for the Hindu is not so much a god as what in the West we'd call an 'animating principle.' It is a pantheistic principle of the sort of 'hum' there is to all life. It does not see God as a person distinct from His creation, and is therefore pantheistic. We, however, have always as a nation believed that a personal God separate from other beings is the SOURCE of our earthly rights (even the most obstinately deistic thinkers believed this)--not some base, vague notion of a God continous with all life.

Incidentally, the Muslim god is also unacceptable to the philosophy of our legal functions. Allah is an arbitrary deity--he does not confer universal rights but makes arbitrary demands.

This is an emblematic instance of the way in which we have utterly and entirely forgotten the principles of out Republic.