The Bible is not the authoritative text. It is not even a good book to read on the subject.

You may use your freedom, if you wish, to sell your autonomy down the river to a church and allow it be your personal dictator, but you still have the legal right to get up and leave when you come to your senses. You also have the legal right to persuade others to self-administer this chloroflorm, if they choose, but not if they don't. The day the Bible becomes established as a founding national document is the day you don't have the freedom or the luxury any longer to 'wake up' at your convenience and without necessary bloodshed.

When you stop book divining, as though it had something relevant to say about everything you ever needed to hear, and look at what the book actually says, there is no recipe in it for a free society. The Old Recipe is for how to run a Jewish fundamentalist state. The New Recipe is for how to practice a secret religion without getting caught because Rome doesn't like Christians and kills them. It's sad when some Bible thumpers read the two testaments together like Moses taught Christianity to the Jews or Paul wielded absolute authority from the state to establish Christinaity as the one true religion.

Some Christians forget that it all started as a small, persecuted, and underground movement, a hiss and a byword that threatened the established order, a minority on the rise to destroy everything we love, a militant group of traitors wanting to fill our children's heads with nonsense, etc.

Why do you think of all the words the evangelists chose to put in Christ's mouth 40 - 50 years afterward, they chose to love their enemies and forgive those that spitefully used them and persecuted them? Nowadays there are plenty of Christians offering to pray for me or someone else, but too often they have become the ones that hate, spitefully use, and persecute others. This is too evident and is why my generation and 'generation x' are leaving religion in droves.

I don't know all the ways you build a healthy free society, but I know some ways that never will. Good Christians who live the good parts of their faith and persuade others to do good shall receive none of my ire. But Christians that come selectively quoting scripture and founding national documents, both, as suits their purposes, saying that unless they may impose certain things on others we are imposing our agenda on them, are being unproductive members of society to put it mildly. They prove that the good news they come peddling is obviously something else entirely from what the rest of the country is based on.

That is all. Have a nice day.

"Healthy free society" = a society without religion

I've been thinking some about where the line is between personal initiative, drive, and business sense begins to overrun good qualities and decency and turns into MMM, pyramids, covetnous, stealing and burglary.

Jesus taught the jews that they are given talents. The one with 5 trades around and takes advantage of society and gets another 5, similar with the other servants. But the one who doesn't try to trade around and squeeze the gentiles gets thrown into outer darkness?

But at the same time Moses said it was a sin to demand interest on loans. Every man is to work for a fair pay. and not steal or covet.

Something doesn't sit right with these stories. Society would be confused if they follow the bible.