Religiosity tangent from voter suppression thread

A question that perhaps should have been asked before basing a bunch of fucked-up laws and societal conventions on the premise.

Mods, please start a Christianity historicity tangent thread off this tangent thread.

Also, I'm pretty sure the real Paul was killed in a chariot accident and replaced by a lookalike halfway through Acts.

Hmmm......makes sense, but to be honest this sounds more like Old Testament "blood & guts" action.

I actually agree. Even though I am a very convinced Christian, I am also a very strong defender of the principle of freedom of or from religion. The worst thing that ever happened to Christianity was when Constantine gave it political power. It has never fully recovered, other than in certain groups that, more often than not, are marginalized because they don't agree with "mainstream" Christianity (whatever that is at the moment).

People have, and should have, every right to base their values, their behaviour and their ideas about metaphysics (if they have any) on whatever belief system they want, provided they are not actively doing any harm to anyone else. The current state of the the Republican Party in the US is directely traceable to the rise of the "Moral Majority" (which wasn't a majority, and whose morals were debatable...) back when I was still relatively young.

Peter and the rest of them could have dealt with that if they had required him to produce photo ID...

Yeah, but as a Roman citizen, Paul wouldn't have been beholden to such a requirement...