Murdoch became a citizen in 1985 the normal way. The scandal regarding Murdoch and Gingrich involved News Corp, Murdoch’s company that owns Fox, and which was, at the time an Australian corporation. There was, at the time, a law really restricting the ownership of broadcast licenses by foreign companies. The Gingrich Congress, in 1996, passed the Telecommunications Act, which amended the Communications Act, by, among a lot of other things, loosening the foreign ownership restrictions. The anti-Murdoch and anti-Newt people claim that Murdoch agreed to a book deal with Newt in exchange for that provision getting into the Telecommunications Act.
But that has nothing to do with Murdoch’s own citizenship…just the status of News Corp.
Actually, that separation tends to occur in any society that divorces religion from civil law. The Reformation helped a lot, though the “render unto Caesar” concept laid the groundwork. Judaism doesn’t embrace religion-based power structures, either.
They just historically haven’t had enough power to generously give away.
And how many societies prior to the European Renaissance separated religion from civil law? I think a weak case might be made for the Roman Empire (but not the Republic), although the periodic persecutions demonstrate a religion-entwined government, but I can’t think of any others off-hand.
The Hasmonaeans were not purely secular rulers in Judaea, relying on the Levitical priesthood for much of their power. Modern Israel was established, in large part, by already secularized European immigrants.
Well, I figure the Jews would’ve set up or helped to influence secular governments in Europe, but they were too busy being expelled and pogromed and whatnot. In any event, there’s nothing specific in Christianity I can see that makes its followers more accepting of liberal democracy, but they’re clearly the first to do so on a large scale. What was needed was a schism in which the existing theocratic power structure is challenged, combined with greater education among the population. Jews had theirs, Islam needs its.
Y’know, that’s what I was idly thinking. Is it merely coincidence that the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the invention of the printing press were all more or less contemporaneous in time and place?
I recall James Burke speculating in Connections that all of the above came about because of the depopulation due to the Black Death, which produced a surfeit of old unused clothing, which was turned into rag paper. This lowered the price of paper, which made printing economical, which spread knowledge, resulting in the Renaissance. Not the only cause, of course, but a contributing factor.
Attributing Marxism to Christianity is quite a stretch. I think you’re going through some pretty creative gymnastics to make the assertion “Only Christian dominated society ever moved away from religious domination.” Clearly, China was not a Christian dominated society, and to attribute its changes to Christianity strains the truth.
China did not move away from religion-dominated society; it was ripped away by numerous forces that caused massive disruptions to society, leaving voids that were filled by a number of opportunistic movements.
Regarding Marxism and Christianity, I am not sure you understand what I actually was pointing out. In the sixteenth century, Europe began a process of secularization that is, I believe, unprecedented in human society. It was a long process that took 400 years and is probably not yet complete. However, from that process of secularization, various specific movements arose, one of them being Marxism that required a society that had sufficent numbers of its population able to conceive of either a secular government or even a society unassociated with religion. As European inroads into China tore apart the fabric of that society between the 1820s and 1940s, various new ways of seeing and structuring society were imported to China from the outside. Many movements struggled to provide the leadership to re-establish a stable Chinese society, but the two that eventually battled for the top position, (having already destroyed the efforts of the internal Confucian-based movements) were the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek (and while he may have been little better than a warlord grown large, his movement was that of European born secularism and capitalism) and the Marxists of Mao Zedong–and Marxism was a European phenomenon that had only sprouted and grown in increasingly secular Europe.
Even if one perceives Marxism merely as anti-religious, it was Christianity against which it was originally opposed and it was in the secular world that flourished in previously Christian Europe that permitted Marxism to develop roots and grow.
It could be argued that the plague made the printing press a necessity by killing off 2/3 of the scribes. It also wiped out 2/3 of the largely illiterate serfs and chattels, putting an end to the feudal system that depended on their cheap labor. This raised the worth of the individual and paved the way for a more educated general populace and more representative forms of government. In many ways, the bubonic plague was directly responsible for the Renaissance.
It could also be argued that a more literate populace with a greater sense of self-worth would be more amenable to a different interpretation of Scripture, inasmuch as many of them could now read the works for themselves. Also, having seen the corruption inherent in the theocratic system as well as its powerlessness in the face of the plague probably sapped its credibility just a wee bit. So the plague may well have given rise to the Reformation, too.
Nice condescension. I understood just fine, I’m simply amazed at the backpedaling required to make the facts fit your assertion. China doesn’t count because it didn’t “move” it was “ripped”. Your arrogance in crediting Europeans with tearing down Chinese cultural structures without acknowledging that the Chinese had any role in the process is impressive.
The influence of external ideas does not mean China did not move away from religion-dominated society. The country was religion-dominated and is not any more. The degree to which this is due to the adoption of ideas that originated elsewhere is important to understand, yes, but really doesn’t exclude them from your original statement.
If you look closely, you’ll find there’s a good reason for there being no article on “fiscal responsibilty”. Hint: saving bandwidth by cutting out vowels is too conservative even for the neoconservatives.
Maybe, but I think it’s a debatable topic. I would argue that because of the mix of religions on the subcontinent, various kingdoms had to engage in a de-facto secularization in order to keep the peace. Couple that with the decentralized nature of Hinduism and Buddhism, the lack of a systematic body of civil law, and the constant shifts in kingdoms, and you end up with a disorganized, conflicting system which wasn’t necessarily religious in its construction.
It’s also debatable whether the British Raj could be characterized as secular. The legal code introduced by the British formalized a lot of religious dictates (Hindu, Islamic, and Christian) which previously might have been left without definite form.
No condescension intended. You did not appear to get my point–which could have been a result of your reading or my writing. I tried (unsuccessfully, I guess) to use a neutral syntax.
I suspect that you are still not understanding the point (regardless whose “fault” that might be).
Secularism arose in Christian Europe on its own. It was not imported from any other part fo the world.
In China, (and the numerous regions of the world operating under Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Animist, and (in a few locations) Christian oriented governments), the idea of a secular state only arrived after European settlers or colonists began introducing that concept as it took hold and began to flourish in the late 18th century.
This is not a claim that no one else was “smart” enough to do it. This is not a claim of any sort of European superiority of thought. It is entirely possible that given some number of years undisrupted by foreign invasion, every religious-dominated society might have arrived at the concept of secular government, eventually.
The reality is that they did not. The Chinese bureacracy that controlled China (both with and in spite of the emperor/emperess), as their world collapsed around them through the 19th century, were thoroughly Confucian, as were other nativist movements that led to uprisings such as that of the Boxer Rebellion.
You seem to be saying, at one point, that I was making a claim that the Chinese had no hand in the process of reorganizing the country. I am not sure where you got that notion. Secular governments were implemented in China, (and India and the lands to the southeast of China and–to a more limited extend–the Middle East), by the people who lived there. No other suggestion has been made. However, the ideas on which they acted, especially the idea that a nation could be governed without the direct involvement of its religious institution, were borrowed from European principles where that particular notion had first arisen.
It is analogous to written language. A great many societies developed their own written languages in their own ways as soon as they were introduced to the concept of writing “words” down in some form. Very few societies, however, actually invented the idea of writing. It is my contention that secularism appears to have only been invented once. (And, again, this makes no comment on the quality of other societies. The fact that European society was developing secularism at exactly the same time that it was imposing its rule, (by conquest, colonization, or settlement), across the rest of the world meant that no other society happened to have had the opportunity, not that no other society was sufficiently “bright” to give it a try.)
Regarding your latter point: “Christian” lands are still developing secularism and in the 19th century it was not as developed as it is today. I am not claiming that Britain was purely secular, much less that its colonies were, only that the seeds of secularism were being sewn from that place.
Regarding your first point: I had considered that, but what I know of India (which may be inaccurate, Where’s Tamerlane?), is that there was greater pluralism in India, where even Hinduism has sufficient variants to require some delicate interactions, but that when one worked up to the actual lawgivers and kings, they tended to operate within the strictures of their own religious systems rather than employing true secularism.
Fair enough. That’s a much more refined concept than I got from your earlier statements, but that’s the peril of message board discussion – lack of context and visual or audible cues. My apologies for the snippy responses. Guess I was reading implications that weren’t there. I’ll have to do a little more pondering and probably refresh some long-neglected reading to see if I really agree with you, but at first blush the idea seems to have merit.
Off on a vaguely related tangent, what’s your opinion on the importance of the individual in history? Do you think individuals have substantial influence, or are you of the opinion that societal forces would tend to create someone to fill even a very distinctive role if a particular individual were not available to do so? The way you’ve sketched out the ideas above seems to indicate the latter, but I don’t want to presume at this point (given my track record in the thread so far).
My own guess is that general trends in history operate regardless of individuals, but that individuals can paly key roles in abruptly changing the direction of events.
We recently had a thread asking whether the Holocaust would have happened without Hitler. My guess would have been that it would not have and the (more nearly inevitable) WWII would have looked a lot different.
I suspect that there was no general better suited to lose the U.S. War for Indepenence than Washington who could keep his constantly defeated forces together until the rest of Europe decided to give Britain a hard time. That would indicate that there might not have been a U.S.–which would radically alter a lot of subsequent history. (That should rouse some history buffs!)
If there had been no Alexander the Great, how would Western society have developed under a more constant threat from Persia? Would there be a much larger Persian influence in the Mediterranean basin (with all sorts of questions about the fates of Judaism and Christianity left hanging in the air).
