I’ll preface this by saying that in no way do I think making The Bible the official law of a country is a good idea. (And I’m strongly Christian, although a liberal Christian).
But many Arab countries follow sharia law and hold The Koran (at least, their twisted interpretation of it) up as “Our One True Source for All Morality and Law”, basically. If you’re a woman, you’d better wear the hijab 24/7. If you’re a woman in Saudi Arabia, you can’t drive. There are even some countries that still put people to death for consensual same-sex intercourse!
I’m curious as to why there aren’t some countries around the world that don’t do the same thing with a reactionary interpretation of The Bible. (I don’t believe the United States is a country that does that, by the way). Whether it be strict Old Testament “stone a woman who refuses to marry her rapist”, “stone gays”, “burn heretics”, or more of a New Testament style, you don’t see a Jewish or Christian equivalent of sharia law. (Disclaimer: I don’t know much about how things are done in Israel). Why is that?
Our whole economy is based on coveting other people’s things. Much of our entertainment is based on coveting our neighbor’s wife or lusting on our hearts. Biblically-based communities start up now and again but don’t last very long or keep a large number of adherents. For every immigrant that comes to America to worship more devoutly, probably ten more come here to get out of the clutches of already too-powerful churches.
Of the Ten Commandments, only three are enforceable by law and I’d like to keep it that way.
Heh, amen to that! Sometimes situations pop up in which I’m forced to break one of the commandments just after leaving church! (Making up an excuse not to get called into work, when the truth is I simply don’t wanna work that day).
Although strictly speaking, “bearing false witness” could simply refer to perjury, and not “every single instance of lying, ever.”
How do you figure? The way I add it up, thou shalt not murder, steal, bear false witness, or commit adultery; as per Wiki, that last one’s a misdemeanor in more than a dozen states, a full-on felony in Massachusetts and Idaho and Michigan and Oklahoma and Wisconsin, and grounds for a court-martial in the US military.
I mean, sure, go make yourself a nice graven image after putting in a full day’s work on the Sabbath, if you want – but if you move from merely coveting thy neighbor’s wife to committing adultery with her, you may well be facing a fine.
A few hundred years ago, many countries would have had the Christian equivalent of “Sharia Law”. You will find enshrined in the original Massachusetts constitution (when the states were first formed after the American Revolution) a requirement to attend Church on Sundays. Western nations have moved on, and over time put up a higher and stronger wall to separate Church and State. Much of the Muslim world is still struggling with that.
It’s because the Bible and the Koran are not the same book and do not command their followers to do the same things. The Koran instructs Muslims, as a basic tenet of their religion, to establish certain laws as laws and enforce them. As Huston Smith says in The World’s Religions, which is the standard textbook in comparative religion classes, “more than any other world religion, Islam requires its followers to seek to establish a certain social and legal order”. By contrast, in the New Testament, Jesus implies and Paul says outright that Christians are on a personal and community quest for God’s Kingdom which does not involve overturning non-Christian rulers. The Jewish scriptures do lay down a set of laws, but all branches of Judaism understand it as applying to the nation of Israel in Old Testament times rather than intended to be universal law for all humanity.
Of course this explanation does not fit well for those who derisively dismiss all religions as being the same except for the details, nor for those who lovingly insist that members of all religions can just get around a big campfire and sing Kumbaya. But it’s the basic truth that everyone who’s seriously studied comparative religion has come to.
Your premise doesn’t make any sense. Biblical prohibitions are the basis for much of the English common law.
The hijab and women driving are bad examples. Neither are mentioned in the Quran.
The gay sex thing is an even worse example. No country currently puts people to death for same-sex intercourse. Uganda’s legislature proposed a law that would make homosexual intercourse a capital crime, and quietly dropped it when pretty much the whole world went apeshit. It’s also worth noting that the law was passed because of an anti-gay froth whipped up by American Christian evangelists (though all of them denounced the bill as too harsh).
Well then how do you explain the many centuries in which the Catholic church was in charge of much of Europe or the Puritans here in the early US. There are many examples of theocratic Christian societies in the past, it just that with the Enlightenment we have moved on to a more secular state. Many Muslim countries for one reason or other haven’t.
It’s mostly the Arab Muslim countries, although it’s true of Afghanistan and Iran as well. Turkey has managed to be relatively secular for about a century now.
The Bible used to be the law of lands. But I doubt it was ever the complete law of the land. It’s big on the morality stuff, less useful with a lot of the administrative details (although there’s a lot of stuff in the OT about some trivial issues of governance).
The Torah was probably the law of the land for Judea from around 516 B.C.E, when the Second Temple was completed and Nehemiah and Ezra began enforcing its tenets, until the Alexander imposed Greek Law around 332 B.C.E. From that time onward, the Jewish people never had a nation that was not either occupied or threatened by outsiders imposing their own laws until 1948. The establishment of modern Israel included many secularists who did not found their law on the Torah.
Christianity never looked at the Torah as a foundation of laws, since the rituals described there were clearly Jewish in nature and Christians had made a serious point of claiming that Jesus had come to fulfill and supplant that law.
The New Testament had Love God and Love your neighbor, the Golden Rule, and, (if looked upon in that way), the Beatitudes, but there was really no way use the New Testament as a basis for civil law.
Beyond that, Christianity got its biggest growth spurt under Roman Law and most people simply accepted that as “the” law, so Christians never really had a way to base the law on the bible.
ETA: Correction: While the Second Temple was completed around 516, Nehemiah did not begin enforcing Ezra’s reforms for another 60 years, or so.
I’m not aware that there were any centuries in which the Catholic Church was in charge of much of Europe. The Papacy may have occasionally fired off a document claiming to have political authority, but outside of the Papal states in central Italy it never had such authority. When the Roman Empire disintegrated, it was replaced in western Europe by a patchwork of kingdoms. Many such kingdoms rose and fell over the years, but the Popes never had administrative authority over Europe.
Obviously the Puritans never ruled anything in the US. Are you referring to the Massachusetts Bay Colony before the US existed?
More germane to this thread, ekedolphin didn’t ask about the existence of theocratic Christian societies. He asked about the places where the Bible is the official law of the land.
While the number of Muslim countries that officially enforce Sharia is small–seven is the number I’ve heard most often–that doesn’t tell the whole story. In some countries, the idea has gained hold in some localities but not nationwide, or has partial influence over the courts and government but nothing has been officially declared. In many other Muslim countries, militant Islam is growing in influence even if it hasn’t taken over yet.
Which is off topic for this thread. It is rather ironic that you made a point of emphasizing that the RCC never officially ruled Europe while you are off haring after some attempt to make unsupported claims for Sharia (carefully omitting that Sharia is not the same as the Qur’an and also being careful to refrain from noting that there are multiple versions of Sharia which is nothing more than the concept of judicial philosophy within Islam).
True, but keep in mind that “Sharia Law” is not some monolithic code that all Muslims agree on. It can vary considerably from culture to culture. That is not to say that I think any of them are comparable to what one finds in Western Democracies, but the term “Sharia Law” is often used as if the only meaning it has is that of its most extreme manifestation (eg, Taliban rule).
nods Credit that to somewhat ignorant oversimplification by people in the Western world. (Myself, definitely included; that’s part of why I want to be enlightened).