By promoting beliefs and behaviours that emphasize cosmically ordained rules, sanctions and ways of life, religion is believed to foster divisive tribal mentalities, creating prejudice, discrimination and violence.
Staunch Calvinists, they saw themselves as the children of God in the wilderness, a Christian elect divinely ordained to rule the land and the backward natives therein.
The result were communities — that is, nations — that were limited (every nation had borders) and sovereign (the Age of Enlightenment and political revolution had eroded the idea of divinely ordained dynastic rule).
They are supported by the State and are hedged in by a long series of rigid rules, ordained by tradition.
"The rules on ordaining gays or blessing same-sex couples are not going to change in Tampa.
Hilary Mantel If God ordained men should rule over women, how can a woman ever rule a nation?
Once women become bishops, more Anglican traditionalists are widely expected to leave — although it remains to be seen whether they will join the Roman Catholic Church, which recently ruled that ordaining women as Catholic priests is a crime against the faith, punishable by excommunication.
A woman who played a prominent role in a large Roman Catholic congregation that was banished in 1999 for violating Vatican rules was ordained a priest on Saturday by a bishop from the Old Catholic sect, which itself broke away from the church in 1870.
We are bound here, however, by the 'rule of four.' That rule ordains that the votes of four Justices are enough to grant certiorari and bring a case before the Court for decision on the merits.
Throughout history, the belief that political society and its rules are divinely ordained has been so strong as to keep many people, and probably most, from considering the possibility that disobeying those rules might ever be justified.
Still, despite the current scandal, there is little talk here about changing the church's rules on celibacy or ordaining women.
