God, Family, and the Green Bay Packers

[Robert J. O'Brien]

>richard duncan <rduncan at UNLINFO.UNL.EDU> writes, among
>other things,
>
>> By the way, I wonder if in the 17th Century a guy could be accused of
>> "religious harassment" for sharing his faith in the workplace?

To which Jim Maule responded:
>In the 17th? You bet. People were killed for going to the "wrong"
>church, people fled countries to avoid persecution, countries tried
>to exterminate each other using mercenaries, merely because of
>religious (theological) differences, laws were passed requiring
>certain practices and forbidding others, and life generally (at least
>in western Europe and the colonies) was unbearably intolerant.

My favorite examples come from England, where, during the time of Shakespeare, a Jesuit priest was castrated, drawn, and quartered; his heart, liver, and testes were burned; the four quarters of his body were hung over the gates to London, and his head was placed on a pike on London bridge.  All this for preaching on the streets of London.

Even after the Act of Toleration of 1689 the greatest English poet of the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope, was not allowed to attend an English university because he was Roman Catholic.  The people who debated the adoption of our Bill of Rights knew about religious harrassment.


Bob O'Brien
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