As large cities and the technology for travel improved during the era of Babylon around 1,500BC, elite groups of people began to travel. Major cities and kingdoms were increasingly confronted with dissimilar beliefs due to the mixing of ethnic and religious groups. Each of these groups believed that its religion was the basis for “their” absolutes. This created a new challenge for civilization that I refer to as the “Multiple Religions Problem”.

Note well, this problem has nothing to do with any specific tenet of any religious creed. It is purely a secular problem. That is, how does a governing authority maintain order when different beliefs require different social behaviors, and those behaviors are not compatible? To maintain social order without having to work very hard at it, Babylon, and later “nations” of the time, adopted a simple, pragmatic social convention:

This practice, with widespread local exceptions, continued throughout the Greek and Roman Empires. Specifically, it allowed visitors to have their own temples, though they had to be small.

Around 300AD, the Roman Empire adopted Catholicism as the official religion. Unlike the “traditional” policies, the Catholic Church wanted sole dominance of the entire empire and the forced conversion of everyone in the territory. Former temples were destroyed; public statues were replaced. As the empire fell apart, western society fell into the Christian Dark Ages. The Catholic Church reverted to severe persecution to enforce its hold. People were no longer allowed to hold and practice other religious beliefs. The Crusades and the severe persecution of the Inquisition were its last stronghold. It didn’t go well.

Many former national groups across Europe had powerful independent thinking secular leaders and individuals including the emerging “Protestant” clergy. The entire continent exploded in the rebellion we call the Renaissance. This put great pressure on rulers, who needed to create social order in the face of endless international conflicts. Unfortunately, their response was just a replay of the Greek and Roman “freedom of religion” solution, including the reestablishment of national religion.

With the emergence of the United States in 1776 and its “democratic” Constitution in 1787, all of western society faced a major paradigm shift. The U.S. Declaration of Independence claimed “democracy”, and “freedom” of individuals from authoritarian control. While seen by many around the world as a long hoped for reopening of the door to Athenian democracy for all, it ironically created a huge new dilemma they didn’t know how to deal with: the intentional elimination of a national religion.

Despite the recognition of some of the founders that this would cause severe adverse consequences, the U.S. congress, in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, essentially stuck their heads in the sand of denial and “kicked the can down the road”.

The U.S. founders initially attempted to adopt the same rhetoric that was used since antiquity, “the right of individual freedom of religious thought … as long as … the national religion was still respected”. The drives for “individual” freedom and religious diversity were so strong that none of the active religions could be selected because they would not be respected by even a simple majority. The ancient wording, therefore, could no longer work because there was no national religion. So, irresponsibly and disastrously, the congress simply dropped the last condition, which of course, had been the magic ingredient for maintaining religious tolerance over the prior 3,000 years of history. Obviously, they actually had no choice. What they didn’t figure out, however, was a comprehensive alternative. The first amendment then stated only that: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

The problem this created was that, without the backup religion, the statement is completely incompatible with the goal of achieving peace in the society. Many religions preach “death to infidels”. An “infidel” is anyone who does not believe in one’s own religion. Without the last clause of the ancient edict requiring respect to a national religion, the U.S. first amendment provides no legal grounds to restrain hostile religions. And while society might capriciously point to laws that prohibit violence to control this, those laws immediately raised a conflict with the wording of this amendment. The result was a repeating Constitutional crisis.

Here are a few more phrases from the first amendment:

“Congress shall make no law …
… abridging the freedom of speech,
… or of the press;
… or the right of the people peaceably to assemble…”.

On their own, each of these seem very progressive; they support free thought, and freedom of action. In fact, the American founding fathers have received high praise for doing this. But, in fact, this just deepened the religious tragedy by expanding the right of freedom of religious thought, to freedom of all thought! While this again might appear to be a great and progressive change, there is a catastrophic flaw in all of it. This entire concept failed to anticipate the complexity of modern society!

In our modern world, the technologies of transportation and communication have changed the paradigm of freedom. Travel brought people with many different beliefs together. Communication allowed people everywhere to see or read about what other people believed and how they lived. What humanity does not comprehend, however, is that complexity can only function with very tightly regulated interconnections. Humanity has not thought this out well at all.

Consider medicine as an example. How would medical care work with a “freedom of thought” philosophy? What if every doctor, every nurse, every drug company, every hospital employee, and every emergency service provider could do things any way they want? How could any operating room be equipped if the doctors all did their procedures differently with different instruments, used different medicines, and expected different kinds of support? What kind of care would patients get if every nurse set their own schedules, used their own approach to care, used different instruments, and had their own ideas about what instructions from doctors they were going to follow? What if drug companies could just provide any chemical they wanted and label it any way they wanted? What kind of hospitals would we have if every hospital employee could just come into work any day they want and do anything they wanted? What kind of emergency service could we expect if any business labeled an ambulance service was no more than someone with a car that advertised in some fliers that came in the mail?

This problem is not simple. It touches every part of our lives. Couldn’t everyone decide to drive any way they want? Couldn’t construction crews build roads any size they want, anywhere they want, from any material they want? Couldn’t every builder decide to build a house anyway they want? Why do we need all those building codes, fire-prevention codes, electrical-codes, or zoning ordinances? Couldn’t we all decide how and where to dump our garbage and sewage anywhere we want? Couldn’t every teacher decide to teach anything they want?

Until society finds ways for people to agree on what citizens are free to do, and what they are not free to do, and what parts of life can be understood as truths, and what can’t, we are essentially living in a world wide insane asylum! (Again, this is a comparison not drawn lightly.)

Are there people in society who know how to fix this? Of course. The philosophy of “Truth” is well understood knowledge in academic theory (even if not in academic practice). So is the philosophy of Freedom. The people we choose to be leaders, however, don’t know these academic fundamentals. Average citizens, and many academics, don’t know them either. When the existence of this knowledge is brought to their attention, they refuse to take the time to understand it. In fact, all of these groups, and especially politicians, don’t actually want to understand it. It would interfere with their positions of power and their ability to do anything they want which they believe they are entitled to do because the Constitution, they believe, ”tells them so”.