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My childhood was Reformed with a Dutch Reformed umbrella. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the Liturgy that tells its believers when to wash their hands. There is nothing that tells them how to cook nor which food to cook. This is two examples about the differences between religions that have living habit rules and the one does not.

I'm still trying to figure out how this happened because it is a startling difference which seemed to happen overnight. The one person who created a schism was Paul.

I'm not saying he was unique; I was saying that he managed to codify it into a religion.

Taking baths had a lot to do with hygiene. Separating the lovees was an old policy.

Our Christians and PC crowds are currently doing equivalent things and some are even succeeding.

An individual Pope's greed or acquisitiveness dies with that Pope, or disintegrates within a generation or two if a son inherits rule. This current mess has to do with a declaration that all non-Muslims are to be end which seems to also include Muslims who are moderate.

Do you not believe what these people say?

anyway.

Where it gets real confusing to me is that these extreme politicians (here in the US, anyway) are ceding to the Muslim extremists as one of their tactics. This is asking the lion to tend your cattle, belieiving that when you come back, all will be alive and healthy.

But politics changes with the times and adjusts in response to the majority. This Islamic thing is very different. It is global and is not constrained by a geographically-local opinion.

I don't know. I've become tired this week. I had to play with my VROOOMM machine twice.

But career bureaucrats continue working using their old habits. This means that the leaders conform to the bureaucracy, not the other way around. A new leader may set policy, but the day to day details constrain the way that policy works. It is an embedded process that smooths rough edges and aspects that would cause an immediate shutdown. This sifting is important in things like trade which relies on the little details to remain the same.

But a single person cannot change the paths of all paperwork trails. If a paperwork trail skips a stop at a desk, or ends up on a new desk, the paper movements are diverted or stop altogether. In the case of invoices or bills of lading, this will stop all trade dead.

I don't see this goal codified. A world domination had more to do with a Pope's ambitions which stopped after he died because the next one had different tastes.

Which were funded by outposts (I think that's the correct word). The Roman Empire disintegrated when Rome stopped using its own labors. It doesn't take long for an estate owner to stop sending its dues to the capital when there is no evidence of benefit. This also happened to the Ottoman Empire.

Didn't the Romans create these religious offices for patronage?

To me an invasion is thousands of fighters landing on the beach all at the same time and systematically going through all buildings and collecting booty. The so-called invasions of Rome, AIUI, were via marriage and trade and politics which means a gradual societal adjustment that takes decades and centuries. Not a month to a year.

Not during the Ottoman Empire. Not having Muslims do the grunt work was a part of the empire's undoing. I think a result was that no sanity check of reality ever made it back into the ruling clbutt. The Ottomans intended to acquire Europe. I had read or had been told that the reason they never got further was because they had reached the end of their supply and support lines which was Vienna-ish. It would seem to me that the Janissaries in charge of doing this work would have known this. Yet nobody told the rulers. I understand why. A slave doesn't live long if he says no to his master.

There were three geographical areas who think they should be the political and religious center of Islam. With each new nationalistic leader of another country, another country is temporarily added and removed with the rest of the leader.

We both could be 100% wrong about everything. :-) That's why our biz has BS sessions--to sort the possible from the cruft.

BAH