Welcome back to
the Liberty Insider.
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Before the break,
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we were on another tangent
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but I want to start
off again with my guest,
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Charles Steinberg.
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Let's talk about
religious conflict,
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which is really what we were
talking about before the break.
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Yes.
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But that was very
specific within the church.
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But conflict between faiths,
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so between large faith
groups is not new at all, is it?
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No, I mean, even going
back in time to the year 1054,
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the Great Schism that happened
when the Orthodox Church
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split from the Holy
Roman Catholic Church.
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They split over
issues that when something's
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at the core of your belief,
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whether or not you
should have leavened bread
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or matzah for the
communion, or leavened bread,
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which is the bread
with the yeast in it.
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That doesn't sound so big.
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But you're going to get
to the really big stuff.
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Yeah, I know. We'll
get to big stuff later.
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But anyway, the
nature of the Holy Spirit
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and then, of course, the nature,
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where you should
have the Holy CB.
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Should the Holy CB in Rome
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with its jurisdiction worldwide?
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Or should you have the
Holy CB based in Constantinople?
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And when that Schism
began, Constantinople
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was the new
headquarters for the emperor.
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Yes.
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So today,
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the Roman Catholic
Church has big claims.
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But when you look back
to the time of the Schism,
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it was a bit uppity
for the Bishop of Rome.
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Yesterday's city,
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Rome was a backwater
largely at that point,
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but he within
the Christian Church
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was claiming that
he was the dominant one
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and so that was the split.
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Yeah.
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So he was sort of
shacked off by Constantinople.
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And part of that conflict,
which continues to this day
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was one of the Crusades
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was diverted by
the Bishop of Rome
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conspiring with the
Christian Crusaders.
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He says, "Before you
go to liberate Jerusalem,
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you know,
liberate Constantinople."
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Yeah.
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So dissect that.
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Yeah, well, those are areas
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what we call as a zero-sum game.
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Yeah.
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If we're arguing over $1
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and you start
out with 50 pennies
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and I start out with 50 pennies,
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anytime I win, I
take away from you,
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and anytime that I
lose, it goes to your gain.
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That's what we call
an entrenched position
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in a zero-sum game.
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And a lot of times,
there are reasons to have that,
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like if you're
going to have to sacrifice
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your religious belief,
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you know, you want to
think long and hard about that
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before you act on it.
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But in these great
actions of history,
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I think of religious conflict
going back to the Bible times.
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I think of great
religious conflict going back
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to what I call the
first law of self-defense
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that was enacted in
the story of Esther.
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And even it's
familiar with the story.
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Back then, they said,
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"Let's kill the Jews and
plunder all their wealth,"
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and the laws of
the Medes and Persians
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couldn't be changed.
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And so Esther and Mordecai
then pleaded to King Xerxes,
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you know, since the laws
of the Medes and Persians
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can't be changed,
you can make a new law,
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and that new law says the
Jews can use self-defense.
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Yeah, they can
defend themselves.
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They can defend themselves.
It's an amazing thing.
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Yeah.
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And none of them were
killed or plundered that day.
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And although when you
go on to continue reading
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the Bible account of Esther,
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it does look like the Jews
actually plundered the people
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that had, have baptized them.
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Yes.
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They got more than
their money's worth.
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But you know, that
brings up another subject.
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I don't know if you
want to go here yet or not,
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but women leaders in the Bible.
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Why do men have such a problem?
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You're trying to introduce
the women's lib movement
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before the '60s?
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Yeah.
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Well, you know, it's clear
that there are different gifts
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that men and women have.
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But it's also
very clear in the Bible
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that God chose certain
women to be strong leaders.
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Yeah.
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I'm just bringing that up there.
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Although the
Bible does answer that.
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It says when the men are not
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assuming their
correct leadership role,
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it says, women
will rule over you.
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Yes.
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And that's I don't think
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is taking it in
my mind the best way.
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It's not put down on women.
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But women make things work.
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And when the men have let
down their responsibility,
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women can fill the gap easily.
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Yeah. And so that does happen.
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And I think of the
churches that I've been to,
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so much work actually gets
done by women in the church.
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Well, you know, you're
getting on another thing.
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Sorry about that.
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It's a matter of
biological makeup,
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I think, or maybe of
roles in the family and that,
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but women tend to be
more spiritually inclined.
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Yeah.
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I wanted to switch
gears back to the history.
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Yes, that's where
I wanted to take it.
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So going back to history,
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I think of one of
the great legal documents
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that we have is the Magna Carta
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that has given
us so many rights.
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Sort of the
seminal legal document.
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It's a seminal legal document.
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I noticed after 9/11 in the US.
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The US at that
time of Antonin Scalia
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who would mock the
idea of English common law
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or anything non-American.
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"We don't care
about that," he would say.
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Yeah, history
began in 1783. Right.
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In actuality, a
lot of the lawyers are,
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the talking head lawyers,
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critiquing things that
followed 9/11 were constantly
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recounting the
value of Magna Carta
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and protection
against search and seizure
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and imprisonment and all that.
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And a jury of your peers.
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You could have 25 barons,
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you could have 14
barons hearing your court case,
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instead of people
just picked by the king.
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And you know,
the interesting thing
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about the issue on
Magna Carta was King John,
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he'd been fighting
these wars on foreign lands
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and all sorts of things
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and taxing the
people very heavily.
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And so the nobles
that had it up to here,
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and they said, "We want
you to sign this document."
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And you know, he was
intending to just rip it up
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and ignore it
after he signed it.
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But what one of the
noble leaders had done,
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Robert Fitzwater,
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he had actually
gotten control of London.
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And when you think
of the King of England,
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his base is in the
prime city, London.
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And so for you to
have basically captured
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the king's main city, he
had incentive to negotiate.
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So he negotiated...
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Oh, they had him
where they wanted him
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at that particular moment.
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They did. Yeah.
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A few years ago
on a trip to England,
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and I'm trying
to remember which...
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Was it Winchester?
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But anyhow, one
of the cathedrals,
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we discovered they
had one of, I think,
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only three original
copies of the Magna Carta.
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It was very interesting
to see that actual document.
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So we're going far afield here,
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but I was in Simi Valley
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and I was at the
presidential library
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of Ronald Reagan.
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And they had one of those
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three copies of
Magna Carta on loan
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when I happened to go there.
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And I was like,
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'cause as a
lawyer, I'm really excited.
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"Oh, this is Magna Carta.
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This is the seminal
document that gave us rights."
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And as I'm
leaning over the case,
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I actually bump into it,
I'm looking at it that close
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that my breath is
there and the docent,
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he says, "Sir, the
condition of this display
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is being monitored
live in London via Internet.
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You need to back off
from the display, please."
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But I was like, "Oh,
this is exciting," you know?
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But you know,
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Magna Carta doesn't
give us our rights either.
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They're given to us by God.
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Well, of course, the US...
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It's the
Declaration of Independence,
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not the constitution.
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Yeah.
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The Declaration of
Independence acknowledges that,
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which I think is
even though that wasn't...
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I mean, it was accepted
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by the Continental
Congress head woman,
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but it wasn't written by them.
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So it's really narrowly
coming from probably Jefferson,
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but still it's now joined
to the constitutional makeup,
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and it's a wonderful
way of looking at it.
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One of the great things about
the United States foundings,
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the different
foundings over different periods
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is I love our
constitutional founding,
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where it says,
"There shall be no
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religious test
for public office."
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Yeah.
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And it also says
that there's a...
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I read into it,
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and Jefferson's
letter to the Dan Barry
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Church Association
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says there'll be a
separation of church and state.
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And you know, you can
attack that all you want,
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but when you look at the result,
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the end game
there is religious wars
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and religious
persecution backed by the state.
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And I'm going to
segue here a little bit,
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Lincoln, into what do you think
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about this issue
with Brexit and Boris?
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You're going to
interview me on my...?
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No, I'm just asking.
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I'm not going to
interview on your own show.
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I'd like to talk about
that on another program.
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Another program? Okay.
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The numbers are ticking down.
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We only have a few
minutes left in this program.
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Okay.
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But, you know,
let's just enumerate
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some of the other
religious divides,
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the Islamic community,
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largely between Sunni and Shia,
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and the difference
between them was always nothing.
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So what's the
difference between them?
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I'll tell you, it's not
even really theological.
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When Muhammad died,
there was a succession problem,
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who would be the next caliph.
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He chose his friend Abu
Bakr to become the next caliph.
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There was a faction that
wanted Muhammad's son-in-law,
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Ali, to take it up.
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And 'cause Ali is the
saint basically of the Shiites,
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and they lost out.
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He died, was killed.
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And so this dispute,
it's only of a succession.
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It's not a deeply
theological thing at all,
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but people are
killed over this today.
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You take something that rooted
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and you teach it to
generation after generation,
00:10:07.70\00:10:12.34
it becomes one
of your core beliefs
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and you're
willing to act on that.
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Yeah.
00:10:15.11\00:10:16.44
And these other social dynamics
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that kick in
that make people act
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at times
violently on these things.
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And you know,
within all belief systems,
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there's these schisms.
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And I think, it's
probably human nature
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dispute over things.
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Yeah. There's
no end of argument.
00:10:30.29\00:10:32.23
But again, what do you
think we can do to ameliorate
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or moderate these things?
00:10:37.17\00:10:38.50
So to moderate
these things, again,
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one of the things
you do is basically
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check yourself to see
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where your
passions are coming from.
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And if your
passions are raising you up
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to do something negative
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or violent against somebody else
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and interfere with
their civil rights,
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you better check
that at the door.
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The letters of the Apostle Paul
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are certainly
dominant in the New Testament
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and arguably they
existed as written material
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before the gospels.
00:11:05.49\00:11:07.26
One element of them that
has always resonated with me
00:11:07.30\00:11:10.77
is Paul's continued complaint
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that he was in
competition with other teachers
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and they were
the false teachers.
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He was the correct one.
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It's very clear
there was great dispute
00:11:18.41\00:11:20.91
in the early Christian Church.
00:11:20.94\00:11:22.78
Then at the Jerusalem Council,
00:11:22.81\00:11:25.11
he came head to head with Peter,
00:11:25.15\00:11:27.78
and as Paul with a
little self-promotion says,
00:11:27.82\00:11:30.99
"You know, and I told
him off, I set him straight."
00:11:31.02\00:11:35.09
Discounting perhaps
Paul's own myopic viewpoint,
00:11:35.12\00:11:39.43
there's no question
that conflict existed
00:11:39.46\00:11:42.03
but it clearly was settled
00:11:42.06\00:11:44.80
in the spirit of
Christian charity
00:11:44.83\00:11:47.77
that so clearly
followed Pentecost,
00:11:47.80\00:11:51.57
brother with
brother, sister with sister,
00:11:51.61\00:11:53.84
and all under the Spirit
of God working toward harmony
00:11:53.88\00:11:57.81
in the Christian community.
00:11:57.85\00:12:00.98
For Liberty Insider,
this is Lincoln Steed.
00:12:01.02\00:12:04.19