For millennia, monarchs ruled by some form of divine right. If not asserting god-like powers, they claimed to be acting as God’s emissaries here on Earth. You can imagine the effect this had on devout peoples of any faith. How could the great unwashed masses dare question any royal’s divinely inspired orders? This paradigm kept government authorities towering over those they ruled.
The Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution crashed through the walls of absolute monarchies and reoriented political systems on the foundations of natural law, religious toleration, constitutional government, and individual liberty. Twentieth-century postmodernism later led to a rise in religious agnosticism and a growing uncertainty about even the existence of God. First, philosophers stole monarchs’ divine right to rule; then they convinced new generations to question God altogether.
Unsurprisingly, both of these intellectual revolutions weakened the innate authority upon which governments relied. Stripped of any divine pretense for exerting power over their subjects, governments have been attempting to justify their existence ever since..............To Read More....
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