"FOXE'S BOOK OF MARTYRS" WHY DID PEOPLE KILL IN THE NAME OF RELIGION?
		To understand why people would actually torture and kill in the name of religion, we must go way back in world history.  In the early centuries of mankind, each nation had its own official deity.  That deity represented, not only a religion, but also rules for living in their society.  Therefore, in many nations, the king was also the high priest.  Where the king was not, his closest advisors were priests.  This same pattern was followed in the Jewish religion.  The Law of Moses, for instance, has 600 commandments (not just the "Ten Commandments") governing all phases of life and society including how to treat others fairly and how to handle sickness, in addition to rules for worship.   To read these 600 commandments, go to the third book of the Old Testament ~ Leviticus.  During the period of the Old Testament, God did tell the Jews to kill off various nations that had been extremely evil.  By evil, it is meant that they tortured captives (such as skinning them alive), burned their children as sacrifices to their gods, and other atrosities.  Interestingly, the God of the Bible never goes very far ahead of mankind.  In the days of the Old Testament (about 4000 BC to 500 BC) people of the world were fairly barbaric by our standards today.  So, when the Jews went to war, they killed instantly; they never tortured first.  This was one step ahead of what nearly all other nations did at that time.  (For more on this, go to the PERSONAL STUDIES section of this website, "Hard Questions You Have Asked.") However, when Jesus came, he introduced a brand new political and religious way:  He would be the king-priest in a spiritual sense, and there would be no king-priest in a literal sense any more.  (Go to the HISTORICAL NOVEL section of this website, Vol. I, and read Endnotes of "Wise Men", both Part I and Part II.)  At the same time, Jesus did say we should obey civil kings (Matthew 22:21).  It took Christians several more centuries to catch on to this separation of church and state.  Therefore, history books say that it was under Constantine around 300 AD that Christianity became the official religion of any nation, namely the Roman Empire.  In fact, he ordered his soldiers to be baptized, and they in turn ordered conquered populations to be baptized or killed.  This was later called the Holy Roman Empire which covered much of Europe and was ruled by the pope.  Jumping forward in history, in the early 1500s, certain men rose up desiring to reform the church (now primarily Catholic) back to the way it was in New Testament times.  Martin Luther was considered the first major figure in the Reformation Movement.  But, even then, separation of church and state had not occurred.   Lutherinism eventually became the official religion of Germany.  Under John Calvin, Congregationalism became the official religion of Switzerland.  Under John Knox, Presbyterianism became the official religion of Scotland.  And so on. As long as nations continued to have an official, government-endorsed religion, they continued to have the power to enforce their religion on anyone their king desired by any means possible including imprisonment, death, etc.  This is the reason Separation of Church and State is so important.