Council
I love reading Elaine's blog, I love it!
One of the effects of the decisions of the Nicea Council and the ones that followed was to persecute the schools of thought that deviated from accepted doctrine. This led on, centuries later, to our dear Inquisition, forerunner of our Patriot Act, and abuses untold.
This particular kind of Christianism that is being delivered by George of Texas and his disciples seems right at home with those deliberations from previous centuries: restricted freedom, persecution of beliefs, centralized control, imprisonment without recourse to an advocate.
You know what happened to the Catholic Church after that: competition sprouted, and it lost a significant amount of its power, but only after causing a severe backlash in the sciences and arts, dividing the world, and causing deaths and destructions just by the sheer arrogance of considering their view the only good one, and labeling everything else as evil.
Sounds familiar?