The Blood Of Religious Liberty Enabled Freedom Of Speech
This is pretty interesting article. It goes into some of the history of persecution of Christians to Obama’s assault on Religious Liberty.
Around the turn of the 2nd century, St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, was condemned by a Roman tribunal to be torn apart and eaten by lions in the Coliseum. What was his crime? Ignatius was condemned because his speech was subversive to the Roman social order. Having a public audience worsened his exercise of free speech; speaking freely in front of an assembled mob was the real crime.
Speaking and teaching the Gospels, according to the Apostles, of whom John was Ignatius' mentor, was the content of Ignatius' speech. Moreover, Ignatius is credited with asserting the notion of the Church as universal and catholic, from the Greek katholikos.
But Ignatius's death sentence didn't chill his free speech. He managed to preach in dozens of venues along the route of a condemned man from Syria to Rome. There are at least seven letters from Ignatius, written during his death march, considered to be authentic, and perhaps another half dozen attributed but of disputed origin. His epistles ranged from declaring the divinity of Jesus to the central truth of the Eucharist being the body of Christ to the need for hierarchy and structure in the Church. All religious speech -- all about religious doctrine and religious polity.
The lives of the Christian saints, chronicled by three centuries of persecution and martyrdom at the hands of Roman oppressors, all had storylines akin to Ignatius's, although his prolific writings at that time made him more prominent than most. The bloody and horrifying struggle to assert religious speech, assembly, and organization was relieved only by the conversion and intercession of Constantine in the 4th century.
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