"Nihil deorum honoribus relictum, cum se templis et effigie numinum per flamines et sacerdotes coli vellet."
"No honor was left the gods, when Augustus chose to be himself worshiped with temples and statues, like those of the deities, and with flames and priests."
Sometimes, in our superior wisdom, we come to find our selves rendering deistic status to mere public servants; these servants, who, like small dogs, strut and bark as if they were all the chosen creations of Mars. Perhaps that comes off somewhat glib, but dig a little further and maybe we could add a little depth to this assertion.
Let's start by looking at the quotation above. We can determine that a single prominent man, Augustus, took precedence over a pantheon of gods, and moreover, so austere was his taste for worship that he pushed the worship of Roman ancestral gods into the background. In addition, Augustus styled himself in the same way the gods were styled, by giving himself all the same marks and devices, thus rhetorically seeing himself up as a god himself. No other gods before the emperor, it seems.
How was it possible that a whole body of people could stand for such blaspheme against the gods and contempt towards themselves? The answer we shall see is twofold. The first facet is that at this point in the history of Rome, the people were artificially classed, the economy was regulated from the throne, military connections were volatile, and the constitutions of the people themselves had become degenerate and weak. the second facet springs from the final point from the last facet that "the people themselves had become degenerate and weak." As can be seen from another quote from the Annals of Tacitus where he shows how the people themselves, like small dogs, had all bark and no bite: "It was then for the first time that the elections were transferred from the Campus Martius to the Senate. For up to that day, though the most important rested with the emperor's choice, some were settled by the partialities of the tribes. Nor did the people complain of having the right taken from them, except in mere idle talk, and the Senate, being now released from the necessity of bribery and of degrading solicitations, gladly upheld the change."
It is easy to see now how one man can through his cunning and preexisting conditions set himself upon the dais as a god. To compare the backward Roman's to the advanced state of civilization today is not a proper comparison, our wisdom is superior to that; but somehow we find ourselves trapped into believing that presidents, congressmen, judges, magistrates, and bureaucrats all contribute a function to some modern made up pantheon. Instead of having a separation of church and state, the church IS the state, and all must be congregates thereto. To establish how the modern state has been setting itself up as god, lets examine the quotation at the top of the page once more, and do a simple compare and contrast.
The aggression towards anything religious shows a spirit of self-deification, this belief is well expressed in a Forbes.com article by Bill Flax: "Americans are frequently reminded of what the revisionists deem our greatest achievement: 'Separation of Church and State.' Crosses are ripped down in parks. Prayer has been banished from schools and the ACLU rampages to remove 'under God' from the Pledge of Allegiance. Moreover, 'Separation of Church and State' is nowhere found in the Constitution or any other founding legislation. Our forefathers would never countenance the restrictions on religion exacted today."
(http://www.forbes.com/sites/billflax/2011/07/09/the-true-meaning-of-separation-of-church-and-state/)
The quotation above shows how church is being purged from the state, but the matter is still inconclusive. In order to show how the state is pushing religion out of religion's own sphere, lets dig a little further. To give a few examples, there is increasing activism to hurtle religious ordinances out of many religions, the greedy purse of the tax collector is wanting to remove the tax exemption from churches, good and evil is prostituted as what is civil and what is not, The government, at times, demanded of the religious that they take heavy oaths and swears against their convictions, et cetera. While the church is still prominent in it's own sphere, it is taking a backseat sometimes.
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