""In your worldview there can be no absolutes, simply personal opinion--thus civil government is completely irrational, because it imposes 'personal opinion' upon other people who obviously didn't find it against their personal standards to steal, murder and speed. How dare you call Hitler evil? He was just creating his own reality. How can you condemn child abuse? The abuser is not breaching their own standard of gooness.
This is the point I've been trying to make. thanks!""

Civil government is merely one way in which human beings have come together to establish consensual standards for the good of the community and often overriding the interests of individuals to achieve that.

It neither requires nor, IMHO, benefits from religious input of any description.

You only have to look at the way in which civil government (through history) has moved towards less and less violent responses to transgressions.

Fundamental Christianity has consistently benefitted only those who accept its doctrines and dogma, in effect become converts (as witness Pius XII's disinclination to remonstrate regarding the treatment of Jews by the Third Reich). It has quite consistently (until very recently) persecuted those who were so "unwise" as not to recognise the "eternal truths" on offer.

Nonetheless, the survivors of those "unwise" peoples have reached their own conclusions and (with some noteable exceptions) established their own systems of civil government.

And you have no basis to take any high moral attitudes, when you believe that the bible is the immutable "Word of God", true in every detail, then decry those Muslims who believe in stoning adulterers to death, which is exactly what YOUR God is demanding of you if your belief is correct.

You cannot have it both ways. Either the bible is, as YOU claim "the immutable Word of God", in which case you'll be needing a good supply of rocks, or it isn't, in which case your slavish belief falls flat on its face.

Now, there's a poser. Which way will you jump?

Don T.