Apostate

Right! So here’s the thing. This term has a negative connotation, and one which has increased over the last two thousand years. The One True Faith was exactly that: faith that one is backing the ‘right’ side.

It was the use of that term to describe the ‘foes’ of the Guardians in the TV show “Night Sky” that made me go, ‘oh-oh’. Evidently, they are allowed to kill civilians in their pursuit of Apostates. That paints the whole idea into a corner: they don’t take any pleasure in doing what they HAVE to do. Really?

In a couple of past lives, I may have been the Apostate. Even now, having been baptized Catholic in this lifetime, I would be considered a lapsed Catholic, at best, or an apostate, at worst. Hmm.

Two modern examples of ‘religions’ that shun, or persecute, apostates are Jehovah’s Witnesses and, wait for it, Scientology. By the middle ages, apostates were any believers of ANYTHING other than Christianity, so heretics could be rounded up and burned at the stake, along with Jews and others. They would only be saved if they converted to Christianity, even under duress.

Or as one Crusader said, of the Cathars, Knights Templar and Christians that were about to be attacked: “Kill them all; God will know his own.”

Heresy is whatever you want it to be. Again, hmm.