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the concepts of common ownership and conveyance of property, particularly through inheritance, which all derive from legal dogma. This intertwining is melded into a single, state defined condition, but a condition that has become associated with questions of morality and ethical conduct more typically engaged by religious orthodoxy. As this obviously reflects an attempt to make law that is steeped in religion-inspired moral values, the result is often less than accommodating to divergent views of morality. The admonition found in the Christian Bible, Matthew 6:24 is perhaps applicable, “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” We do understand that the word mammon refers directly to wealth. However, in Chapter 5 we will offer for consideration the concept that the establishment of a system of commerce, and hence a framework for wealth, is an evolved characteristic of religious social orders.

A significant aspect of the commonality between government and religion is that of identification. Religion has historically involved itself with the identification of its suppliants. Indeed, in times of physical conflict among religious and secular social structures, knowing who is a believer and who is not can be a life-or-death consideration. Some of the earliest identification mechanisms were cultural and biometric. Consider the admonition from the Christian Bible, Judges 12:6 “Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.” As the passage suggests, the social group called the Ephraimites used a spoken language in which the “sh” sound was not normally present. So, members of this group could not naturally pronounce the word shibboleth. Hence, it provided a socially enabled biometric facility. This precursor leads rather inexorably to the similar, but more cognitively demanding mechanism used by American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. There, when approached by other ostensibly American soldiers who were in reality German agents, they asked a very context sensitive question such as, “Who won the World Series in 1939?” With both mechanisms, cultural conditioning provided the establishment of context through which an effective identification process could be enacted.

The basic family has naturally been a seminal concern of religious groupings. As a consequence, religions have a strong inclination to establish identity through the family’s progression. The acts of procreation, familial bonding and death form significant social events within the religious domain. As technology enabled it, record keeping of births, marriages and deaths became commonplace within religious frameworks. The fact that such records were established within the relatively high trust environment of religious structure also meant that such records were, and still are, highly trusted throughout the social environment. If we then consider the emergence of government within the United States under the auspices of the Constitution, we see that a seminal activity of the prescribed policy infrastructure was to count, and hence to identify, the peoples from which subsequent governance authority would derive. As this policy infrastructure became more thoroughly defined, Bureaus of Vital Statistics were formed, often using the registries of churches as the starting points for their records.

Such blurring of the distinction between governmental organizations and religious organizations is common, whether in dictatorships, theocracies or democracies. All of these are of interest to us in that they are all concerned with the establishment of policy environments. One of the earliest impacts that we will see of this is in the application of policy adjudication mechanisms. The United States judicial system uses, as do many such systems, a venue of adversarial interaction moderated by a trusted third party in the determination and application of consequences to policy based interactions. Decisions of fact are made by a randomly selected group called a jury while

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