If you wonder why I take seriously separation of church and state issues, part of it is because I was a music student.

Centuries ago, the Church believed that instrumental music was an affront to God. The people who were the final authority for practically all of Europe’s citizens on what sent you to Heaven or Hell -- giving them power over princes and paupers alike -- had a very careful set of rules for what music was acceptable. Thanks to Pope Gregory (for whom Gregorian chant was named) there was a way to sing praises to God without offending Him. It seems the Lord only wanted pure singular tones, no harmonies, sung in certain modes.

Over time (perhaps the monks were getting bored) an instrument was finally allowed to accompany, but ONLY if it played the exact same notes. We didn’t need this device to go wild, serving Satan with unholy melody. Eventually, songs outside of Gregorian modes were allowed, as long as they were to the glory of God and not the singer or writer. Over centuries, there was a slow process of allowing counterpoint and harmony, and more instruments and more variation, eventually to the allowing of instrumental music on its own. Note that, until such a step was allowed, engaging in it could be construed as an act of heresy -- a charge that carried the possibility of torture and/or a death sentence.

(Of course, at the time there was plenty of secular and instrumental music in the countryside, played by folk minstrels and gypsies, but you can imagine what Church authorities would have done with them if given the chance.)

Still, by the time we got to the Classical eras, with their great composers (making plenty of God-pleasing sacred music along with the secular), the Church had largely moved on to micromanaging other aspects of human life.

Like science. Since working with dead humans was a sin, the Church said, anatomy lessons from animals such as monkeys would suffice -- and just getting to the point of allowing the study of anatomy and internal medicine took some time to get used to. The art of balancing the body’s humours (such as by blood-letting) used to be all the God-approved medical science one needed.

Of course, we’ve heard about Galileo’s persecution for believing the sun the center of our corner of the universe, rather than Earth being the center of it all. Starting with the “fact” of Earth being central, reality was made to conform to it, with rules for the retrograde motion of stars and planets. Sounds kind of silly when you think of it, like throwing out years of voluminous scientific research and conforming reality to fit “facts” such as the entire universe being created in six days, just thousands of years ago.

But squabbles over astronomy or dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden seem to have no bearing on our daily lives, do they? What’s the harm in letting religious authority, which only has our best interests at heart, determine what is true or real?

Considering that, I can’t help but remember something someone once told me (and which I somehow can’t help feeling has some truth) that the Medieval Church had ordered that since cats are of the Devil, they should be destroyed -- and pay no attention to the rats; rat infestation and the plague are two totally unrelated things. And I’ve read that the Church at the time didn’t disagree with the notion that bathing too much spread the Black Death.

But at least, after a while, they stopped messing with music, right?

Still, consider that even without Church interference there were still strict rules as to how music should be composed and performed. Always, a higher authority seemed to be respected. Works known as “fantasies” may not sound radically different from pure classical to us but were so called because they went in some careful way outside those rules. The baroque and romantic movements were as radical as rock ‘n’ roll were in the 1950s.

Through the years there was always an accepted “way things should be,” as though playing the wrong notes would case a person to fall sick or commit depraved acts. Perhaps, on some level, people do believe that. Such arguments were made against jazz, and how it drove people to sin.

So if you want to argue that we should let people use their interpretation of the Divine to guide our practice of law, medicine, and science in general -- I’m sorry, but I’ve heard that tune before. And I don’t like the sound of it.