>>2749520>Martin Luther probably didn't think that by denouncing the Catholic Church for selling indulgences that he'd be inviting an endless horde of prosperity gospel scammers to sell fake bibles with Trump's face on them. Or maybe he did, idunno.There's a kind of irony in Martin Luther's life where after he formalized a schism with the Catholic Church, after he declared that Scripture Alone should be the basis of Christian faith, you have all of these different Protestant Sects spring up precisely because of the interpretations they developed reading Scripture, and Luther's response was broadly "No, wait, you're wrong!" He naively thought, to some degree, that if everyone just read the Bible they'd come to the same conclusions as Martin Luther.
While Luther broke what was at the time the ultimate taboo of denying the Catholic Church's spiritual authority, he himself was horrified by groups that came after like the Anabaptists. Denying the authority of the Papacy was one thing, but he still felt an affinity for infant Baptism deep in his soul, and even if the Baptists justified themselves with his own arguments, he couldn't accept their conclusions.
It's like how when the French Revolution started, you actually had crowds in Paris greet King Louis as "The King of a Free People", even though they were directly rebelling against his authority. After that first step, the door was opened to cutting aristocrats heads off.
>>2749529So from what I've been told of the traditional story, when the Prophet Muhammad was dying he was asked who should inherit the mantle of leadership of the community. According to Shia traditions he declared his son-in-law Ali to be his heir but the Ummah (Muslim Community) waited until after he died and held a vote on who their leader should be, settling on the Caliph Abu-Bakr, who was Muhammad's father-in-law and closest friend.
Again, speaking as a Catholic, it reminds me of how the Catholic Church holds that whoever is given the Bishopric of Rome is the heir of St. Peter and given authority over the wider Church, whereas the Protestants hold that Peter's authority is not inherited and, in some traditions, was never even located in Rome in the First Place! (There are Protestants that believe Catholicism is just a mask worn by Egyptian/Hellenic Paganism)
Tying this all together, I think the retards in the Trump admin took the title "Supreme Leader" too literally for Khomeini and thought it was something like the Fuhrer or whatever. Its the trope of "If you kill Hitler, you defeat Nazi Germany". Its akin to murdering Iran's Pope as I see it. Its a faith based on the traditions of martyrdom and you just martyred one of its biggest proponents. You're igniting that faith, not smothering it.