{"id":3457,"date":"2017-11-08T00:04:18","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T21:04:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=3457"},"modified":"2017-11-08T00:04:18","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T21:04:18","slug":"render-unto-caesar-the-spiritual-basis-of-limited-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3457\/render-unto-caesar-the-spiritual-basis-of-limited-government\/","title":{"rendered":"Render Unto Caesar: The Spiritual Basis Of Limited Government"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity<\/a>, at Amazon<\/p>\n

“Christianity and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source.” <\/em>\u2014Jurgen Habermas, “A Time of Transition”<\/p>\n

THE EFFORT TO TEACH OUR CHILDREN <\/strong>hostility to religion, and specifically to Christianity, is especially strange considering that Western civilization was built by Christianity. The problem is not that our young people know too much about Christianity, but that they know too little. In America we do not have the problem of the Muslim madrassas, <\/em>where only the Koran is studied. Rather, we live in a religiously illiterate society in which the Bible is rarely taught. Consequently many people in America and the West cannot name five of the Ten Commandments or recognize Genesis as the first book of the Bible. There’s no point in even asking about the meaning of the Trinity. One in ten Americans apparently believes that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. Ignorance of this kind has made many Westerners aliens in their own civilization, as they no longer know the literature, history, and philosophy that made the West the civilization it is today.<\/p>\n

There is also a second type of person, in a way more dangerous than the first, that I seem to run into more often. This is the person who thinks he knows the foundations of Western civilization but doesn’t. Such people are usually the products of self-education, or cursory reading, or tidbits they have picked up over the years. They have not read Edward Gibbon, but they have somehow absorbed his anti-Christian prejudice. Thus they confidently assert that Greece and Rome represented the high point of ancient civilization. The classical world, they sigh, was then destroyed by Christian barbarians who plunged the world into the Dark Ages. Fortunately, they go on, civilization was saved by the Renaissance, which was a return to classical learning. Then came the Enlightenment, which opened our eyes to the wonders of modern science, the market system of creating wealth, and modern democracy.<\/p>\n

Even the names\u2014”Middle Ages,” “Dark Ages”\u2014guide such a person in his prejudices. Terms like “Renaissance” and “Enlightenment” are uncritically interpreted as literal descriptions of the spirit of the age. We should remember that the people who lived during the Renaissance did not consider themselves Renaissance figures. The term is anineteenth-century one that has been retroactively applied.<\/p>\n

To the two groups I have mentioned\u2014the ignorant and the half educated\u2014we must add a third: those who know the West has Christian roots but want to leave them behind. When the drafters of the European Union’s constitution excluded any mention of Christianity from their account of Europe’s identity, they did so because they wanted to emphasize the degree to which Europe had broken with its Christian past. As George Weigel writes in The Cube and the Cathedral, <\/em>secularism is now one of the banners behind which modern European man wishes to march.
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\nIn this and the next few chapters I intend to dispel some modern prejudices and show that Christianity is the very root and foundation of Western civilization. I will also argue that Christianity is responsible for many of the values and institutions secular people cherish most. Consequently, the desire to repudiate the Christian roots of Western culture is not only an act of historical denial, but it also imperils the secular person’s moral priorities.<\/p>\n

Let us begin by examining how Christianity formed a kind of foundation pillar of Western civilization. Actually, the West was built on two pillars: Athens and Jerusalem. By Athens I mean classical civilization, the civilization of Greece and pre-Christian Rome. By Jerusalem I mean Judaism and Christianity. Of these two, Jerusalem is more important. The Athens we know and love is not Athens as it really was, but rather Athens as seen through the eyes of Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

“It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire <\/em>Edward Gibbon accuses Christianity of replacing classical civilization with religious barbarism. But classical civilization was itself infused with barbarous practices like pederasty and slavery. Moreover, the Christians didn’t destroy Roman civilization. The Huns, Goths, Vandals, and Visigoths did. These barbarians, who came from the pagan regions of northern Europe, smashed a Rome that had long been weak and decadent. Fortunately, they eventually converted to Christianity. Over time it was Christianity that civilized these rude people. Christianity didn’t overrun and lay waste to a learned civilization. Christianity found a continent that had already been laid waste. The “Dark Ages” were the consequence of Roman decadence and barbarian pillage.<\/p>\n

Slowly and surely, Christianity took this backward continent and gave it learning and order, stability and dignity. The monks copied and studied the manuscripts that preserved the learning of late antiquity. Christopher Dawson shows in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture <\/em>how the monasteries became the locus of productivity and learning throughout Europe. Where there was once wasteland they produced hamlets, then towns, and eventually commonwealths and cities. Through the years the savage barbarian warrior became a chivalric Christian knight, and new ideals of civility and manners and romance were formed that shape our society to this day. If Christianity had not been born out of Judaism, Rodney Stark writes, we might still be living in the Dark Ages.<\/p>\n

Christianity is responsible for the way our society is organized and for the way we currently live. So extensive is the Christian contribution to our laws, our economics, our politics, our arts, our calendar, our holidays, and our moral and cultural priorities that historian J. M. Roberts writes in The Triumph of the West, <\/em>“We could none of us today bewhat we are if a handful of Jews nearly two thousand years ago had not believed that they had known a great teacher, seen him crucified, dead, and buried, and then rise again.”<\/p>\n

Consider the case of Western art. Have you been to the Sistine Chapel? Seen Michelangelo’s Pieta? <\/em>Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper? <\/em>Perhaps you are familiar with Rembrandt’s Christ at Emmaus <\/em>or his Simeon in the Temple. <\/em>In Venice you can see the spectacular murals of Veronese, Titian, and Tintoretto. What would Western music be with- out Handel’s Messiah, <\/em>Mozart’s Requiem, <\/em>and the soaring compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach? If you haven’t, set foot in one of the great Gothic cathedrals and see what those anonymous builders did with stone and glass. Is Western literature even conceivable without Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare? My point is not only that all these great artists were Christian. Rather, it is that their great works would not have been produced without Christianity. Would they have produced other great works? We don’t know. What we do know is that their Christianity gives their genius its distinctive expression. Nowhere has human aspiration reached so high or more deeply touched the heart and spirit than in the works of Christian art, architecture, literature, and music.
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\nEven artists who rejected Christianity produced work that was unmistakably shaped by Christian themes. Goethe was a kind of pantheist who viewed God as identical with nature, yet his Faust <\/em>is a profound allegory derived from Christian themes of suffering, transformation, and redemption. Our greatest skeptics and atheists\u2014 such as Voltaire and Nietzsche\u2014are inconceivable without Christianity (Voltaire was educated by Jesuits; Nietzsche’s father was a pastor and the title of his autobiography, Ecce Homo, <\/em>is a reference to what Pilate said of Christ: “behold the man:’)<\/p>\n

Today, however, we read books like Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers <\/em>that celebrate the fact that we live in a mostly secular society. We find Sam Harris insisting that it is quite possible to develop morality independent of the Christian religion or religion in genera1. We read Theodore Schick Jr. in Free Inquiry <\/em>insisting that philosophers as different as John Stuart Mill and John Rawls “have demonstrated that it is possible to have a universal morality without God.”<\/p>\n

There is a profound confusion here. We get a hint of this when we realize that the term “secular” is itself a Christian term. In Catholicism a priest who joins a contemplative community and retreats from the world is considered to have joined a “religious” order, while a priest who lives in a parish among ordinary people is considered a “secular” priest. As we will see, secularism is itself an invention of Christianity. Secular values too are the product of Christianity, even if they have been severed from their original source.<\/p>\n

If all this is true, then our cultural prejudice against acknowledging and teaching the role of Christianity is wrong. Believer and nonbeliever alike should respect Christianity as the movement that created our civilization. We should cherish our Christian inheritance not as an heirloom but as a living presence in our society, and we should worry about what will happen to our civilization if Christianity disappears from the West and establishes itself in non-Western cultures.<\/p>\n

Rather than attempt a catalogue of Christianity’s achievements, I am going to trace its influence in the West by focusing on three central ideas. The first one is explored in this chapter and the next two in subsequent chapters. First I consider the idea of separating or disentangling the spheres of religion and government. Although this notion has become highly confused and distorted in our time, the original concept is a very good one. We think of separation of religion and government as an American idea or an Enlightenment idea,but long before that it was a Christian idea. Christ seems to be the first one who thought of it. As we read in Matthew 22:21, Christ said, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and to God that which is God’s.\u201d<\/p>\n

To see the radicalism of Christ’s idea, I turn to the ancient Roman writer Celsus, who in the second century AD wrote an influential attack on Christianity. Celsus’s work was lost, but the church father Origen published a refutation, Contra Celsum, <\/em>that helps us reconstruct his argument. Celsus basically accused the Christians of being atheists.<\/p>\n

He was serious. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, the gods a man should worship were the gods of the state. Each community had its own deities\u2014it was a polytheistic age\u2014and patriotism demanded that a good Athenian make sacrifices to the Athenian gods and a good Roman pay homage to the gods of Rome. The Christians, Celsus fumed, refused to worship the Roman gods. They did not acknowledge the Roman emperor as a god, even though Caesar had been elevated by the Roman Senate to divine status. Instead the Christians insisted on worshipping an alien god, putting their allegiance to him above their allegiance to the state. What blasphemy! What treason!
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\nI am not suggesting that the ancient Greeks and Romans were especially “religious.” Gibbon reports that philosophers and public officials held very different attitudes toward the gods than did ordinary citizens: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.” Even so, religious identity in the ancient world was indissolubly tied up with your tribe and community. You could not be a good Dinka and not worship the Dinka deities, whether rock or stone or sun. Nor could you be a good Roman and not exalt the Roman deities, whether Apollo, Bacchus, or Jupiter.<\/p>\n

Christianity introduced not only a new religion but a new conception of religion. So successful was this cultural revolution in the West that today the ancient paganism lives only in the names of planets and for those who follow astrology charts. Atheists do not bother to disbelieve in Baal or Zeus and invoke them only to make all religion sound silly. The atheists’ real target is the God of monotheism, usually the Christian God.<\/p>\n

Christianity was not the first monotheistic religion. There are hints of monotheism in the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. The Persians were henotheists: they seemed to have believed in many gods but with one supreme god who was more powerful than the others. The Jews were the first monotheists, embracing the concept of one God who embodies all the virtues and who is the sole deity deserving of human worship and obedience: “thou shall have no other gods before me.” In the Old Testament we can witness the battle raging between Jewish monotheism and the still powerful temptation to polytheism, represented in the episodes of the Israelites who worshipped Baal, Moloch, and the golden calf.<\/p>\n

Christianity adopted Jewish monotheism and gave it both a universal and an individualistic interpretation. There was no individualism in the Judaism of ancient Israel; the Jews worshipped Yahweh as a tribe and as a community. Individual Jews were not given a choice in this matter. When Moses came down from the mountain and saw the Israelites worshipping the golden calf, he did not think they were simply choosing to follow a different faith. “Freedom of religion” was not an issue here. Moses’s approach was a bit more severe: either embrace Yahweh, the monotheistic God of the Jews, or be killed. Some people imprudently chose to stick with calf worship, and Moses ordered them massacred.<\/p>\n

The God of the Old Testament is a universal deity, yet at the same time He seems to be atribal God. He relates mainly to His chosen people, and the enemies of Israel become His enemies. Egyptians and Romans are not expected to follow Him, even though the Jews regarded Him as superior to the Egyptian and Roman deities. No wonder Jewish monotheism was generally unthreatening to Roman paganism. Indeed, the Romans simply integrated the Jews’ god into their pantheon. Judaism was a legal religion in the Roman empire; Christianity was not, at least not until the conversion of the emperor Constantine. The reason for the prohibition and persecution of Christianity was that Christians claimed one God not only for themselves but for the whole world.<\/p>\n

Implicit in Christian monotheism was a critique of pagan polytheism. According to the Christians, the Greek and Roman gods were human inventions. Look at the gods of Homer. Each of them seems to embody a human quality: Aphrodite is the goddess of sexual desire, Ares is the god of conflict, and so on. The gods have the same petty vanities and jealousies as their human counterparts. Their virtues are human virtues writ large. As classical scholar Mary Lefkowitz puts it, “The life of the gods is a highly idealized form of what human life would be if mortals were deathless, ageless, and strong.” Ironically, this criticism of invented deities, which seemed valid when it was launched against ancient polytheism, is today leveled against Christianity. As Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins would have it, the Christians too have invented their God. But the Christian God is not like human beings at all. He is outside space and time. He does not have a body. He is a purely spiritual being. He can be comprehended only dimly by humans, who resort to anthropomorphic images and analogies.
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\nMonotheism was a hugely important idea, but as we can see from how Islam is interpreted today, it is an idea that can be used to justify theocracy. By theocracy I don’t mean rule by priests. I simply mean that God’s law extends to every sphere of society and human life. This was the case with ancient Israel, and this has indeed been the Islamic tradition. The prophet Muhammad was in his own day both a prophet and a Caesar who integrated the domains of church and state. Following his example, the rulers of the various Islamic empires, from the Umayyad to the Ottoman, saw themselves as Allah’s vicegerents on earth, charged with establishing Islamic rule worldwide and bringing all the lands they could under the authority of Islamic holy law. Historian Bernard Lewis writes that “in classical Arabic and in the other classical languages of Islam, there are no pairs of terms corresponding to ‘lay’ and ‘ecclesiastical; ‘spiritual’ and ‘temporal; ‘secular’ and ‘religious: because these pairs of words express a Christian dichotomy that has no equivalent in the world of Islam.” Even today in strict Islamic states like Saudi Arabia we see that Islamic law (or sharia) <\/em>extends beyond religious law to commercial law, civil law, and family law.<\/p>\n

Not so in Christianity. The reason is spelled out in the church father Augustine’s great work The City of God. <\/em>Augustine argued that during our time here on earth, the Christian inhabits two realms, the earthly city and the heavenly city. (Only at the end of time will God integrate these two into a single majestic kingdom ruled by Him.) To each of these realms the Christian citizen has duties, but they are not the same duties. Yes, the Christian gives his ultimate devotion to the heavenly city. But some remarkable conclusions follow from this primary allegiance. It means that the earthly city need not concern itself with the question of man’s final or ultimate destiny. It also implies that the claims of the earthly city are limited, that there is a sanctuary of conscience inside every person that is protected from political control, and that kings and emperors, howevergrand, cannot usurp authority that rightly belongs only to-God.<\/p>\n

Here we see, in its embryo, the idea of limited government. This idea derives from the Christian notion that the ruler’s realm is circumscribed and there are limits beyond which he simply must not go. Those limits were originally set by the church competing with the state and establishing its own realm of authority. Let’s remember that the church was not simply a spiritual institution\u2014holding services and administering sacraments\u2014but was also a temporal power, possessing huge properties and in some cases even commanding armies. For centuries the kings and the church fought over how to draw the legitimate dividing line between the two spheres, but both sides agreed that there was a dividing line. The kings have now been replaced by democratic government, but the Christian idea persists that there are some things even elected governments cannot control.<\/p>\n

Our modern idea of limited government takes the Christian notion of space that is off- limits to state control and extends it to the whole private sphere. This is the crucial distinction we see in the West between the spheres of state and society. “Society” encompasses the whole range of people’s activities, while “state” refers to the specific and delineated sphere of government authority. The state may trespass on territory that has been previously reserved for the private realm, but it cannot take over the private realm altogether. Even an elected government cannot arbitrarily force you to move out of your house or turn over your property to the government. Even a government with 99 percent of the popular support does not have the right to tell the remaining 1 percent of the people that they must all become Republicans, vegetarians, or even Christians. If it does, then legitimate government has become tyrannical government, and the people have the right to oppose and replace it.
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\nIf the domain of government is to be limited in this manner, so is the domain of the church. As Christ put it, “My kingdom is not of this world.” God has chosen to exercise a limited domain over earthly rule, not because He is limited, but because He has turned over part of His kingdom to humans for earthly supervision. This Christian notion would have been utterly unintelligible not only to an ancient Athenian or Roman but also to an ancient Israelite. In the new framework of Christian universalism, the same God rules over the whole universe, but each country retains its own laws and its own culture.<\/p>\n

God’s domain is the domain of the church. Here God’s laws are supreme, although there must necessarily be earthly interpreters to understand and apply them. Even so, there is also a secular realm that operates outside church control. Here we see how the idea of the “sec- ular” is itself a creation of Christianity.<\/p>\n

It is important to recognize that separation of the realms of state and church has operated since the beginning of Christianity. It is not an invention of modernity, although in modern times this separation has been given a new and to some degree perverse form. In the Rome of the Caesars, the rulers were the emperors, and the Christian church was a persecuted minority entirely distinct from the empire. Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire in the late fourth century, the two realms were somewhat integrated. But even so, the church administered the sacraments and the emperor ratified and enforced the laws. Even during the tragic time of the Spanish Inquisition, if you committed heresy you were tried by the church, while if you committed murder you were tried by the state. So church and state have functioned as distinct if overlapping jurisdictions throughout Western history. Thus it is today that we in the West stare in horrified incomprehension when an Islamic government proposes to execute awoman for refusing to wear religiously mandated garb or a man for daring to convert to Christianity.<\/p>\n

But this sort of thing did happen in the West, and unfortunately its perpetrators were Christians. Starting from the time that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire, all the way through the Spanish Inquisition, and even as late as the seventeenth century,<\/p>\n

Christian rulers with the support of the churches used the power of the state to enforce religious orthodoxy. Both Catholics and Protestants were guilty of this. The Puritans who fled England for America were not escaping Catholic persecution but Anglican persecution. Their objective in finding a land of their own was not to allow everyone to have religious freedom but rather to impose their version of orthodoxy on the whole society.<\/p>\n

In some ways the motives of all these Christian autocrats are understandable. Sometimes they were even well meaning. Believing themselves to be in possession of the sole truth, they were driven by their concern for others to go to extreme lengths, even to the extent of using imprisonment and coercion to win the unpersuaded over to their side. In doing this, however, they confused Christianity and Christendom. They were trying to establish the heavenly city here on earth, which is precisely what Augustine warned against, as did Christ before him. Moreover, they were violating the principle established by God in the Garden of Eden. God could have easily compelled Adam and Eve to conform to His command, but He didn’t. Even though He knew they were making a bad decision, He respected their freedom enough to allow them to make it. The freedom to do good implies the freedom to reject the good.
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\nEarly modern thinkers like John Locke were sincere and practical Christians. They invented the concept of religious tolerance not because they wanted to dilute or eliminate the influence of Christianity but because they saw that the wrong kind of Christianity had come to dominate Western society. Men like Locke were rightly disgusted with some of the abuses that had occurred in the name of Christianity. So for this Christian problem\u2014division and conflict\u2014they developed a Christian solution: religious freedom. This idea developed in stages, the first one of which was religious tolerance. The word tolerance <\/em>is derived from the Latin word meaning “to bear.” and to tolerate means “to put up with.\u201d Tolerance contains the seeds of disagreement and even contempt: I tolerate you because although I believe you are wrong, I will endure you and let you persist in your erroneous ways. Locke’s tolerance extended to most Protestant denominations but not to Catholics.<\/p>\n

The American founders extended the concept of tolerance and produced a bold new idea unknown in Europe: freedom of conscience. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) had established the practical rule that the religion of the ruler became the religion of the state. But this was simply a compromise solution aimed at stopping the interminable quarrels among the various Christian sects. In some ways “separation of church and state” also developed in America for the same reason. There were several denominations that wanted to dominate and impose their orthodoxy into law, but none were strong enough to do so everywhere. The Puritans predominated in Massachusetts, but the Anglicans were the majority in Virginia, and there was a substantial Catholic stronghold in Maryland. Ultimately the various groups agreed to leave the central government out of religion. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was passed largely with Christian support.As John Courtney Murray once said, it was not an article of faith, but an article of peace.<\/p>\n

The genius of the American founders was to go beyond tolerance to insist that the central government stay completely out of the business of theology. Despite its novelty, this idea was a profoundly Christian one. The majority of the founders were devout Christians, although some of them, like Thomas Jefferson, were Deists. But whether they knew it or not, they were following Christ’s rule to keep the domains of Caesar and God separate. The founders in no way denied the Christian foundations of the American experiment. Even Jefferson, perhaps the least religious of them, argued that religious faith was the very foundation for liberty itself: “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?” After the Revolutionary War, the founders continued to hold public days of prayer, to appoint chaplains for Congress and the armed forces, and to promote religious values through the schools in the Northwest Territory.
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\nNor did they seek to insulate the central government from the province of morality. No “wall of separation” was intended here. On the contrary, the founders believed that morality was indispensable for their new form of government to succeed. Most of them shared George Washington’s view as expressed in his farewell address: “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion:’ John Adams went even further: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” At the same time, the founders recognized that theological differences were the province of revelation and thus not a fit subject for democratic debate. They sought to exclude differences in theology precisely so that there could be reasoned disagreements over issues of morality, and so that the laws could reflect the prevailing moral sentiment of the people.<\/p>\n

Visiting America in the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “the sects that exist in the United States are innumerable,” and yet “all sects preach the same moral law in the name of God.” Tocqueville termed religion the first of America’s political institutions, which means that it had a profoundly public effect in regulating morality and mores throughout the society. And he saw Christianity as countering the powerful human instincts of selfishness and ambition by holding out an ideal of charity and devotion to the welfare of others.<\/p>\n

Today courts wrongly interpret separation of church and state to mean that religion has no place in the public arena, or that morality derived from religion should not be permitted to shape our laws. Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression. Secularists want to empty the public square of religion and religious-based morality so they can monopolize the shared space of society with their own views. In the process they have made religious believers into second-class citizens. This is a profound distortion of a noble idea that is also a Christian idea. The separation of the realms should not be a weapon against Christianity; rather, it is a device supplied by Christianity to promote social peace, religious freedom, and a moral community. If we recovered the concept in its true sense, our society would be much better off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon “Christianity and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source.” \u2014Jurgen Habermas, “A Time of Transition” THE […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6707],"tags":[7332,1225,7333,7334,7284,5719,7335,7336,7337,7338,7339,7340,7341,482,7342],"class_list":["post-3457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-ancient-civilization","tag-barbarians","tag-book-of-the-bible","tag-classical-world","tag-dinesh-d-souza","tag-edward-gibbon","tag-illiterate-society","tag-joan-of-arc","tag-jurgen-habermas","tag-literature-history","tag-madrassas","tag-rights-and-democracy","tag-self-education","tag-western-civilization","tag-westerners"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}