Buddhism is a very peaceful religioun, I doubt it would be spread by violence
The mountainous terrain made city-states become independent from one another.Basically meaning that different city-states did not have any interactions with each other. If so, very little.
What / or who are they: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey
Why middle: These were the 4 of the 13 original colonies that were between the northern and southern colonies.
Religion: this is the sentence you really like to write. There were all sorts of religions present, but not one of them could dominate. These 4 colonies had Lutherans, Mennonites, Calvinists (mostly Dutch), and Presbyterians.
Commerce: mostly agriculture at the time, but not restricted to 1 crop as the south was. Had good ports and growing cities (New York, Philadelphia). I like to include the well respected intellectual hotbed of people there like Ben Franklin.
Tim Keller on Dr. King’s rejection of relativism:
When Martin Luther King Jr. confronted racism in the white church in the South, he did not call on Southern churches to become more secular. Read his sermons and “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” and see how he argued. He invoked God’s moral law and the Scripture. He called white Christians to be more true to their own beliefs and to realize what the Bible really teaches. He did not say, “Truth is relative and everyone is free to determine what is right or wrong for them.” If everything is relative, there would have been no incentive for white people in the south to give up their power. Rather, Dr. King invoked the prophet Amos, who said, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” The greatest champion of justice in our era knew the antidote to racism was not less Christianity, but a deeper and truer Christianity.
(Reason for God, pp.64-65)
In Ancient Greece, city states were independent and often in competition with one another so they had different gods and goddesses as their representatives.
Explanation:
The gods and goddesses of the Ancient Greeks had human qualities and vices.
So, when the city states came into their own as power states in Greece, while retaining their religion common among each other, they adopted their own city gods that represented what their city stood for the better way.
Thebes' god was the god of wine and theater, showing the status of the city as the cultural capital for a long time. Similarly, Sparta was the city of the God of war, and they were a military society.
