I think that a prerequisite for putting up the Ten Commandments in any publicly-funded forum should be that they also have to put up the following verses (and Moses is in there, so it should make everyone happy!): 14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army-the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds-who returned from the battle. 15 "Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them. 16 "They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the LORD's people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. (Numbers 31:14-18) Just to give the idea of what Judeo-Christianity has been about from the beginning - say one thing and do another. Like - Thou shalt not kill but um.. yeah, go ahead and kill all the men and women except for the virgins you're going to rape. Or the multitude of Jesus' sayings about charity and poverty - but the really important thing is to stop the homos from getting married.
Hi zyncod, Why anybody thinks it's the government's business to post mandates to worship a certain jealous God is beyond me. I am a huge fan of the decalogue but one's choice of who and how to worship is a personal rather than a governmental decision. Those who say that the Constitution is based on the 10 Commandments don't have a clue. The Constitution gives us the right to worship the "wrong" god(s), commit idolatry, commit blasphemy, and violate the Sabbath. The Ten Commandments are all about prohibiting such activities and the OT mandates death for things such as worshiping the "wrong" god(s), blasphemy, and idolatry.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a thread about the death sentence which was commuted this week (ref: the London Daily Telegraph Tuesday) because in order to reach their verdict of death, the jury in a case (oh, and never was there a more unconstitutional thing than for sentence to be determined by jury), consulted a Bible. Apparently with particular reference to "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". It might have interested the jurors to know that the two oldest religious strands which use the Bible, ie Judaism and the Catholic Church, are both quite emphatic about the wrongness and inapplicability of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". But this all goes back to my basic problem with American Fundamentalist Christianity (which has a pernicious effect on nearly all aspects of life there) - that it has no theology, no understanding of two thousand years of religious history. http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/9829
I e-mailed these verses to my Mother, and this was her response: She knows much more about Christianity than I, so there you go. And for the atheists in the crowd: "dont'chu talk 'bout my momma!"
