Quote:
Originally posted by jimf747
The U.S. was founded by a religious people looking to practice religion without discrimination. The simple fact that the Ten Commandments are written on the ceiling of the Supreme Court should tell you something.
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On the ceiling of the Supreme Court - as part of
the same frieze - are Confucius, Solon, and the Tortoise and the Hare. It is merely a depiction of various lawgivers in history, from various cultures.
When you go to court you swear to God to tell the truth! The oaths of judicial office are made with the right hand on the Bible.
I have been on two juries, and have been a defendant in a civil suit once. I never saw a Bible. This was in the Federal Court, and the Superior Court, in the District of Columbia. Don't trust TV too much -it ain't always like that anymore.
As for oaths of office, that is completely up to the person taking the oath. It is not required to use a Bible, and the oath does not end with "so help me God". That is either a sincere request or a PR move, depending on the person.
The Ten Commandments are considered the first laws handed to civilized men by God. There is more then enough material floating around the net to support any kind research along these lines.
That is true, for Christians, Jews, and Muslims. There were earlier civilizations with divine laws, but Abrahamic religions don't recognize them.
Without religion the actual word morality has no meaning with relation to cause and effect. Without religion the human being has worth expressed in dollars and sense… 68 cents in materials. The ideas of right and wrong need to have certain preconditions to have meaning.
Personally, I find people frightening when they say they wouldn't be moral if God wasn't threatening them with Hell. I'm not religious, and I still wouldn't kill someone - even if I knew I could get away with it.
For instance there were many tribal cultures that sacrificed people for many supernatural ideas… those tribes considered their actions moral and right, do you, if you don’t, then you have to ask why. If you say a human being has value then you must define the substance or units with which this value is expressed… shall we use dollars and cents or the promise immortality and the immortal soul.
I suspect that most of them acted somewhat morally - truly believing that they had to do it. I blame whoever set up the rules more than the people who believed them. They were products of their times. However, I am not a product of those times, and cnanot speak with authority on them.
Human life cannot be given a value. There is no way to measure it. Any attempt to do so is inherently religious in nature, or inherently selfish. In either case, it is an attempt to justify murder by giving a life a lower value than another goal.
Communism and Socialism preached atheism and killed over 100 million people, those people who did the killing went home and hugged their kids and slept well. They slept well because they believed that they were not going to pay any price for their actions. In their eyes the people who they killed had no supernatural value.
Indeed. Evil is not monopolized by religious fanatics. People in subservient positions find it horrifyingly easy to completely shut out empathy for fellow humans, in an Us Vs. Them situation, where "they" are subhuman. People in power find it easy to consider others to be less than human, and expendable. Whether the goals are religious or not is not really relevant. If they were religious people, they would have decided that their enemies were the wrong religion.
There are people in New York that have been charged with Sodomy recently. Be very careful what you put forth. Without Sodomy laws it would not be possible to charge a child molester with Sodomy… if that was the extent of the transgression. How would you like to come home and find you 9-year-old child has been sodomized and you couldn’t do anything about it except maybe charge the person with a minor assault.
This is completely wrong. You are either being deliberately obtuse, being trollish, or are just not that clever. First, anti-sodomy laws have been ruled
unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. It may not have been challenged yet in NY (do you have a cite on the case?), but if challenged, the law will go down. Second, if someone sodomizes a 9-year-old, the crimes are child abuse, sexual assault, and rape, not sodomy. The rapist is off to prison, even without your precious sodomy laws. Come on, this isn't too hard to figure out.
I never made the connection between Sodomy and Bestiality, I only said that they are considered to be un natural acts under the law. It’s the phrase “un-natural act” that would generate the problems in the courtrooms and legal circles, lawyers would have a field day with it, and they have hundreds of years of legal precedent to call on.
Connecting sodomy and bestiality is legally worthless. Laws against sodomy are already dead. Laws against bestiality are in no danger. What's the difference? Animals can't consent. Neither can children, in reference to your last paragraph. So those issues aren't even on the same mountain, let alone the same slippery slope.