kanzeon

What they didn't say is simply that the whole thing was a scam by Coral Ridge Ministries to raise money!


<a href="http://news.findlaw.com/nytimes/docs/religion/glsrthmre111802opn.pdf" target="_blank">The court said as much in its decision (page 34-36 at the bottom.)</a>

[ November 19, 2002: Message edited by: kanzeon ]</p>

hezekiah jones

No shit. Me too.

Much of the decalogue is a bunch of archaic religious junk. None of our statutes that do parallel some of the its proscriptions say anything like, "Thou shalt not do this," or "Thou shalt not do that." In fact our statutes are essentially a list of definitions that assume thou shalt do all sorts of rotten things.

Then there are a whole bunch of lesser degrees of, say, "Thou shalt not kill," involving recklessness and negligence and so forth, which leads me to believe that Yahweh wasn't contemplating the required criminal confluence of mens rea and actus reus at the time. Furthermore, the statutes contain a whole list of recognized defenses to several of those "thou shalt nots." I don't see any "unless" or "provided that" or "conditioned upon" anywhere in the Decalogue.

What's funny is that adultery, until fairly recently, was a complete defense to murder. So the alleged basis of Western law should run more along the following lines:

"Thou shalt not kill."
"I killed my wife and her lover."
"Um, I said, thou shalt not kill."
"But I caught them in flagrante delicto."
"Oh well then. In that case, thou shalt kill."
"Thank you, Yahweh."

Krieger

Those stupid right wing political shows on cable TV are all just pathetic. I don't know why reasonable people like Rev. Lynn would want to be seen on them.

Stephen Maturin

Amen to that! Ask for an argument and what you usually get is a tidal wave of quote mining that, at its very best, shows that some of the founding fathers said nice things about the Bible every now and again.

But hey, I'm open to dicussion. If one of these theocrats can manage to put together a convincing argument showing just how the Ten Commandments act as the basis for, oh, let's say ERISA or the Locomotive Boiler Inspection Act, I'll gladly don sackcloth and spend the rest of my days placing decalogues on every parcel of public land in the country.