HRG

Nitpick: the Institutes of Gaius would be called today a "hornbook" - a simplified summary of the law, and Gaius himself was not regarded as a great legal scholar. The much larger part of the Corpus (the Digests) consist of quoted passages from the work of the great Roman lawyers like Papinian, Ulpian etc.

BTW, us European atheists are luckier. No one with any scintilla of legal knowledge would claim that the 10 commandments (and not Roman law) are the source of our current legal systems!

Regards,
HRG.

Kevbo

Ask the people putting up the 10 Commandments everywhere to include some other important historical documents, like the 5 Pillars of Islam, the legal writings of Confucious, the religious laws of the Hindu Vedas, and the hundreds of other religious law documents whose relationship to the American legal system is tangential at best ("Hey, every one of these says that murder is bad!").

Then, once this circus is assembled on the lawn or wall of a courthouse, people will wonder why they wanted such a religious display in the first place.

godfry n. glad

Whichever is applicable and easiest: Impeach or recall.

I'd suggest you start with the five Supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of Bush in Bush vs. Gore. They are not only willfully ignorant of history, they're willfully ignorant of their own constitutional and judicial principles.

godfry

godfry n. glad

Plus, if memory serves, there are three different sets of "The Ten Commandments" in the Old Testament (aka Hebrew Bible). Which one do we pick? The one that ends with the "Thou shalt not cook a calf in it's mother's milk"? That way, we could effectively make a case that cheeseburgers (not to mention Swiss steak, biscuits and gravy, and Stroganoff) are not only an abomination in the eyes of the Lard, but they'd then be a gross violation of the underpinnings of American legal tradition...ha!

godfry

Defiant Heretic

There's an article in the library that compares the Ten Commandments of Moses and those of Solon, and asks which set is more applicable to our modern society.
The Real Ten Commandments, by Richard Carrier

scigirl

Here's a question for the fundies--

If the Bill of Rights came from the 10C, than why do they hate the ACLU so much, whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights?

scigirl

Shake

Here's another interesting article similar to the one Defiant Heretic posted above:

Commandments 5-11

Jacobus Altus

Melkor:

I really enjoyed your spirited discussion about the 10C basis for US law.

Please also consider the 13th ammendment to the US Constitution, which abolished slavery. I'm at a loss to see it in the 10C, and I have read that Jefferson Davis defended the 'peculiar institution' by citing the Christian Bible's lack of opprobrium for slavery.

I wonder about how the Western world would have progressed if Yahweh, or El, or Whoever, would have included an 11th commandment to Moses in the 10C: "Thou shalt not own another human being."

Best, Jacobus Altus

unregistered_user_1

Where was that, exactly? I can't find it.

unregistered_user_1

Never mind, I think I may have found it...