Feather

<homervoice>
Damned Roman numerals!
</homervoice>

lpetrich

I agree on how unhistorical many fundies' beliefs are.

Consider also that the Bible nowhere talks about trial by jury, something considered sacred in the Anglo-American world.

And consider that the Senate is not called the Sanhedrin. The original Senate was a council of aristocrats in ancient Rome -- whose citizens had never heard of anything in the Bible until their conquests reached the eastern Mediterranean.

And ancient Rome had had a long tradition of legal scholarship; its first laws were the Twelve Tables from about 450 BCE. Many of them are fairly reasonable, like the rules of procedure for a trial and the disposition of property; there are some rather interesting ones, like if one does not maintain a road, one has no right to object to travelers using other parts of one's property.

But there are some very sexist ones, like the presumption that a married woman is the property of her husband. But there is a curious provision that if a woman lives away from her husband for three days of a row each year, she does not become his property.

And there is also the provision that a seriously deformed baby is to be killed.

Though the originals of the Twelve Tables are now lost, they were cited by many later writers -- some of whom idolized them.

lpetrich

Here is some more stuff on Roman law. An important work in this field was the Institutes of Gaius, written around 150 CE; much of Justinian's law code, the Corpus Iuris Civilis of the 530's, was derived from it.

Here is a translation of Gaius's work: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. The pages contain the translator's footnotes mixed in with the text; be careful. The overall style is mention of numerous laws and discussions of what they mean.

These pages are referred to from this title page, which also points to translations of several other Roman legal works.

beejay

Atlanta Journal-Constitution article

Well, that sure is bad news.

At least it's not the 10C, just the Roman numerals (that God must have put there, knowing the importance Rome would have a thousand years later.)

nogods4me

Uhh, nominate them to the Supreme Court?:banghead:

paul30

Remember, a Judge is just a lawyer who knows the governor.

Doesn't mean they are either smart or educated.

Radcliffe Emerson

I read a comment on another board on this topic:

"These idiots need to put down their bibles and actually read some US history books for a change."

I think that sums it up pretty nicely.

gsx1138

Bill O'Reilly debated (yelled) at some guy and actually asked the question, "Exactly what religion are the ten commandments promoting?" This is the kind of thinking that permeates fundy "logic". They totally don't understand why noone would want the ten commandments posted in public view anywhere.

Shake

Or as I read somewhere else (not to be confused with ~~Elsewhere~~ ... actually I think it was in PD), that instead of being Judeo-Xian based, since most of our ideas of government came from the Greeks and Romans that we are more of a Greco-Roman nation!

Radcliffe Emerson

You are correct!!!!!