Are the Ten Commandments Really the Basis for Our Laws?
Here’s an excellent essay by Phil Plait on a timely subject, as the Christian right pushes harder than ever before on many fronts to erase the line of separation between church and state: Are the Ten Commandments really the basis for our laws?
As we ramp up to the mid-term elections in November 2010 — sure to be just a warmup to the insanity that will be the Presidential election in 2012 — you can bet your bottom shekel that we’ll be hearing from a lot of “family values” politicians decrying our lack of morality. That’s de rigeur for any election, but every cycle it seems to get worse.
A lot of these claim that the United States is either a Christian nation — a ridiculous and easily-disprovable notion — or that it was founded on Judeo-Christian principles (the “Judeo” part is a giveaway that these politicians are Leviticans: they seem to keep their noses buried more in the fiery wrath of the Old Testament than in the actually gentle, politically-correct teachings of Jesus… more on this later, promise). Specifically, they claim quite often that our laws are based on the Ten Commandments.
I was thinking about this recently. People seem to accept that our laws are based on the morals of the Old Testament laid out in the Commandments, but as a proper skeptic, I decided to take a look myself. Why not go over the Commandments, said I to myself, and compare them to our actual laws, as well as the Constitution, the legal document framed by the Founding Fathers, and upon which our laws are actually based?
So I did.