Wow, Dave!! Impressive piece of work, I must say.

Odd how Jefferson's wall of separation is conveniently omitted from your list of selected assertions.

I believe that following a good number of the Ten Commandments is vital, not because of their theism but because they are viable MORAL precepts.

I believe that it is possible, as John wrote above, to bring into the framework of law those moral precepts that are necessary to the public good framed as clear and enlightened guidance. But to the degree these make some assertion about their Authority other than natural law, they will be failures, complexified and tangled up with the unseeable, the untestable, the unworkable, the authoritarian, the arbitrary and the dogmatic. These are the characteristics of bad law.

They may or may not also be the characteristics of bad religion, but I am not in a position to judge other men's religions. That is why I do not want them entered in to law.

Christianity has much to recommend it in terms of ethical insights. To complicate the social framework by adding to those the heavy and unmanageable freight of after-death experiences, angels and deities, demons and afterlife destinations is to make ridiculous the noble effort of building a better civilization.

Let those insights become, for examples, laws against adultery, laws that seek to love their neighbors as themselves, laws that discourage covetousness if possible, but for the love of all that is good about the open association of free men, leave religiosity out of the commons. It is as useful as a beached whale at a garden party.

I consider the religious views of the people you cite to be immaterial, but that they want to dick around with the assertion that some form of Christianity was built in to the Constitution -- which prohibits the nation's lawmakers from establishing ANY religion for good and sufficient reason -- is just, to my mind, absurd.

I appreciate your scholarship, and in no way do I mean to trifle with your or anyone else's religious beliefs. But you will concur that even under the umbrella of Christianity there as many versions of doctrine as there are ticks on a blue hound. To even invite these complexities into the social fabric of our legal system is to invite failure and disaster and irremediable divisiveness. Do you know how many men have died just because they thought three-in-one was a better description of divinity than one-in-one, or two-in-one or all-in-one??? You want Congress to take that on, when they can't even stay out of bankruptcy?

Believe me, let anyone believe what they may, to enter those beliefs into our arena of law and social structure is organizational suicide. Theocracy and freedom do not mix.


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