THE SWINE!
My County Commission here in Rutherford conuty, Tennessee has just voted to hang the 10 Commandments in our courthouse, in diredt violation of the Constitutional separtation of Church & State!
See here– http://host1.bondware.com/~dnj/news.ez?viewStory=1998
The people backing this won’t be satified until they outlaw every other faith besides Southern Baptist in our community! :mad: :mad: :mad:
It will cost our small community tens of thousands of dollars to defend this, money we desparately need for education. And the courts will strike it down on Constitutional grounds anyway!
The Commissioners are only going along with it to pander to the Baptists!!
FUNDY SWINE!!!
Every time I think this joint has gotten two steps beyond the Scopes trial something like this shit happens! :mad: :mad: :mad:
Yeah, heard about that today. Just dumb dumb dumb. Wait, someone will use the usual arguments pretty soon: “Well, what could it hurt.” “That not religion, those are laws for life.” “The community is almost all Christian, so who cares?” “Fuck off, heathen.”
Sigh. Sometimes I really hate living in the south.
Odd though, how all of the people who managed to comment online are against the action (except for one apparent abstention). I guess the hillbillies in the county don’t have Internet access.
And what up with that newspaper, anyway? I have a feeling the publisher/editor thinks the whole thing is just peachy keen. “What all of the fuss is about,” indeed.
perhaps it’s just an “artifact” of sorts, like a piece of art. Surely they’re not going to actually follow the commandments, since most governments don’t.
I really don’t think it’s TOO big of a deal, the hanging up of the commandments, that is. Now, establishing an official state religion is another matter. The founding fathers would not have appreciated that, and neither do I.
Why exactly would you object to an official state religion–government sponsorship of particular religious beliefs–but not to hanging up the commandments–i.e., government sponsorship of particular religious beliefs?
Yeah, the Daily News-Journal in Murfreesboro isn’t gonna be the ones to champion the effort to remove the 10 commandments. The Tennessean here in Nashville acted basically the same way.
Even better was the coverage of the sales tax debate recently, when a legislator introduced a 10% rate, stating that it was a “tithe”. The paper dutifully explained what a tithe was, never asking why we should tithe to the state government. I’m not really looking for a tax debate, it was just some weird phrasing.
You could always come join me in Ky, where not only do we have that but a lovely group of schoolteachers determined to ban library books that might corrupt the innocent young’uns, presumably by making them think or something.
Not that any of the teachers have actually read the books. I guess they have that dangerous look. :rolleyes:
What really got me was this quote from one of the commissioners:
They expect lawsuits, but they do it anyways? So they’re going to go through all that, put up the Ten Commandments, spend $25-$50,000 arguing that it doesn’t violate the establishment of a state religion, and possibly lose the lawsuit and have to take the Ten Commandments down?
Message to people proposing this display: there’s much more cost-effective and effective ways of spreading your religious beliefs than hanging the Ten Commandments in the courthouse!
"Rev. James Avaritt: ’ I, for the life of me cannot understand why folks are opposed to having a code of values.’ "
No one arguing against the posting argued against having a code of values, and he knows it. Which would be breaking commandment #9. (I guess if it had been posted he would have known better.)
** “Mike Hoffman told commisioners that people shouldn’t be offended by seeing the ten commandments in the courthouse- unless they have broken them.”**
So if you break #1 by not having Yahweh as your Lord God above all others, you should be offended.
Why, yes. That’s the point. Glad we got that cleared up.
Who are these people?
What are they trying to do, destroy the economy? “Coveting” things drives purchases, keeps the money moving and keeps our economy strong, and now they’re telling us we can’t do it? The nation will crumble!
If they want to put “rules for life” up, why not the Draconian Code? I bet that would have a greater effect on criminal behavior than “keep the sabbath holy”.
I happen to be a Christian myself, but even I don’t believe in public displays like this. If it’s hung as an “artifact,” lets hang some relevant passages from the Torah or the Book of Mormon, too. Religion is private, government is not.
Gotta agree with Lizard here. If any organization like a school board, county commission, et al, decides to post the Ten Commandments in public, they should be REQUIRED to post similar documents from all religions.
Lord knows (pun intended) we need some more moral strength in this country, but morals, by definition, are something decided on a personal level. The over-all moral attitude of a country is an agglomeration of millions of individual moral attitudes, NOT a single, government-decreed attitude.
For the record, I am a non-practicing Christian of indeterminate faith.
That’s odd, because as the author of the proposal pointed out (in today’s L.A.Times(this link is only good for a few days), the phrase became the national motto in the 1950’s (and if I am correct, the motivation for the adoption of the motto was not exactly a tribute to the stated ideals of our nation).
