If any of the original Articles has specific mention of slavery or if it had other objectionable statements, like stoning gays to death, why not simply edit the original article? I don’t think that fixing it by simply adding an Amendment should be enough.
Imagine if it was like this:
Why have one article contradict the other? Edit the original article to make the Constitution self-consistent.
However, that was not how it was done. And doing in another way does not change reality, merely convenience.
The issue here is that many if not most people are quite ignorant of how Judaism “works” as a religion, leading many to quite erroniously conflate ancient and modern day Judaism - when they are very, very different.
Part of the blame lies historically on the advent of Christianity, which is interested in ancient Judaism (as a precursor for itself) but not “modern” Judaism. So many Christians have an intimate familiarity with the OT but have never even heard of the Talmud, and assume (quite erroniously) that they understand Judaism.
So how does this work?
You show your kids a book with 100 rules on how to behave (towards other humans and towards God), and tell them “Out of these 100 rules, only 15 of them are still accepted today. The other ones, we disagree with them, because they are barbaric by our standards, and they are not even God’s word, they were written by humans who make mistakes”
Won’t your kid say “Why are you teaching them to me then? Why do I have to learn about these outdated rules of behavior? Just teach me the ones that we all agree are good to follow”.
Unless you want to present the whole thing as a history lesson. But even in that case, I would have separate books for teaching history and for teaching rules on how to behave.
What’s the “reality”? The Constitution isn’t a history lesson. It doesn’t have to document its own history. It’s a statement about what people agree are the basic principles upon which a country should be run. As such, it should be self-consistent at any given point in time, even if it changes over time.
There is no process to change or remove anything in the Constitution, we can only add amendments, and because of that the rule is basically 'whatever comes later overrules stuff that came earlier. The 18th amendment is still on the books, but is entirely nullified by the 21st amendment. Sure, we could pass an amendment to allow editing the Constitution, but since we already have precedent governing how we should interpret contradictory text, there really isn’t any need.
Except that not all of them are the sort who want to go that far. And of the rest, they give into the temptation of using guns or bombs to kill “sinners”, or indulge in more satisfying methods of assault and murder, like bare hands or knives.
And the cops quite often do abuse people for religious reasons. Homosexuals, for example.
I wasn’t aware homosexuality was a religion.
Don’t be dense ( or dishonest ); I didn’t say it was. It is hated for religious reasons, however.
And quite often for non-religious reasons.
That’s my point, though. Even though the bible says you’re supposed to stone adulterers, the vast majority of American Christians and Jews don’t “want to go that far”…they don’t think they should do it.
And even the Jews and Christians who are against homosexuality (and, again, a lot aren’t), don’t tend to think that gays should be put to death. They have a different set of values than the writers of the bible.
It doesn’t have to, but it does. Our agreed upon process for changing the Constitution is to either amend the constitution, or hold a constitutional convention and rewrite the whole thing. We’ve had 27 amendments to the constitution since it was adopted, and amendments don’t erase the old text, they just say “Remember that bit about slavery in article X paragraph Y? Yeah, turns out slavery’s bad, mmkay?”.
Now, we could do things your way by holding a constitutional convention and writing a brand new cool Constitution without all the post-it notes attached, except we just haven’t happened to have done that yet, and there’s no real movement to do so, mostly because even people who would be for the idea in theory would be terrified at what the knuckleheads at this hypothetical convention would actually come up with.
No question it’s hatred for religious reasons. It’s just the religious reasons are related to modern Christianity/Judaism.
But people don’t hate gays today because some guy 3000 years ago wrote that it is an abomination for a man to lie with a man. They hate gays because some guy yesterday at church told them to hate gays. Modern homophobia doesn’t exist because of one random homophobe 3000 years ago. There is plenty of homophobia in pre-Christian Rome, in modern day Hindu India, in modern day Confucianist/Taoist/Buddhist/Maoist/Whatever China.
Man is not made in God’s image, instead, God is made in man’s image. Human beings imagine that God tells them to do what they’ve already decided they want to do. There are many millions of non-homophobic Christians and Jews in America. If Christianity turns people into homophes, how did this happen? A homophobic group invents a homophobic God to justify their homophobia. A non-homophobic group invents a non-homophobic God to justify their non-homophobia. A homophobic Christian points to the Bible to justify hating gays. A non-homophobic Christian points to different parts of the same Bible to justify loving gays. And that homophobic Christian will point to Deuteronomy to justify hating gays and then go home to eat pork and shellfish, put on cotton-nylon blend underwear, shave, and yoke a horse and an ox together to plow his field.
Heh, if people’s homophobia was actually created by the literal word of Leviticus, note that lesbianism is a-okay in Leviticus.
How many modern day homophobes do you think go around saying, “I sure hate them gays, just like the OT says - but you dikes are cool, the OT has noting against you”. 
The reality is that those who already hate gays for other reasons like to cherry-pick the OT to find support for their position; you can support almost anything that way, including that homosexuality is just fine (remember David and Jonathan?)
The OT isn’t neat like that. It is a jumble of myths (Genesis), snippets of history and mythologized history (Kings), rituals (Leviticus), ramblings of various prophets, musings of pessimistic philosophers (the Book of Job, Ecclesiasties) and last but certainly not least erotic love poetry (The Song of Solomon).
In various places in that mass are commandments, ranging from the profound to the odd; many are based on non-existent Priestly ritual.
Any attempt to find some sort of simple-minded and straightforward “rules of behaviour” without any knowledge of historical context out of that is doomed to dissapointment from the start. It is the raw stuff of history and culture.
Curry even breezed through Comments on Cecil’s Columns a few years back. But he was just spamming for his website and didn’t actually bother to interact with anyone.
FINALLY a post in this thread I not only understand, but with which I agree
And that guy hates gays because the Bible says so. Really, this is just another attempt to deny that religion can possibly be at fault, for anything.
Wrong; people are made, or re-made, in the image of the religion that has infected them, to the extent that they are religious. It is part of the nature and purpose of religion that is destroys people’s humanity, their personality, and replaces them with itself, making them into vehicles for it’s spread. The more religious they are, the more they are reduced to empty puppets.
The weakening of Christianity’s and Judaism’s power over people’s minds; the rise of secularism.
Really, this is just another attempt to prove that religion is at fault for everything bad.
No, it’s not. I never said that, although I’m not surprised that the defenders of religion are willing to lie about what I say. If they respected truth, or facts, they wouldn’t be religious.