I said:
Our laws (were) based on Judeo-Christian principles.
You just "reasoned" that our laws resonate with biblical teaching...so do you concede already. LOL. Probably not huh? No, you wish to frame the debate and define the terms. I am simply going to try and answer qam1 questions....with scripture. The same scripture that was read by our founders.
False logic.
Uh, maybe, but apparently not with the same conclusions as you. Oh, but don't take my word for it:
"I have examined all the known superstitions of the word, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short
"The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words." --Thomas Jefferson
"The New Testament, they tell us, is founded upon the prophecies of the Old; if so, it must follow the fate of its foundation." --Thomas Paine
"I am for liberty of conscience in its noblest, broadest, and highest sense. But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the pope and his followers, the papists, so long as they tell me, through all their councils, theologians, and canon laws that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle my children, and cut my throat when they find their opportunity." --Abraham Lincoln
"Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity." --Thomas Paine, Age of Reason
"I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. The scriptures assure me that at the last day we shall not be examined on what we thought but what we did." --Benjamin Franklin, letter to his father, 1738
"I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Richard Price, 1789
"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize [sic], every expanded prospect." --James Madison, in a letter to William Bradford, April 1,1774
"...It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses..." --John Adams, "A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" [1787-1788]
My how they do so properly and clearly express themselves, don't they? Hardly any "filtering" or interpretation is needed to understand their writings. Unless, of course, one is a moron and requires Pat or Jerry or Hal or one of the others to "interpret" those writings to get the "real" or "correct" meanings out of them.
Sorry, but I fall on the right hand side of the IQ Bell curve distribution and don't need no steenkeen interpretation.