To: Stark_GOP
Doesn't mention the Ten Commandments. Nor God. The argument IS old--God is not in the Constitution.
The Ten Commandments laid out the basic tenets of religious morality. That is a historical fact. However, there has been codified law since Hammurabi, and the Babylonians were polytheists. His laws were not based on religious belief but rather common social sense--stealing is bad for society, murder is bad for society.
I think, perhaps, you are arming yourself for a "God doesn't have any place in society" argument, whereas the opposite is true. I recognize the destruction that befalls mankind when he thinks he has the inside track without God. The point I am making is that the Constitution is based on near-universally accepted ideas of morality, which, through the millenia, have become influenced by religion. Doesn't make it a religious document, nor even a recognition thereof. As the Declaration stated, "We hold these truths to be self-evident," thus, obvious, needing no further explanation or statement. The Constitution details the make-up of the government (the "constitution" thereof), and lists very few actual "laws' ("stealing will be punished by..." or "murder is defined as..."). It was inspired by the writings of Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and other Enlightenment thinkers. The Framers didn't have a blank parchment on one side of the table and a copy of the Ten Commandments on the other, since the Constitution hardly deals with issues of morality or behavior at all. It says there will be three branches, with a bicameral legislature making the laws, an executive branch enforcing them, and a judicial branch resolving disputes, and all the minutiae thereafter.
Re-read it. The only reference to the Creator is in the closing, "Done in convention by the unanimous consent of the states present the seventeenth day of September in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven and of the independence of the United States of America the twelfth." i.e. A.D. 1787
64 posted on
01/26/2007 10:28:37 AM PST by
jcb1379
To: jcb1379
How about YOU read the things that inspired and gave direction to the people who wrote the Constitution.
I have read the Constitution many times. Thank you very much.
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