To: Hemingway's Ghost
as long as it wasn't a Catholic one. Or in New England, an Anglican one. Or in Virginia, a Puritan one. The "simple fact of the matter" is that you can't overlook that when you make your grand, sweeping generalization about this subject.
This is an extraordinarily trivial concern, frankly. A catholic influence works just fine. Society views things in such a way that the specific theology of right and wrong don't matter as much as what the church in general says.
Which Christian religious influence was, or is, the correct one? Do the Mormons have it right? The Presbyterians? The Unitarians? The Methodists? The Baptists? The Seventh-Day Adventists? The Congregationalists?
Government does not concern itself with which churches are the influencer in a community, sense that's not an 'official' government position anyway. Of all those you mentioned, most of them when confronted with a moral question about something being right or wrong would give pretty much the same answer. So, in short, it really doesn't matter which one. The government makes no determination about that anyway. That whole 1st Amendment thing.
In sum, while a certain morality should be the underpinning of criminal law, morality in and of itself should not dictate criminal law.
Have you not been reading my posts???? I never said that. I said that the church's teachings on morality should be the influencer, the moral conscience of the nation. I didn't say they should write our laws. Actually read the posts please....
312 posted on
05/10/2007 12:16:29 PM PDT by
JamesP81
(Isaiah 10:1 - "Woe to those who enact evil statutes")
To: JamesP81
This is an extraordinarily trivial concern, frankly. A catholic influence works just fine. Society views things in such a way that the specific theology of right and wrong don't matter as much as what the church in general says.
You might think the concern trivial today, but it certainly wasn't trivial when this nation was founded. You can't quote the Founders as you've done here---John Adams in particular---as the final word on the subject without recognizing the historical context in which their words were written or spoken. There wasn't a "capital C" Christian church in Adams' day, and there's not one today.
Have you not been reading my posts???? I never said that. I said that the church's teachings on morality should be the influencer, the moral conscience of the nation. I didn't say they should write our laws. Actually read the posts please....
By "write," do you mean "dictate"? "Ordain?" Where, exactly, is the line drawn between "influencing" the laws and "writing" them, as you say? In any event, if you prefer, we can return to the subject of the thread: should prostitution today remain illegal? If it should, why?
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