Done and forwarded... thanks Dan!!!

Hog

Likewise!

Charlie

the story is that moses had three tablets and dropped one. imagine 5 comandments missing.

personally i don't approve of religious messages in public places. if you can't remember them, how will you follow them.

is that the real story or the story according to Mel Brooks?

lofty1

i've always wondered what the other five were.

i know hanging the tablets on wall as a sign of the religion violates the 2nd commandment.

dapperdan

how dare you hang a symbol of your religious beliefs on a publicly paid for building. these buildings do not belong to you and your fellow believers.

it's no more then grafiti to people of other religions.

explain your selfish thinking.

rick,
do you not believe that this country was founded by christians and based the laws on christian beliefs?

Rick. If the one true God is selfish, so be it! In fact # 3 You shall have no other gods before Me. What god do you serve? Out of town for a few days we will talk when I get back.
Dan

Actually its the first one I hit the wrong key.

Some scholars count 29 original commandments, not ten. A few commandments left out off the two ton monument they kicked out of the Alabama Supreme Court building are:

(Exodus 21:7) "A father may sell his daughter into slavery."

Exudos 21:17) "Whoever curses his father or his mother will be put to death."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/08/26/MN274126.DTL 

I wouldn't call those people scholars. There are 10 commandments according to the NIV Bible. There are laws listed in Exodus that describe the laws to be created at that time for those people. Those are not described as commandments -- at least, not in the NIV.

I just read the King James version, as well. It also seems pretty clear what the commandments are compared to the laws to be set for the followers of Moses. The number of commandments could be up for interpretation, however. What the article describes as commandments seem to be clearly laws for those people and not commandments. They are actually described as "ordinances" while previous rules are described as commandments.


You be the judge. Read the book.

I wouldn't call the fellow they booted off the Alabama supreme court a scholar. Talmudic scholar Baruch Spinoza was quite knowledgable on the subject though. His assessments as stated in his Theologico-Political Treatise pretty much echo those of the article. Too many versions and lack of knowledge of extinct ancient Hebrew make forensic certainty untenable. I would tend to give more credulity to participants like Spinoza or exegetical historians and Indo-European linguistic experts, and even the Catholic church, than to a recent invention like the NIV.

how much credit do you offer the king james version?

actually, before this goes too far out of the original scope of the issue, do you believe the founders of our country based on the laws on the bible and perhaps the ten commandments as described in the king james or any other version? my point is, i think the ten commandments, as we know them today, were very influential in the development of our society and its laws. for this reason, i have no problem with displaying the ten commandments in public, government-owned buildings.

Spinoza, a Judeic scholar, published not long after the KJV was completed. His studies were done from the Greek & Hebrew scriptures. The KJV was interpreted from Greek & Hebrew too, but for the purpose of translation into English, and to suit the tastes of the then English crown, which had a lot of differences with the Papacy; so probably that version is going to be subject to primary error due to translation itself, to semantical idiosyncracies inherent in Greek, Hebrew, and English, and to the then prevailing political differences. Probably folks like Spinoza are more qualified to assess the OT, while the Catholics are closer geographically and culturally to the NT. The KJV is removed a few steps from both of these sources, but probably less so than the NIV.

That's not a very strong argument. Surely some of the founders were religious, but many others, Franklin, Jefferson, certainly Thomas Paine were not. Figues like Franklin and Jefferson were strongly influenced, as were western European intellectuals, in those times, by the European enlightenment, which was more science based than religious based. Many intellectuals of the 18th century, both in Europe and America were deists, not theists. At that time deism was a sort of socially acceptable atheism. The strong American religious sentiment you refer to, I believe, comes more from the subsequent "Great Awakenings" and tent revivals that were imported from England to counter the Anglican hegemony in the American church of those times. That's where the Evangelical sects arose from, from the later great awakenings, not from the enightenment based deism of the founding fathers.

i'll simply have to take your word when it comes to the religious tendencies of the framers of our government as i don't have any real knowledge regarding that specifically. my statements were based on the word "God" being present in national documents that defined our nation. i've been an atheist for as long as i can remember, but i've never had a problem with the government showing its religious roots -- as long as the government practices religious tolerance and equality for all "reasonable" beliefs.

i'm sure i'll get toasted for the use of the word "reasonable."

I just remember some of this stuff from history in college. Interesting as hell I thought. The framers, like Franklin, Hamilton, etc. were really quite snooty, wealthy, and taken in with enlightenment thinking. Franklin actually made some stunning scientific discoveries. They called themselves deists, but that can be taken with a grain of salt. Their no-nonsense, anti-royalty, anti-spiritual, empiricism can really be seen in Paine's "Common Sense." The fire & brimstone holy rollers came later and was a popular movement. The Mormons were an off-shoot of this Protestant free-for-all. The wealthy, intellectual, frilly-collar wearing founding fathers would have turned their blue-blood noses up at the rolling on the floor, crying for Jesus Evangelicals; they were a fairly elite, pragmatic bunch.