Courthouse Bible Removed

See how much a bunch of out of work losers can accomplish if they really put their mind to it?

 

Attorney and real estate broker Kay Staley sued Harris County...

She is an attorney and real estate broker, not an "out of work loser."

 

Well gosh, we sure wouldn't want anyone to be offended. By all means, take it down!

 

What if I were Amish and offended by all the people driving cars? Can I sue?

 

The fact that people are complaining about this being taken down confuses me.

If this was a Koran, it would have never gone up. What if it was a KKK outfit or something similiarly offensive to a large group of people?

 

I'm surprised San Francisco hasn't been forced to change its name.

 

The key is "large group of people".

Christians in america are the majority. Thus when they feel restricted, lots of people tend to complain.

Hypocrites.

 

The fact that people dont understand why it is up there in the first place confuses me. I mean, they still teach US history in this country, dont they? The ten commandments form the basis of modern law, thus the 10 commandments are on display in front of a court of law.

 

Good idea. It could be called Ohlonenia after the Ohlone American Indians that originally occupied that area prior to the European conquest of California. We could set up Ohlone and other American Indian religious monuments all over the place!

 

The 10 commandments do not form the basis of modern law. Anyone who taught you that was not teaching accurate US history.

Murder and stealing are really the only two commandments that truly deal with law, and those were laws in communities before and unrelated to the 10 commandments. They were laws in England prior to their even being a U.S. It wasn't as if the U.S. decided once they became a country they were going to base their laws on those.

The other commandments such as no God before Jehova, coveting neighbors wife, etc. are fine principles, but they aren't laws at least in the U.S.

 

English Common Law, help me with this Max or Sam, was influenced by some biblical premises but developed mostly on it's own with a LARGE heaping of Roman Law.

I do relish the fact that the War Crimes trial in Nuremburg after WWII had a prominent scroll of the Ten Commandments above the courtroom simply to remind the Nazi's that the God of Isaac and Moses would be present as judgment was meted to them.

 

If we're talking about a legal perspective, then the courts decide the law, and as of now they've decided it is a violation of the seperation of church and state, so it isn't there.

Surely you can recognize how it is offensive to a non-christian to imply that the Bible is the basis of our legal system, especially when said legal system specifically seperates church and state, no?

 

I do believe that Christian values have their place in the courtroom. We would do well to remember the mercy, not condemnation, that Jesus taught.

However, I'm not too comfortable with judges dressing themselves in Biblical trappings, appearing to imply that their judgement is God's judgement. The strivings of human beings should aspire to the Godly, but never be equated with the Godly. That is what I find distasteful about dressing a courtroom up like a church. One represents acceptance, the other judgement. Never should they be confused.

 

I am not Christian. So, no, I do not see how it is offensive to non-christians.

 

What does your offense have to do with it. I'm not christian either and am not offended, but I can still see how someone else would be.

 

Interesting hipocracy at play here. You posted a quote from the Declaration of Independance in a recent thread. The thread itself was a feeble attempt at trying to use the Declaration of Independance to prove that the gitmo prisoners have rights under US law. However, you appear to align yourself with those views of our forefathers.

You continue in that same post to support this statement by saying

and

So, how is it that in one post you are noting that the Declaration of Independance uses the word Creator as the basis for rights granted to individuals and in this post claim that the bible (specifically the Ten Commandments) doesnt play a role as the basis of our law (specifically the Declaration of Independance)?

 

. While strictly speaking the declaration of independence is of no binding legal effect, it is certainly closer in lineage to our legal system than the 10 commandments.

In any event, rvolkin's statement that "The ten commandments form the basis of modern law" is quite simply wrong. Little to no hebraic or talmudic law was ever incorporated into Western law.

 

The term "Deism" originally referred to a belief in one deity, as contrasted with the belief in no God (Atheism) and belief in many Gods (Polytheism). During the later 17th century, the meaning of "Deism" began to change. It refered to forms of radical Christianity - belief systems that rejected miracles, revelation, and the inerrancy of the Bible. Currently, Deism is generally no longer associated with Christianity or any other established religion. Then, as now, Deism is not a religious movement in the conventional sense of the world. There is no Deistic network of places of worship, a priesthood or hierarchy of authority.

Deism was greatly influential among politicians, scientists and philosophers during the later 17th century and 18 century, in England, France Germany and the United States.

Early Deism was a logical outgrowth of the great advances in astronomy, physics, and chemistry that had been made by Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, etc. It was a small leap from rational study of nature to the application of the same techniques in religion. Early Deists believed that the Bible contained important truths, but they rejected the concept that it was divinely inspired or inerrant. They were leaders in the study of the Bible as a historical (rather than an inspired, revealed) document. Lord Herbert of Cherbury (d. 1648) was one of the earliest proponents of Deism in England. In his book "De Veritate," (1624), he described the "Five Articles" of English Deists:

Belief in the existence of a single supreme God
Humanity's duty to revere God
Linkage of worship with practical morality
God will forgive us if we repent and abandon our sins
Good works will be rewarded (and punishment for evil) both in life and after death
Other European Deists were Anthony Collins (1676-1729), Matthew Tindal (1657-1733). J.J. Rousseau (1712-1778) and F.M.A. de Voltaire (1694-1778) were its leaders in France.

Many of the leaders of the French and American revolutions followed this belief system, including John Quincy Adams, Ethan Allen, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison Thomas Paine, and George Washington. Deists played a major role in creating the principle of separation of church and state, and the religious freedom clauses of the 1st Amendment of the Constitution.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/deism.htm


"That’s what the Great Seal [of the United States] is all about. I carry a copy of the Great Seal in my pocket in the form of a dollar bill. Here is the statement of the ideals that brought about the formation of the United States. Look at this dollar bill. Now here is the Great Seal of the United States. Look at the pyramid on the left. A pyramid has four sides. These are the four points of the compass. There is somebody at this point, there’s somebody at that point, and there’s somebody at this point. When you’re down on the lower levels of this pyramid, you will be either on one side or on the other. But when you get up to the top, the points all come together, and there the eye of God opens.

This is the first nation in the world that was ever established on the basis of reason instead of simply warfare. These were eighteenth-century deists, these gentlemen. Over here we read, “In God We Trust.” But that is not the god of the Bible. These men did not believe in a Fall. They did not think the mind of man was cut off from God. The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God. Reason puts you in touch with God. Consequently, for these men, there is no special revelation anywhere, and none is needed, because the mind of man cleared of its fallibilities is sufficiently capable of the knowledge of God. All people in the world are thus capable because all people in the world are capable of reason.

All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy. Because everybody’s mind is capable of true knowledge, you don’t have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be.

[These symbols] come from a certain quality of mythology. It’s not the mythology of a special revelation. The Hindus, for example, don’t believe in special revelation. They speak of a state in which the ears have opened to the song of the universe. Here the eye has opened to the radiance of the mind of God. And that’s a fundamental deist idea. Once you reject the idea of the Fall in the Garden, man is not cut off from his source.

Now back to the Great Seal. When you count the number of ranges on this pyramid, you find there are thirteen. And when you come to the bottom, there is an inscription in Roman numerals. It is, of course, 1776. Then, when you add one and seven and seven and six, you get twenty-one, which is the age of reason, is it not? It was in 1776 that the thirteen states declared independence. The number thirteen is the number of transformation and rebirth. At the Last Supper there were twelve apostles and one Christ, who was going to die and be reborn. Thirteen is the number of getting out of the field of the bounds of twelve into the transcendent. You have the twelve signs of the zodiac and the sun. These men were very conscious of the number thirteen as the number of resurrection and rebirth and new life, and they played it up here all the way through.

This is not simply coincidental. This is the thirteen states as themselves symbolic of what they were.

[That would explain the other inscription down there, Novus Ordo Sedorum.]

“A new order of the world.” This is a new order of the world. And the saying above, Annuit Coeptis, means “He has smiled on our accomplishments” or “our activities.”

He, the eye, what is represented by the eye. Reason. In Latin you wouldn’t have to say “he,” it could be “it” or “she” or “he.” But the divine power has smiled on our doings. And so this new world has been built in the sense of God’s original creation, and the reflection of God’s original creation, through reason, has brought this about.

If you look behind that pyramid, you see a desert. If you look before it, you see plants growing. The desert, the tumult in Europe, wars and wars and wars — we have pulled ourselves out of it and created a state in the name of reason, not in the name of power, and out of that will come the flowerings of the new life. That’s the sense of that part of the pyramid.

Now look at the right side of the dollar bill. Here’s the eagle, the bird of Zeus. The eagle is the downcoming of the god into the field of time. The bird is the incarnation principle of the deity. This is the bald eagle, the American eagle. This is the American counterpart of the eagle of the highest god, Zeus.

He comes down, descending into the world of the pairs of opposites, the field of action. One mode of action is war and the other is peace. So in one of his feet the eagle holds thirteen arrows — that’s the principle of war. In the other he holds a laurel leaf with thirteen leaves — that is the principle of peaceful conversation. The eagle is looking in the direction of the laurel. That is the way these idealists who founded our country would wish us to be looking — diplomatic relationships and so forth. But thank God he’s got the arrows in the other foot, in case this doesn’t work.

Now, what does the eagle represent? He represents what is indicated in this radiant sign above his head. I was lecturing once at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington on Hindu mythology, sociology, and politics. There’s a saying in the Hindu book of politics that the ruler must hold in one hand the weapon of war, the big stick, and in the other the peaceful sound of the song of cooperative action. And there I was, standing with my two hands like this, and everybody in the room laughed. I couldn’t understand. And then they began pointing. I looked back, and here was this picture of the eagle hanging on the wall behind my head in just the same posture that I was in. But when I looked, I also noticed this sign above his head, and that there were nine feathers in his tail. Nine is the number of the descent of the divine power into the world. When the Angelus rings, it rings nine times.

Now, over on the eagle’s head are thirteen stars arranged in the form of a Star of David.

Do you know why it’s called Solomon’s Seal?

Solomon used to seal monsters and giants and things into jars. You remember in the Arabian Nights when they’d open the jar and out would come the genie? I noticed the Solomon’s Seal here, composed of thirteen stars, and then I saw that each of the triangles was a Pythagorean tetrakys.

This is a triangle composed of ten points, one point in the middle and four points to each side, adding up to nine: one, two, three, four/five, six, seven/eight, nine. This is the primary symbol of Pythagorean philosophy, susceptible of a number of interrelated mythological, cosmological, psychological, and sociological interpretations, one of which is the dot at the apex as representing the creative center out of which the universe and all things have come.

The initial sound (a Christian might say, the creative Word), out of which the whole world was precipitated, the big bang, the pouring of the transcendent energy into and expanding through the field of time. As soon as it enters the field of time, it breaks into pairs of opposites, the one becomes two. Now, when you have two, there are just three ways in which they can relate to one another: one way is of this one dominant over that; another way is of that one dominant over this; and a third way is of the two in balanced accord. It is then, finally, out of these three manners of relationship that all things within the four quarters of space derive.

There is a verse in Lao-tzu’s Tao-te Ching which states that out of the Tao, out of the transcendent, comes the One. Out of the One come Two; out of the Two come Three; and out of the Three come all things.

So what I suddenly realized when I recognized that in the Great Seal of the United States there were two of these symbolic triangles interlocked was that we now had thirteen points, for our thirteen original states, and that there were now, furthermore, no less than six apexes, one above, one below, and four (so to say) to the four quarters. The sense of this, it seemed to me, might be that from above or below, or from any point of the compass, the creative Word might be heard, which is the great thesis of democracy. Democracy assumes that anybody from any quarter can speak, and speak truth, because his mind is not cut off from the truth. All he has to do is clear out his passions and then speak.

So what you have here on the dollar bill is the eagle representing this wonderful image of the way in which the transcendent manifests itself in the world. That’s what the United States is founded on. If you’re going to govern properly, you’ve got to govern from the apex of the triangle, in the sense of the world eye at the top.

Now, when I was a boy, we were given George Washington’s farewell address and told to outline the whole thing, every single statement in relation to every other one. So I remember it absolutely. Washington said, “As a result of our revolution, we have disengaged ourselves from involvement in the chaos of Europe.” His last word was that we not engage in foreign alliances. Well, we held on to his words until the First World War. And then we canceled the Declaration of Independence and rejoined the British conquest of the planet. And so we are now on one side of the pyramid. We’ve moved from one to two. We are politically, historically, now a member of one side of an argument. We do not represent that principle of the eye up there. And all of our concerns have to do with economics and politics and not with the voice and sound of reason.

Here you have the important transition that took place about 500 B.C. This is the date of the Buddha and of Pythagoras and Confucius and Lao-tzu, if there was a Lao-tzu. This is the awakening of man’s reason. No longer is he informed and governed by the animal powers. No longer is he guided by the analogy of the planted earth, no longer by the courses of the planets — but by reason.

And of course what destroys reason is passion. The principal passion in politics is greed. That is what pulls you down. And that’s why we’re on this side instead of the top of the pyramid.

[That’s why our founders opposed religious intolerance —]

And that’s why they rejected the idea of the Fall, too. All men are competent to know the mind of God. There is no revelation special to any people.

They are Masonic signs, and the meaning of the Pythagorean tetrakys has been known for centuries. The information would have been found in Thomas Jefferson’s library. These were, after all, learned men. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was a world of learned gentlemen. We haven’t had men of that quality in politics very much. It’s an enormous good fortune for our nation that that cluster of gentlemen had the power and were in a position to influence events at that time."


~ from a conversation with Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth c.1986




Deism. Not Judaism or Christianity.

The fact that you dont this in the first place confuses me. I mean, they still teach US history in this country, dont they?

 

I can't and even if I wasn't Christian I wouldn't care.

these damn separists groups always b****ing about some monument, bible, or statue that even resembles Christianity.