--- In [email protected], [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>  
> In a message dated 7/13/07 9:32:56 A.M. Central Daylight Time,  
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> 
> "The  government of the United States is not in any sense founded on
> the  Christian religion."
> 
> 
> 
> I never said it was founded on the Christian religion. It was
founded  on 
> Christian principles which are common to the Christian/Judaic
culture. I see  
> very little, if any,  Islamic, Hindu,Buddhist influence in our laws
 and 
> government. Yet our laws and morays are saturated with Biblical  values.


No. They are not.

---Forty-one law professors and legal historians weighed in on a
lawsuit challenging Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore's
display of the Ten Commandments in the state Judicial Building in
Montgomery. The scholars were brought together by Steven K. Green,
former legal director at Americans United and now law professor at
Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Oregon.

The friend-of-the-court brief, filed April 28, musters ample
historical evidence to debunk claims by Moore's attorneys that the
judge has the right to display the Ten Commandments because they are
the foundation of American law.

Nothing in the nation's legal history supports Moore's view, the legal
scholars and historians say.

"Aside from a failed attempt in the seventeenth century to establish a
biblically based legal system in the Puritan colonies, American law is
generally viewed as having secular origins," asserts the brief.

The brief notes that "various documents and texts" figured in the
development of American law, among them English common and statutory
law, Roman law, the civil law of continental Europe and private
international law.

American law, they point out, was also influenced by the writings of
William Blackstone, John Locke, Adam Smith and others as well as the
Magna Carta, the Federalist Papers and other sources.

"Each of these documents had a far greater influence on America's laws
than the Ten Commandments," asserts the brief. "Indeed, the legal and
historical record does not include significant and meaningful
references to the Ten Commandments, the Pentateuch or to biblical law
generally."

The brief notes that the U.S. Constitution lacks even "a perfunctory
or formalistic reference to God" and says during the debate over
ratification of that document, delegates discussed Roman law, British
law and the laws of other European nations but "as can best be
determined, no delegate ever mentioned the Ten Commandments or the
Bible." [...]

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3944/is_200306/ai_n9283024






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