Some insightful comments

I'm currently reading, God on Trial: Dispatches from America's Religious Battlefields. It's tremendously good, and I'll have more on it later, but I wanted to share this one part. It's from an interview with Dave Howe, the plaintiff in a suit against a posting of the Ten Commandments in a courthouse in Kentucky. He says:

Looking back on this case, I'd do it again. And I may, now that I know what they're posting down there in the courthouse. But with the Supreme Court the way it is now, with Justice O'Connor gone, it's tipped the other way, and that's kind of discouraging. What really galls me, I think, is this attitude of, Our country, our legal system, was founded on the Ten Commandments. That is not true; it's patently offensive to me that they insist that this is the case. There is absolutely no historical basis for it, and I defy anyone to show me law in any state that tells us we have to worship a God! The prohibitions in the Ten Commandments, like murder, adultery, perjury, theft--that's common law! It's been common law since the get-go; you wouldn't have a civilization without it. Where did they come up with this? And this is ignored by the justices. There's a couple of those guys who really push me the wrong way, and how they got to be Supreme Court justices is beyond me. But as they say, excrement occurs.

Some of the quotations from Scalia made me wonder how he manages to put on his robes in the morning, they were so idiotic. But that's for another post.