First of all, the Sabbath is NOT Sunday.
What is it then? A lot of business owners still work seven-day weeks, so whatever it is, they're not observing it.
Skip the first four, which have to do with God. The other six are the ones that apply to how we're supposed to treat each other, which is what government is for.
Skip the first four? You can't ignore 40% of the Ten Commandments when proclaiming that the Ten Commandments in their entirety are one of the bases for American law.
Children have to obey their parents in every state.
Not really. If a parent tells their teenaged son to take out the trash and he refuses, do they call 911 and have him arrested? He hasn't committed any crime by disobeying his parents.
Murder is illegal in every state. Adultery is probably illegal in some states. Property is protected in every state. Lying under oath is illegal.
I'm not sure what your point is. I never argued otherwise, besides adultery, and you're probably right that it is illegal somewhere.
Scheming to take property from your neighbor is also illegal.
That's not what "covet" means. More on that below.
Your interpretation of the tenth amendment is particularly poor, IMO. It is one thing to think about how much you'd enjoy something, and another to think of how much you'd like to take something away from someone.
v. cov·et·ed, cov·et·ing, cov·ets
v. tr.
1. To feel blameworthy desire for (that which is another's). See Synonyms at envy.
2. To wish for longingly. See Synonyms at desire."To covet" essentially means the same thing as "to envy" or "to desire". That
may mean that you want to steal your neighbor's TV. Or it may mean that you want to go to Future Shop and buy a larger TV to show him up. All it means is that you want what someone else has. If coveting was the same thing as theft, we wouldn't need a whole new commandment for it.
So, what we've currently got from the Ten Commandments are "don't kill", "don't steal", "don't commit adultery" (probably somewhere), and "don't lie".
Are you trying to tell me we need an almighty God to tell us these things?
People who damage churches should be treated differently from those who break the window in a car. All morals come from religion. If religion never existed I see no reason why murder, theft, etc. laws would ever have come into being.
I've known unreligious people who are very moral and I've known very religious people who are very immoral. Religion does not imply morality and the lack of religion does not imply a lack of morality. Morals are simply common sense: people know that society would fall apart without them, so most people observe most of them for the common good.
Religion does, of course, teach morality, but it doesn't work for me to assert that religion is the root of morality. That sounds to me more like taking a concept that already was there and claiming it as your own. People had morals before Jesus was born.
At any rate, the point was that American laws are not based on the Ten Commandments. I said nothing about religious morals in general.
