According to the US consititution the government isn't allowed to recognise god. The monument is the same as saying "The US government worships a Christian god".
While it's not harming anyone, it is unconstitutional.
Although keep in mind, I know nothing about the US consitution, or the Australian one for that matter...

[EDITING MY FIRST PARAGRAPH OUT... I just realized I mistook your meaning.]

Yes, questions have been asked about the holidays... the thing is, the government is actually recognizing secular holidays. Firstly, Easter is not a national holiday... the government rarely has to weigh in on holidays that fall on weekends. Secondly, as hardcore Christians have so often lamented, not everyone who observes Christmas is observing the birth of Christ. Every culture except for maybe a few in the tropics where there's not much for seasons to begin with has some sort of winter solstice-ish celebration usually having something to do with light being delivered into the world, and with everything so cold and dismal otherwise it's a handy time to spread some cheer around.

It's an unfortunate bit of etymology for everyone involved, Christian and not, that the term "Christmas" has become genericized and refers to the secular/syncretic amalgamation as well as the Christian holiday... causes a lot of contention that could otherwise be avoided... same thing with the way we use the term "marriage" (which refers to a sacrament administered by churches according to their own precepts) to refer to the government's own legal recognition of personal relationships, or the term God with a capital G to refer to the creator/father figure of the Christian faith and also use it generically refer to almost all figures of other mythologies.

Now for the 10 commandments... sure, they're all very good ideas, but if the point is that they're all things we ought to follow anyways, why couch them in terms of the 10 Commandments?

Imagine that you're a Christian and a very proud Christian and a very obvious Christian (cross, bible, and everything) and while going to a courtroom to meet a judge who's going to have a big say in whether you're found guilty of a crime, and how long you'll spend in jail (or worse) for that crime, and while on the way to that courtroom, you pass a monument inscribed with a command to worship X'hklantori the Law-Giver which, upon asking a passerby, you find the judge in charge of your case had personally ordered displayed. Now the rest of the inscription has things you believe in, like not murdering and not stealing, but it's prefaced by saying, "X'hklantori commands..." and you believe X'hklnatori is a false god and an idol.

Now you're faced with two choices... one, be false to your faith and say a couple of kind words about X'hklantori to help your case... or two, be true to your faith and hope that a judge who's willing to direct thousands of dollars be spent on a very expensive monument to X'hklantori doesn't really feel that strongly about religion. Either way, could you really feel that you'd been given a fair shake?

The Supreme Court hasn't said that the ten commandments themselves are bad, just that it's not the place of a criminal judge to be exhalting them and placing them such that exhorts people to follow them (most of the commandments are basic law, true, but the first several are completely religious).

Interestingly enough, the Supreme Court has an image of Moses carrying the tablets as one of the relief carvings adorning their chamber. What's the difference? The Supreme Court's decorations depict several law-givers, religious and civil, taken from throughout history. In addition to a prophet, Moses was the leader of his people and the laws he gave them, whatever their source, were codified and written down, which is an important first step in making sure they're applied fairly and equally.

Of course, the second step is actually applying them fairly and equally... and how can you be sure that's being done if the people in charge of appyling the laws seem to think their first job is religious conversion and the law is, if anything, a close second?

Technically this is wrong. The government isn't allowed to set up a state church, in which membership or other status regarding the church affects the legal status of an individual.

I think we can both agree that the imprudent jurist was kinda taping a kick me sign to the back of his robe, but in what way is having the local interpreter du jure du jour erecting an on-site monument to the law-giver of a given religion not establishing a state church that affects the legal status of an individual?

No, he's not putting it down on paper, but witness all your own talk about "legalists" who think they can get around the spirit of the law by just barely sticking to the letter. Should an individual state or the federal government be able declare Southern Baptism or even Heinz 57 Proestantism the "Official State Heritage?" If that's not Constitutional by virtue of being a poorly disguised establishment of religion, then isn't it equally unconstitutional for the government to act like it is so?

WHERE??? Show me where in the constitution it says the us government isn't allowed to recognize god? Oh wait, you're full of [excrement]! All it says is that the government can't REGULATE the church, not ******* destroy it in every venue of life and replace it with homosexuality and atheistism. oh look, i made a new word...

Actually, many of the founding fathers believed in a being they called the Creator or a force they referred to as Providence, both of which they equated with the Christian God... but you won't find those terms popping up in the Bible... I'm not going to get enmeshed in a pointless argument about whether people whom we never met that died centuries ago were aeists, beists, ceists, or deists... but if you were to read the letters and other writings of the founding fathers, you'd find that the situation back then wasn't much different than it is now.

Some of them didn't even like the idea that we were endowed by our Creator, some of them wanted direct endorsement of the Christian God, and so on... to say that they were unanimously Christian is no less folly than to claim to they were all atheists.

The Declaration of Independence is a statement of principles which are not legally binding and has no force except as propaganda, it says we're endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights, and then it mentions that Creator no more. The Consitution is a statement of laws and practices, it makes no mention of religion outside proscribing the establishment of one.

Boy. What a ringing endorsement of Christianity that is, huh? Yes, a lot of the Founding Fathers went to Church and wrote and spoke of God often in their private lives. Look at this example: they talk up religion in private, they mention it briefly when stating principles, but leave it out of the laws entirely. What does that tell you?

This is how I know you're not actually a Discordian, that you and your friends just latched onto something that seems "cool" that you probably picked up from a collectible card game...

Discordians know that "order" is simply the prevailing form of chaos, that when things seem to make sense it's only the proverbial broken clock that's right twice a day, and that evolution is the inexorable axiom that if you throw enough mud at the wall, some of it will stick. To a Discordian, the idea that any group of individuals could exercise control over the quadrillions of factors that make the world what it is, is simply laughable.

Religion played a bigger part in public life in the 1700s then it does in the 2000s not because of the acts of conspiracies or because one group or another exerts control. It's the actions of billions of people, all acting more or less at random in more or less what they perceive to be their own self interest, which have changed the nature of our society over time.

True, these individuals get together to try to exert more force, but lacking knowledge of the trillions of other variables which will come into play down the road, they don't honestly know if they're helping their cause or hurting it. It's like going back in time and trying to kill a specific butterfly to effect the future in a specific way so that a specific outcome will happen.

Yeah... Christmas has really gone to the dogs... I personally would like to see everyone's presents disappear one year... see what would happen... though that would never happen, I wish people would learn that Christmas isn't about presents.

Blueseed15 wrote:

Yeah... Christmas has really gone to the dogs... I personally would like to see everyone's presents disappear one year... see what would happen... though that would never happen, I wish people would learn that Christmas isn't about presents.

I wish that Christian diehards would learn that people are perfectly capable of observing a meaningful celebration of compassion and goodwill without submitting themselves to Christian dogma.

NO, it's all just commercialism, because that is all America and it's precious capitalism/corporationism cares aobut. They made jesus just another way to make money.

Christmas existed before the US did, I'm pretty sure... I don't know, I should check the history of it sometime, but I'm pretty sure it started as a purely religious holiday.