{"id":12472,"date":"2012-05-13T15:20:23","date_gmt":"2012-05-13T19:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/?p=12472"},"modified":"2012-05-13T15:20:23","modified_gmt":"2012-05-13T19:20:23","slug":"the-six-commandments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/2012\/05\/the-six-commandments\/","title":{"rendered":"The Six Commandments"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>\n  Could the Ten Commandments be reduced to six, a federal judge asked Monday.<\/p>\n<p>  Would that neutralize the religious overtones of a commandments display that has the Giles County School Board in legal hot water?<\/p>\n<p>  That unorthodox suggestion was made by Judge Michael Urbanski during oral arguments over whether the display amounts to a governmental endorsement of religion, as alleged in a lawsuit filed by a student at Narrows High School.<\/p>\n<p>  After raising many pointed questions about whether the commandments pass legal muster, the judge referred the case to mediation \u2013 with a suggestion:<\/p>\n<p>  Remove the first four commandments, which are clearly religious in nature, and leave the remaining six, which make more secular commands, such as do not kill or steal.<\/p>\n<p>  Ever since the lawsuit was filed in September amid heated community reaction, school officials have said the display is not religious because it also includes historical documents such as the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.<\/p>\n<p>  \u201cIf indeed this issue is not about God, why wouldn\u2019t it make sense for Giles County to say, \u2018Let\u2019s go back and just post the bottom six?\u2019\u201d Urbanski asked during a motions hearing in U.S. District Court in Roanoke.<\/p>\n<p>  \u201cBut if it\u2019s really about God, then they wouldn\u2019t be willing to do that.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Reminds me of the joke in Mel Brooks&#8217; &#8220;History of the World part 1&#8221; where Moses comes down the mountain with three tablets and starts to announce the fifteen and then ten commandments as he drops one tablet.<\/p>\n<p>Via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/deaconsbench\/2012\/05\/judge-suggests-cutting-some-of-the-10-commandments\/\">The Deacon&#8217;s Bench<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Could the Ten Commandments be reduced to six, a federal judge asked Monday. Would that neutralize the religious overtones of a commandments display that has the Giles County School Board&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12472"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12476,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12472\/revisions\/12476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.splendoroftruth.com\/curtjester\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}