Anti-swearing law

[Anne Gilbert]

----- Original Message -----
From: James E. Clapp <jeclapp at WANS.NET>
> By the way, this site--in common with most of the others I saw--does not
> use the King James translation, and I'm guessing that the main reason is
> that version's use of the word "kill," which is eschewed in the
> translations that seem to be favored today.  So it appears that many of
> those who want to post the Ten Commandments in schools probably would
> *not* choose the King James version, which might confuse impressionable
> schoolchildren into questioning war, the electric chair, shooting the
> guy who is trying to steal your TV, etc.  I also wonder if the versions
> they want to post include the longest two commandments in their
> entirety.  These really, really important ones, judging from the amount
> of explanatory material God included in them, are the one about not
> making any image of anything in the sky or on the earth or in the water,
> and the one about not working on the Sabbath--meaning you can't spend
> the day at the mall.  Many versions of the Ten Commandments that I saw
> on the Web--which were really summaries rather than translations--pared
> those down to practically nothing.

James:

I suspect most of the sites you visited used the New International Version,
a Bible favored by fundamentalists of various denominations.  As I have only
a limited amount of time I can spend each day surfing the Web, I will have
to take your word for it.  And this only confirms my impression that various
translations of the Ten Commandments leads to various interpretations of
their meaning(why is the murder if Matthew Shepard relatively unimportant,
even if he *was* gay?) There are no commandments, AFAIK "Thou shalt not be
sexually attracted to one of your own sex".  In any case, I think the Ten
Commandments issue, the "anti-swearing" issue, and others like it, are a
complex mix of attitudes and beliefs which stem from a "religious"
background in our past, but are acting in a relatively "secular" present.
Anne G