Dear Editor:
Assuming we really want to destroy American democracy by declaring that the ten commandments are really secular, and that the rules contained therein regarding which god to believe in, and how to worship this god, and when to go to church, and so on, are not religious, then we should take care that we use the right translation of the Bible when posting these non religious principles, for those who want them posted in public tend not to read Hebrew, and those who do read Hebrew tend to understand all too well how religious doctrines can be called something else when employed to harm others.
The problem is that the translated version of the ten commandments most frequently quoted for commandment posting is from the 1611 King James Version of the Bible. For over three hundred years, many have declared this translation the only true and accurate rendering of the Word of God. It was this Bible that was carried to our shores by our Puritan forefathers. Yet other fundamentalists have recently condemned it, and denounced it as unfit for Christians to read. This is because they have finally discovered that King James I of England, who authorized the translation, was a homosexual--a fact historians have known for all those years the King James Bible had been the inerrant word of God.
Another problem, of course, is that the Roman Catholic Church uses a different ten commandments, and a different translation, than do those protestants condemned as heretics.
How can this possibly be resolved to satisfy everyone? Maybe we should just keep church and state separate and keep our democracy. Maybe we should make public display of our American Bill of Rights. There are ten of them after all, and they were written in English.
Unless, of course, we don't really believe in them.
Edwin Kagin
Union, KY
Last updated: 25 January 2005