Muslims promote Sharia law. Why do Christians not promote their law?

It means what many consider to be the most important statement in the Declaration; "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights..." - the constitution was largely about the preservation of those rights. The constitution followed that statement. So the Declaration has nothing to do with the founding of the U.S.? It mentions a creator. Nah, vulgar 4 letter words work better, don't they?

No, goalpost runner. You're a new member of the big gang, so if you don't believe it, I'm afraid I can't help you today.

Yes, since 1 Corinthians 7:1 says; "It is good for a man not to marry". Contradictory? If one believes that all men are completely equal robots, with the same interests, same looks, height, weight, life expectancy, etc. it could be taken as contradictory. If the Bible was one set of instructions for everyone to follow. But it takes into account that people are different, with different skills, interests, personalities. It's up to us to apply what the Bible says to the circumstances we find ourselves in. Some are best to be married (one man/one woman) some are best to stay single. But no one can really make the case that the Bible condones gay marriage, if that's what you mean. And so far, no one can make the case that it's good for society.

I've already explained that something doesn't necessarily have to be specifically mentioned to be an inspiration for something. If you don't agree, then we should agree to disagree. Please don't use the F word again. Well let's see;

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The Declaration was a document proclaiming the severing of ties. It is not a document of the USA it is pre-USA.

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Yep, you said it! I love this place!

We're speaking of the imposition of laws on society, my reason for being involved in this thread is to show that secular laws can be just as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than religious laws.

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History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.

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Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

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The same can be said of science and environmentalism. These forums are a crutch for some people, followers of the screaming, arm waving Al Gore are also satisfying their need for a crutch. Okay, now for that comparison. It should first be noted that the words "Sundays excepted" appear in Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution. "If any bill shall not be returned by the president within 10 days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the same shall be a law...."That didn't necessarily establish or promote laws concerning Sunday activity, but it did recognize Sunday as a day not completely identical to all the others. A case where the founders recognized a Christian trait as beneficial to a secular society. As your link said, in some cases those blue laws were created or retained by those whom they affected. I don't see them as a big deal concerning personal liberty, I think I could re-arrange my buying habits to make it work. But I agree with you that they are restrictive, religious based laws. Now let see how they compare to the secular law that I referred to earlier.The fourth amendment reads like this;

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The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

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The words that I bolded clearly show that the founders were opposed to all encompassing searches which auto emissions testing obviously is. A car is an "effect" that the fourth amendment describes. The technology exists today to set up spot checks along the road with manned, emissions detecting equipment, that would identify heavily polluting autos. To make everyone in a certain area take their car to a government establishment, and pay to have it "tested" obviously violates the fourth amendment. These types of tests have come and gone in my area a few times over the past few decades, probably not because anyone recognized their constitutional violation, but because they were simply a waste of time and money. But they also could have been another kind of test, a measurement of just how much public outcry and other problems there would be, to prepare for a future federal auto testing program, for every car (and truck) in the U.S. A federal program would never go away. Not only a cash cow for the government, its pollution standards could be adjusted up and down, to adjust several economic conditions, such as increases in scrap metal as more non-compliant cars would have to be scrapped, more new car sales as fewer used cars would be in compliance, differences in gasoline sales, as more (or less)government mandated economy cars would be in use, etc.My secular example is much more anti-constitution, anti freedom, than yours. This has been gone over many times before, these aren't necessarily a forcing of religion, they're intended to be a balance for the current atheism that's established in schools. That's yet another problem that happens in a secular society, an establishment of atheism in science education.

It's not a contradiction, the Bible condones being single, it condones marriage between one man and one woman, and it condemns homosexuality. There is no law in the U.S. that makes it illegal to be homosexual, (as there shouldn't be) but homosexual marriage is bad for society, and should be made/kept illegal, for secular reasons.

I'm afraid they easily can.Gay marriage debate: a secular case against same-sex marriage | WINTERY KNIGHT

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Claim: about 58% of traditional marriages last longer than 20 years.

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Source: National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2001)

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Claim: about 5% of same-sex unions last longer than 20 years.

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Source: 2003-2004 Gay/Lesbian Consumer Online Census

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Claim: 85% of married women and 75.5% of married men report being faithful to their spouses. For homosexual males, the number is 4.5%

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Sources: Laumann, The Social Organization of Sexuality, 216; McWhirter and Mattison, The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop (1984): 252-253; Wiederman, “Extramarital Sex,” 170.

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To big of a burden on the U.S. court system. The U.S. can't afford it.

Exactly. Under the U.S. Constitution, a homosexual should have the same access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness just the same as anyone else. His private life in his own home with his partner is no one else's business. But he shouldn't have the right to the public institution of marriage, if the majority sees it as a public burden. I don't think they need a contract for anything - single people don't have a contract.

Yes yes, I was drawn into off topic stuff, and you took off with that without commenting on my comparison of your example of religious oppression and my example of secular oppression. Other slightly different variations of Wedge Document opinions have been posted at EvC dozens of times before. Are you finished now, you have nothing else to say about my message 83? Back in message 35, you said this; Following the question asked by the opening poster of this thread (who starts threads and then abandons them?) I've made the case that a secular government can be more oppressive than a religious one, and no one has shown any evidence to the contrary. I'll be watching if you or anyone else would like to start a thread about "what manner of secular government we would prefer." I'd particularly like to see a description of any secular government in the present day and age that wouldn't have government promoted health and safety as one of its top priorities, with the scientific community heavily influencing its leadership.

I don't see a difference. The only way to analyze religious law vs. secular law is to analyze the governments that would apply them. It's never been a problem in the U.S. While there may be some very small religious groups in the U.S. that believe this, they are far too small to be taken seriously. And there's no evidence that they're growing in strength, in fact, there is evidence for just the opposite.In yesterday's Sunday newspaper, I read a column by one E.J. Dionne, a liberal Washington Post columnist. I don't know what his religious affiliation is, and it's not important - I believe the statistics he cites, though I don't trust all those who answer questions in these types of surveys. This column I'm referring to was easy to find on the net;http://www.washingtonpost.com/...369-d1954abcb7e3_story.htmlHe shows some statistics there that should ease your mind as an atheist, and scare you do death if you're a conservative. Just a few highlights;

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...28 percent of Americans could be classified as religious conservatives, 38 percent as religious moderates and 19 percent as religious progressives. An additional 15 percent were nonreligious.

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Among supporters of the two parties, Republicans were far more cohesive. The analysis found that 56 percent of Republicans were religious conservatives and 33 percent were religious moderates. Only 5 percent were religious progressives and just 6 percent were nonreligious.

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Democrats, by contrast, were all over our analytical map: 28 percent were religious progressives, 13 percent were religious conservatives, 42 percent were religious moderates and 17 percent were nonreligious.

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Among self-identified political liberals, the proportion of nonreligious essentially, the folks sending me those messages was even larger: 31 percent of liberals were nonreligious, 33 percent were religious progressives, 30 percent were religious moderates and 6 percent were religious conservatives.

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Two things are thus true simultaneously: Nonreligious Americans are a very important part of the liberal constituency,yet the majority of liberals have ties to religion

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(hmmm, must be devout Diests)Now here comes the big one;

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Yet if liberals face obstacles when it comes to faith, conservatives have problems of their own. The most serious? The religious conservatism that is such an important component of the right and the Republican Party is deeply unattractive to the rising generation of voters.

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The "rising generation of voters", students from today's atheist science classes, young voters who grow up with two mommies and no daddies, or two daddies and no mommies. You know I'm not, and you know it's not a threat in the U.S. Are you in favor of the scientific 4th amendment trashing that I described in message 85?

It's pretty well described in the link in my message 85. I don't feel like going into more detail about here, it's too far off topic.

Can't say I agree with that, I've compared Coyote's example of inconvenience of Sunday shopping to my example of a scientific trashing of the fourth amendment, and now it seems that about everyone here now wants to discuss gay marriage. But no one seems to be anxious to do it. Maybe because there are no actual serious threats to liberty by religion in the U.S. and there are plenty of serious threats to liberty in the U.S. by secular science.

That WHAT is something that I'm wrong about? You didn't quote anything from message 77 - the main thing there seemed to be your denial of something you actually said. Yes, someone else performed the fallacy of poisoning the well on that one too. I'd like to have explored his reasoning about that, but if I'd have asked him about it he'd have flown into a rage and denied that he said anything about it.Rather than mocking the source, why don't you read what it actually says?

I was referring to its influence on the constitution of the U.S. and that's when you told me it wasn't a founding document of the U.S. So if you believe it DID, or COULD HAVE had influence, what was your purpose to say that it wasn't a document of the U.S.?