A wonderful nugget of good writing and great perspective from The Mahablog (also posted in the American Street), discussing Christianity's views and practices around the worship of idols, and applying it to the Ten Commandments.
"Christians tend to think of idolatry as the worship of false gods. The more universal definition is using any image as an object of worship...The text [of the Ten Commandments] actually says not to make graven images of anything. Both Judaism and Islam forbid making likenesses of God...Judaism also forbids speaking or writing the name of God.
...
For years, fundamentalist Christians have been attempting an end run around the graven image rule by making the Ten Commandments themselves into an object of worship. But at the same time, they skirt the First Amendment by claiming the Ten Commandments aren't specifically religious at all."
The obvious conclusion is that fundamentalists "either have to keep their graven images to themselves or...they have to acknowledge the Ten Commandments have no particular meaning." In which case they aren't deserving of being idolized in or on public monuments. The author also dispatches the arguments about it being somehow central to our legal system or our country's founding, neither of which are accurate. As she summarizes:
The Constitution, for example, makes no mention of God or the Ten Cs at all. This was not an oversight.
The Founders didn't include "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance either, did they? *
*I know the Pledge wasn't written by the founders. It was written by a Christian Socialist Baptist minister in 1892, but it didn't include the words "under God" until 1954.
