It was God's will that it be misspelled.

They also seemed to have forgotten about the whole "first amendment checker"

Thou shalt shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. 

Follow the constitution, except for the parts we disagree with.
/asshats

Bird3149: How do you misspell "derp"?

"R-E-LI-G-I-O-U-S R-I-G-H-T"?

I'm less offended by the misspellings and the All-Seeing Eye as I am by the American Eagle carved there. Considering how the Jews reacted when the Romans tried to nail their Imperial Eagle over the doors of the Temple in Jerusalem, it's pretty ironic.

Actually, what would be ironic is if the monument got defaced not by some radical secularist but by a proper God-fearing Christian who objected to the worldly national symbols placed on top of God's Law.

felching pen: /As a Christian, I wish we Christians would act more Christ-like.

Silly Christian, American Christianity is about making a big show that you believe. As long as you believe you are saved, so you can act like a giant douchebag and it's ok because you're forgiven. Doing good works? That's Papist talk, and Papism is practically devil worship.

The people who think putting up crap like this is important aren't smart enough to notice the misspellings.

If the Christians can have their 10 commandments. Then they need to put up the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, too.

simplicimus: Paris1127: simplicimus: Magorn: simplicimus: The design is wrong. It's two tablets, 5 on each. Did this guy even read the Old Testament?

Well actually THREE tablets, 5 on each, didn't you see the movie?

Yeah, I saw the movie. But on the bright side, we have 5 fewer commandments.

I wonder what was on that tablet... Perhaps a commandment about loving other people even if you disagree with him or her?

Well, the first 5 are man's relationship with God, the second 5 are man's relationship with fellow humans. No idea what would be on the third tablet.

the fine print.

1. I IS CEILING CAT
2. CEILING CAT COMS 1ST
3. DON' LISSEN TO BASEMENT CAT
4. DON' USE MY NAME TO DO EVELL
5. REMEMBER CATERDAY AND KEEP IT LAZY
6. DRIVE UR HOOMAN AZ CRAZY AZ POSSIBIL
7. DON' KILL. UNLESS HOOMAN MAKES YOU DRESS UP
8. DON' CHEAT N HUK UP WIT CRAZY KITTEH DOWN THE STREET
9. DON' LAI. UNLESS U HAS TO
10. DON' STEEL. JUS TAKE STUFF AN PUT IT BACK B4 THEY KNO

9Speed: ciberido: simplicimus: 9Speed: I count 11 commandments...

Most of don't use base 9.

If you think about it, everybody uses base 10.

No, not everybody.

Sigh. It was a joke. Not a very good one, apparently.

Look at it this way. If you use base eight, then "eight" in base eight is written "10".... 

Let me try to redeem myself with a riddle. Why do computer science geeks and math nerds confuse Christmas with Halloween?

simplicimus: 9Speed: I count 11 commandments...

Most of don't use base 9.

If you think about it, everybody uses base 10.

ciberido: GBB: If the Christians can have their 10 commandments. Then they need to put up the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, too.

284. Deep down, everyone's a Ferengi.

One of my personal favorites.

6. Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity.

31. Never make fun of a Ferengi's mother. Insult something they care about instead.

111. Treat people in your debt like family ... exploit them.

192. Never cheat a Klingon... unless you can get away with it.

211. Employees are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don't hesitate to step on them.

Indubitably: PsiChick: TheCharmerUnderMe: Somacandra: AdolfOliverPanties: Isn't there something in the Ten Commandments about graven images?
\
 

Yup, that's the monument--with misspellings and all.

I'm sorry, but is that the All-seeing Eye in the pyramid above the eagle? What the hell is THAT doing on there?

The American flag and a nice shiny eagle are there. Clearly, this is a sabotage attempt by the lamestream media and those jackbooted Obama thugs to reinforce steryotypes oppressing the poor good ol' Christians by implanting the 'Christianity Is America!!!11!!eleventy!' symbolism in the minds of the people involved in working on this.

Please just stop.

Thank you.

...That was sarcasm.

/I need a font for that.
//But really, that stuff is only on there because, well, of the entire point of this--that these guys believe America is a Christian Nation(tm). Which is ridiculous, but oh, well.

ciberido: GBB: If the Christians can have their 10 commandments. Then they need to put up the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, too.

284. Deep down, everyone's a Ferengi.

One of my personal favorites.

Absolutely. Given that this country more closely follows the Rules of Acquisition than they do the Ten Commandments, a monument to the Rules would be more socially relevant.

Son of Thunder: The Larch: Son of Thunder: Yes, but that's because I make the effort to read up on what actual scholars say about religious texts, instead of just shooting my mouth off.

OK, smart guy. You are undoubtedly aware that the meaning of this text has been interpreted in many different ways by many different groups and many different times. Why don't you tell us why everyone else in the whole history has been doing it wrong, and how you're doing it right.

Really? Everyone else in all of history has interpreted that commandment as an absolute prohibition of all visual art? Citation needed.

Hardcore Jews and Muslims interpret it as a ban on *representational* art. So a picture or a portrait of a person is BAD BAD BAD, but calligraphy or pretty patterns are A-OK. Back in the day Turkish and Persian minature portraiture was consudered incredibly scandalous:



OMG you can see his face BLASPHEMER

but this is all good:


I do believe the "art" of photography was a point of some controversy back in the day as it is capturing the handiwork of God Himself. So knuckledraggers still don't like it, thinking that a picture of a man can steal his soul, and only God is allowed to do that.

oldfarthenry: God

Magorn: AssAsInAssassin: Bonzo_1116: I sometimes wonder how much of the monotheism that the Hebrews picked up was related to the dualistic ideas of Zoroastrianism coming out of Central Asia. Judaism has a weird mix of Indo-European ideas of an overall father-god figure grafted onto a local Semitic storm-god chassis.

Yep. "Jupiter" comes from the Indo-European "dyeu-peter", or "god-father." Another name for Jupiter was "Jove." Except it was "Iove" (That's a capital "eye," not a lower-case "el.") which means it was pronounced "YO-WEH." "Zeus" comes from the same source.

...

and allow for a few centuries of linguistic drift and regional accents and it's not hard to hear Yahweh (Yah-wheh not Ya'll-way) in Allah (Or El-Al, the root word of Yahweh). It wouldn't shock me if the origins of Islam didn't have its roots in the remnants of the Samaritan culture which seems to vanish just after biblical times

Pretty much any Biblical name that has "el" or "al" in it comes from the same Semitic root.

ALLAH: 1702, Arabic name for the Supreme Being, from Arabic Allahu, contraction of al-Ilahu, from al "the" + Ilah "God," related to Hebrew Elohim

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=allah&s e archmode=none

ELOHIM: a name of God in the Bible, c.1600, from Hebrew, plural (of majesty?) of Eloh "God," a word of unknown etymology, perhaps an augmentation of El "God," also of unknown origin. Generally taken as singular, the use of this word instead of Yahveh is taken by biblical scholars as an important clue to authorship in the Old Testament, hence Elohist.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Elohim&allowed_in_frame=0

But "Jove" is an Indo-European word:

JOVE: Roman god of the bright sky, late 14c., from L. Iovis, from PIE *dyeu- "to shine," with derivatives referring to the sky, heavens, a god (see diurnal, and cf. Zeus). In classical Latin, the compound Iuppiter replaced Old L. Iovis as the god's name.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=jove&se a rchmode=none

/Etymology geek.
//I LOVE etymology. It helps the world make sense.

Great Porn Dragon: AssAsInAssassin: Ahem... wrong link...

Yep. "Jupiter" comes from the Indo-European "dyeu-peter", or "god-father." Another name for Jupiter was "Jove." Except it was "Iove" (That's a capital "eye," not a lower-case "el.") which means it was pronounced "YO-WEH." "Zeus" comes from the same source.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=jupiter & searchmode=none

Which is actually fairly impressive, considering that the Indo-European language family has no known relation to the Afro-Asiatic languages (of which the Semitic languages are a broad language family, much as the Romance or Germanic languages are part of sub-families of Indo-European)...save for some as-yet-unproven theories of relating some of the larger primary language families that still tend to be considered a little fringey.

(That said, I don't discount it could have happened. Somehow Semitic peoples got the one pre-Abrahamic faith (for which we have good records) from the people of Ur--and Sumerian is a language isolate which has no known relatives (and--at least if some interpretations of the fact there are sometimes as many as four or five separate glyphs in Sumerian for the same syllable are any clue--there's even a chance ancient Sumerian may have been a tonal or partially tonal language, like Vietnamese or Thai or quite a lot of language families in Africa). One theory is that when the Akkadian peoples (who spoke proto-Semitic) moved into the Middle East that they essentially "Sumericised" (taking on religion and culture, as well as apparently a form of cuneiform script) whilst causing a language shift from Sumerian to Akkadian.)

Or it could just be a loan word.

The Latin alphabet came from Etruscan--another language isolate--by way of Greek, which was adapted from the alphabet of the Phoenicians--a Semitic people. English, as I'm sure you know, has words from Arabic, Hebrew, Basque, American Indian languages, and pretty much every culture on Earth. Maybe the ancients were similarly promiscuous with their vocabularies.

Son of Thunder: Yes, but that's because I make the effort to read up on what actual scholars say about religious texts, instead of just shooting my mouth off.

In my experience, theology scholars spend an awful lot or their time developing ways of explaining that "No, God didn't mean that" where that is something which is (a) clearly stated in the Bible and (b) inconvenient to the individual or their church. The Catholics are the masters at this, having managed to convert not killing into the inquisition, not coveting into the fabulous wealth of the church and love thy neighbour into two thousand years or religious war.

But you know, I rather like them for it. They are such openly and unashamedly devious bastards that they merit some respect. It's the thick as pigshiat evangelicals who start off with biblical literalism, realise that it's full of contradictions and impossible to implement and then stick doggedly to a few bits which suit their own tastes who annoy me.

TL;DR. Papists explain away the bits of the Bible they don't like while evos ignore them.

PunGent: propasaurus: Thou shalt have no other gods...

Wait. There are other gods?

Exactly :)

Christians aren't REALLY monotheists...they just like to dress that way.

They need to go back to the really Olde Tyme Religion and get to worshipping the Maid/Mother/Crone. Now there's a Trinity that doesn't f*ck around.

MaudlinMutantMollusk: simplicimus: The design is wrong. It's two tablets, 5 on each. Did this guy even read the Old Testament?

Do you think any of 'em actually read any of the book?

I had to explain this to my friend. While Jesus did exhort making one's self better (and so on) he was the ultimate hippie. I mean hippie as in give everything you don't need to survive to help others. I reminded him, that as a prosperity gospel heretic who doesn't shun wealth, it is unlikely he will get into heaven. His "good works" ledger is woefully inadequate, his help of fellow man is low, and his material desires are too excessive.

Tldr version:

Lapsed Irish Catholic schooled a Lutheran because if there's one thing you get beaten into your skull by the Nuns it is the Bible. Well that, and a fear of women named Mary Francis.

---

Why, the poor guy thought that God was nice. No, God is not nice. God is vengeful and hot tempered. Jesus was nice, and he moderated dad a bit. Have no doubt that otherwise (if there really is a God) we'd see bears rending children guilty of petty transgressions an awful lot today.

Bonzo_1116: Look at the story of Cain and Abel, and all the stuff in Genesis--it's really clear that it was a herding culture that distrusted the agricultural folk of the cities.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Now we have a rural agricultural culture that distrusts the industrial/post-industrial folk of the cities.

simplicimus: The Larch: simplicimus: jshine: simplicimus: The design is wrong. It's two tablets, 5 on each. Did this guy even read the Old Testament?

I certainly haven't. Where does it say how many commandment were on each tablet?

Well, it's implied from the Talmud. 5 and 5 on two tablets. Might be in the OT,

Where does it say in the OT that there were 10 commandments?  I can't find the number of commandments anywhere in the Bible. It looks like someone just took the words that God said and sort and said "meh... that's somewhere between 9 and 13, depending on how you divide 'em up. Let's say there's about 10. And different religions can argue about how to number them for the next few thousand years."

How do I know? I don't read Hebrew. The 10 commandments are a translation of Exodus 20:1-17. But the Talmud is pretty clear on their being 10.

Some of the more interesting gnostic documents mention more than 10 commandments. Talking with a jewish scholar, I got the inpression there were another set of commandments which came before the ones we know today. Basically, moses got to the bottom of the mountain and looked around. He saw what was happening and dashed the tablets he'd written the 10 commandments on to the ground, turned around and walked back up the mountain, and in no uncertain terms, noted thet he and God needed to get to brass tacks with his flock, as they were not the most eloquent of peoples. The long and the short of it is that our current understanding of the 10 commandments is the dumbed-down version, because the jews at the time were the equivalent of the population of the short bus, having lived in a pan-helenic society(egypt) for so long, they had started to move into polytheistic worship, much like the phrase, "When in rome" but they were in Egypt.

/that guy was fun to talk to
//just don't get him started on the oiginal polytheistic religion which evolved, slowly, into the current version judaism(sp?)

JohnnyC: Son of Thunder: JohnnyC: Somacandra: Seriously, the commandment in Exodus 20 expressly forbids making images of ANYTHING in Heaven as well as Earth.

I think the "no art" commandment can suck my cock. :)

/atheist artist

Obviously "no art" is exactly what that passage means, seeing as how no Jews or Christians ever made art.

They break their own rules all the time...

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

Seems to say not to make an image or likeness of pretty much anything. You think it said something else?

Yes, but that's because I make the effort to read up on what actual scholars say about religious texts, instead of just shooting my mouth off.

SquiggsIN: Great Porn Dragon: simplicimus: AdolfOliverPanties: Isn't there something in the Ten Commandments about graven images?

I think that refers only to the competition, Baal and whoever else was being worshiped.

More properly, refering to graven images of all the ba'alim and ashtarot, aka the old gods and goddesses of Sumer (which were later adopted by the Babylonians).

(To make a long story short, it's now thought by actual archaeologists that Judaism started out as a monotheistic fork of Mesopotamian polytheistic faiths (being probably the first monotheistic faith to actually catch on, versus Akhenaten's failed attempt). There are still some traces of the old polytheism (particularly in Genesis and the creation myths), and at the time that the Ten Commandments were encoded as the basis of halachic law, there were still a lot of issues with folks reverting to the polytheistic worship of the old gods.

Hell, even the Bible itself mentions this in relation to Moses and Aaron--with Aaron having set up a golden calf, a ritual item of Ba'al Hadad (the old Sumerian god of storms) which was specifically designed as an idol to the (monotheistic) god of Israel. There are at least two instances recorded after this when royalty or the people in general went back into frank polytheistic worship (with the God of Israel equated to either Ba'al Hadad or El) and a number of other instances where the early Israeli people had gone into partial polytheism reversion (with the God of Israel being paired with Ishtar or Astara, and the female companions of God/the gods being referred to as the ashtarot--"Astara" may well have been a functional title of "Lady" in this case, much as "ba'al" is actually a title of "Lord").

Yes, this is where knowing a bit about the predecessors of Judaism gets very interesting :D

In my experience, the more religious a person is, the less likely they want to hear about the ACTUAL origin of their religious customs. Christians, in particular, (likely due to my increased exposure to this group) seem especially offended when confronted with the Pagan origins of many of their most treasured traditions.

Try seeking out educated Christians. The college where I teach has a seminary attached to it. In addition to my wife being a theology grad student, I am friends with a good number of the other faculty members. Ever gotten together to watch MST3k with an Old Testament prof, two theologians, a historian, and a philosopher? It's an experience. I have found that the PhD-holding types (including the conservative ones) love learning about the cultural context in which their religious traditions developed. I find that it is those who never dig any deeper than their childhood Sunday School lessons (or maybe get a 2-year diploma from a local Bible College) that are the ones who see scholarly inquiry as a threat.

On the other hand, it also might have something to do with your approach. If you launch discussions of these topics with the attitude that you are "explaining away" their religion as "nothing but" carry-overs from earlier phenomena, then I can understand them getting annoyed at you.

Great Porn Dragon: simplicimus: AdolfOliverPanties: Isn't there something in the Ten Commandments about graven images?

I think that refers only to the competition, Baal and whoever else was being worshiped.

More properly, refering to graven images of all the ba'alim and ashtarot, aka the old gods and goddesses of Sumer (which were later adopted by the Babylonians).

(To make a long story short, it's now thought by actual archaeologists that Judaism started out as a monotheistic fork of Mesopotamian polytheistic faiths (being probably the first monotheistic faith to actually catch on, versus Akhenaten's failed attempt). There are still some traces of the old polytheism (particularly in Genesis and the creation myths), and at the time that the Ten Commandments were encoded as the basis of halachic law, there were still a lot of issues with folks reverting to the polytheistic worship of the old gods.

Hell, even the Bible itself mentions this in relation to Moses and Aaron--with Aaron having set up a golden calf, a ritual item of Ba'al Hadad (the old Sumerian god of storms) which was specifically designed as an idol to the (monotheistic) god of Israel. There are at least two instances recorded after this when royalty or the people in general went back into frank polytheistic worship (with the God of Israel equated to either Ba'al Hadad or El) and a number of other instances where the early Israeli people had gone into partial polytheism reversion (with the God of Israel being paired with Ishtar or Astara, and the female companions of God/the gods being referred to as the ashtarot--"Astara" may well have been a functional title of "Lady" in this case, much as "ba'al" is actually a title of "Lord").

Yes, this is where knowing a bit about the predecessors of Judaism gets very interesting :D

I sometimes wonder how much of the monotheism that the Hebrews picked up was related to the dualistic ideas of Zoroastrianism coming out of Central Asia. Judaism has a weird mix of Indo-European ideas of an overall father-god figure grafted onto a local Semitic storm-god chassis. I get the feeling that the Hebrews as a nomadic tribe of herdsmen blundered into the relatively advanced and polytheistic culture of Mesopotamia and tried to mesh up their simple set of gods with a complicated one.

Look at the story of Cain and Abel, and all the stuff in Genesis--it's really clear that it was a herding culture that distrusted the agricultural folk of the cities.

MaudlinMutantMollusk: Do you think any of 'em actually read any of the book?

They prefer to beat people over the head with it and stuff it down their throats.

Son of Thunder: JohnnyC: Somacandra: Seriously, the commandment in Exodus 20 expressly forbids making images of ANYTHING in Heaven as well as Earth.

I think the "no art" commandment can suck my cock. :)

/atheist artist

Obviously "no art" is exactly what that passage means, seeing as how no Jews or Christians ever made art.

They break their own rules all the time...

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

Seems to say not to make an image or likeness of pretty much anything. You think it said something else?

Somacandra: Seriously, the commandment in Exodus 20 expressly forbids making images of ANYTHING in Heaven as well as Earth.

I think the "no art" commandment can suck my cock. :)

/atheist artist

I thought in the case of legitimate misspelling a monument had a way of shutting that whole thing down,.

SquiggsIN: jshine: AdolfOliverPanties: Isn't there something in the Ten Commandments about graven images?

If there is, just about every church on Earth is violating it:

[upload.wikimedia.org image 220x313]

Mormons are one of the few christian denominations i've noticed that use no images of their 'savior' You won't find so much as a single cross in one of their churches.

Nor any golden tablets.

There's a second set of Commandments in Exodus 34, possibly another in Deuteronomy, but that's for scholars/ theologians, not doctrinaires as these OK folks are.
That's not Stars of David at the base of the monument. The Sign of Silence is given. 93/93

I guess they are going to have to abort this monument and try again.

propasaurus: Thou shalt have no other gods...

Wait. There are other gods?

Clapton.

They don't follow them themselves, and they can't even spell them right, but they expect the rest of the country to follow them without question?

Separation of church and state, people. Freedom of AND from religion. Practice what you preach, and get with the times.

I'm glad the ACLU decided to stand down, this time. As long as they don't try to correct the spelling, it should be allowed to stand. As a monument to........well, I'm sure you can all figure that out.

Loucifer: Teh Ten Commandments.

1 Then Ceiling Cat spoked all them werds:

2 I iz Ceiling Cat An I iz Top Cat, An I broughted u out of hawt litturbawx wit no cheezbrgrs for hard mousin at all

3 No can has other ceiling cat!! U gotz other Ceiling Cat, I shoot yous wit mah lollazer eyes. Srsly.

4 If u try be Ceiling Cat of any of mai creayshunz up in floaty skai, down in erth or in watr or I shoot yous wit mah lollazer eyes.

5 If u think faek Ceiling Cat iz Ceiling Cat, I mek u ded An ur kittenz ded An if yur kittenz have kittenz, dey be ded too, for being stupid and stuffs.

6 If not I wuv u An all ur lotz uf kittenz!

7 U sez Ceiling Cat bad, I shoot yous wit mah lollazer eyes, cuz I dun liek it. Srsly.

8 Remembur Caturday An keep holy.

9 U ketch mousies 6 dais An finish ketchin, K?

10 Caturday, u no ketchin mousies. U An all ur peepz go wrship me. And, if yu beez gudd, I maks it so yu can stays home and do alla stuffs yu wanted tu doos.

11 I maded heavenz An erth An see An the stuff that does teh funney hoppey stuffz in An on it - so I make it holy cuz I no ketch mousies.

12 Bez u good to papa kitteh An mama kitteh so u has long nine liefs.

13 U no maek peepz ded with teh malice! Srsly!

14 U no maek sexxes wit other gurlz or menz than urs (that mi jobz!).

15 U no taek cheezburgerz for free if not getz for free.

16 U no tell bad stuff ov ur neibor.

17 U no wantz neibor cheezburgerz! No wief, no gurlz, no menz, no abimalz, NO BUKKITZ! DEY NOT UR BUKKITZ, K? dey da LOLrus' bukkits.

18 When peepz see mai great orkestr wit thundr An all cool speshul effects thei wur scairdey wimps

19 Thei sed to Mozus 'U goez speek to uz An we will listen; but Ceiling Cat will shoot us wit His lazer eyes!'

20 Mozus LOL'd lotz, An a bit moar, for thei wuz such scairdies, An sed 'Ceiling Cat no maek u ded; he just wantz to hav fun wit u gais An maek u scairdey cats so u obei him.'

21 But peepz wur still scairdies An let Mozus go ther to Ceiling Cat.
Ceiling Cat roolz for idles an alters
22 Ceiling Cat sez "Tellz them scairdies: 'U see I meowed to u from big ceilingz.

23 U no mek me of silvar or goldz.

24 U mek me altar of kitteh-litturz An gif me pwnz0rzed animulz ther An I gif u cheezburgr.

25 But u no maek me altar of bjutiful stonez. DO NOT WANT!

26 An u no use steps on altar or I can see ur penises. DO NOT WANT!"

simplicimus: Paris1127: simplicimus: Magorn: simplicimus: The design is wrong. It's two tablets, 5 on each. Did this guy even read the Old Testament?

Well actually THREE tablets, 5 on each, didn't you see the movie?

Yeah, I saw the movie. But on the bright side, we have 5 fewer commandments.

I wonder what was on that tablet... Perhaps a commandment about loving other people even if you disagree with him or her?

Well, the first 5 are man's relationship with God, the second 5 are man's relationship with fellow humans. No idea what would be on the third tablet.

That was the honey-do list his wife gave him.

1. It's okay to call hooters "knockers" and sometimes "snack trays."
2. It is wrong to be French.
3. It's okay to put all bad people in a giant meat grinder.
4. Lawyers: see rule three.
5. It is okay to drive a gas guzzler if it helps you get babes.
6. Everyone should car pool but me.
7. Bring back the word "stewardesses"
8. Synchronized Swimming is not a sport.
9. Mudwrestling is a sport.