Group of atheists has filed a lawsuit

But they are including it because people adopted it as a religious symbol. If they hadn't, they wouldn't. I guess to get the Ten Commandments into a courtroom we'd need to have it venerated by a bunch of judges first.And that, gentlemen, is how we separate church and state.

Hence all this trouble. Yes, if they'd all adopted a cross as a symbol of mother's apple pie rather than Christianity this whole thing could have been avoided. You think my scheme wouldn't work? But why not? Surely enough religious veneration, by the right people, in the right place, makes a religious symbol secular ... or is it just this one?

I'll wait for the judge. Well, does it? Quite possibly. For the historical value it gained by being venerated. You wouldn't object if they displayed the Bill of Rights because of its historical associations, would you? So apparently if the Ten Commandments was venerated enough, it, like the cross, would become secular and historical, at which point you could put the Bill of Rights in a broom closet and replace it with the secular ol' Ten Commandments.

This is indeed usually the case, but for some reason James Madison forgot to stipulate as much in the Bill of Rights, so it is possible to erect purely secular displays in the courtroom. And, as we have now learned, an object can become purely secular as a direct result of being the object of religious veneration. So I don't see why it wouldn't work.The only question remaining is how much religious veneration makes a thing secular. Does it actually need to be blessed by a priest, or can laymen make it secular if they're sufficiently devout? All the time? What a shame, then, that the one time you decided to call me on it, I wasn't. Jolly bad luck, old bean. Some quotes, then: Let us know when there are enough of you to amend the Constitution. Clearly the case is not completely without merit. Public displays of religious symbols have been successfully challenged in the past. The question is whether this particular religious symbol is immune for some reason. No you don't, what on Earth gave you that idea?You can swear on the Bible. Or the Koran. Or the Guru Granth Sahib ... etc. Or you can affirm. It's a matter of individual choice, like the symbols on soldiers' headstones, and as such does not entangle Church and State.

My opinion is that I'm glad I'm not a judge. I was. I said: "If you left a display of the Ten Commandments outside a church for long enough, and enough people paid religious reverence to it, and a sufficient number of priests blessed it, could you then put it in a courthouse as a secular historical artifact?" And apparently an artifact can become secular simply as a result of receiving religious veneration. So it seems that my scheme would work, and that you can indeed make any religious artifact completely secular by having enough people treating it as a religious artifact for long enough. Apparently repeated applications of holy water progressively washes all the religion out of it until it isn't religious at all.It's possible that someone really super-religious like the Pope could make it secular at a single stroke, if he gave it a really thorough Pontifical blessing. But the basis on which they are selected is surely their artistic merit rather than their religious significance. If a painting by (let us say) Donatello, previously identified as St. Spirograph The Vague Rebuking The Lepers, was realized by art historians to be actually a picture of Socrates teaching his disciples, would it lose one cent in value or be taken off the walls of a museum? Whereas if the cross had no religious significance, it would just be scrap metal. And if it was a crescent and star people would have thrown rocks at it.

Trying to get displays of the Ten Commandments into courthouses is one of the things conservatives like to do when they're not too busy licking cocaine off rentboys. "Help"? It wouldn't have had the "historical secular value" that it has.Look, this is all topsy-turvy. Suppose the museum had commissioned the cross, and they explained to the judge: "Oh, it just happens to be cross-shaped. No-one has ever taken it as a symbol of faith, or sprinkled holy water on it, or called it a miracle, or exhibited it outside a church. It's secular." Then the judge would have said: "Nice try ... assholes". Agreed?But because people have done all these things, somehow it becomes secular. Surely it shouldn't work like that. Which museum?

Presumably the reason it was there in the first place was that it did have some secular value.

Well what did happen? They used it as a crane?It "became secular" by becoming a religious symbol. Well, see, that's where you're wrong.