Shortly after watching multiple accounts of the Dayton killings just about an hour north of my home in Cincinnati, I have to wonder if this killer or the one in El Paso was ever the recipient of any effort to teach him the Ten Commandments.
Some people are well acquainted with President George Washington’s Farewell address in which he said that “religion and morality are the indispensable supports” of a democracy. A bit later in the Address he responds to those who think otherwise. Contemporary secularized USA certainly illustrates the truth of his statement.
It occurs to me that the time is ripe for a massive petition to the Supreme Court to enshrine somehow the Washington statements into Court decisions. Wasn’t it sometime in the 1950s or so that a Court decision banned the reading of the Bible in public school classrooms etc.? That just compounded the damage to our culture provided by the Blaine anti-Catholic amendments.
The atheists and the Planned Parenthood folks have been running the country’s educational system. It’s time to get back to basics. It’s time for the Courts to realize in practical ways that it is for the benefit of the country to have faith-based schools teach morality. And it should take place now, before the rapidly multiplying Muslim communities make legal the teaching of Islam but not Judaism or Christianity in public schools. Somehow, every student should learn the Ten Commandments. They can learn them as divinely revealed or they can learn them as a natural development that is necessary for community peace and prosperity. Or both.
I don’t know how to organize anything such as is needed, nor at 88 do I have the energy to do much about it. But El Paso and Dayton certainly shout loudly about the need for such teachings as a start toward the redevelopment of a Culture of Life.
John F. Kippley