Why does this keep happening? Virginia school district posts Ten Commandments

Are these people living in the dark ages? Don't they have newspapers and the Internet?

A Virginia school district is restoring the Ten Commandments to their classroom walls in spite of being told by their own lawyers that it's illegal.

There are so many aspects of this that baffle me that it's hard to know where to begin.

Do they really think this is going to convince their children to believe in God and stay in their faith? Is their regular Sunday (and often Wednesday) church not enough?

Don't they have better ways to spend their money ... like on the kids' educations? This is certain to spark a lawsuit

Ten Commandments in Oklahoma: A Disappointing Victory

(Update: The original headline said "Texas" but it's Oklahoma.)

Yesterday the Supreme Court declined to hear the case from Stigler, Oklahoma, in which the Federal Court ordered a monument with the Ten Commandments removed from the courthouse lawn. While it is a victory that maintains our constitutional rights to a religion-free government, it's too bad that the Supreme Court didn't answer this case once and for all.

A number of other states actually urged the Court to take the case on – not because they had a specific pro/con agenda, but rather because they wanted a clear answer. These cases keep popping up, over and over. Some local Christian minister or ladies group or men's fraternal order will get the notion that everything that's wrong in the world is due to the fact that we don't have God and Jesus in our courtrooms, and they stick a Ten-Commandments monument on some government lawn, and then the state is faced with a big, expensive legal battle.

Roadside Religion and Film Festivals

I'm on the way to the Red Rock Film Festival, a road trip that is taking us from San Diego north to Las Vegas, then over to the southwest corner of Utah, the Zion National Park area. As background, my wife wrote and produced a movie (I'll leave it to you internet sleuths to find it), a feature-length comedy/drama that has already won four awards at film festivals, including best story/writing, Director's Choice, and Best Narrative Feature. We also got best LGBT, which was a salute to one of our actors who did a fantastic job playing Lola/Lowell, a transvestite waitress. So that's four awards in eight film festivals, and we're hoping for another this weekend.

We just passed by Yermo, the run-down town where Lola is a waitress in our movie. Her employer, Milo the Cook, is being harassed by the town's health inspector, Ed, who doesn't like "people of his persuasion," i.e. gays.

Lo and behold, as we drove past Yermo today, what did I see? Some good Christian had placed a series of signs by the road, the Ten Commandments! They were nicely spaced to give you time to read each one. And probably illegal since the 1965 Highway Beautification Act limits signs near Interstate Freeways.

I'd always thought maybe my wife was a bit harsh on the town of Yermo when she wrote her movie script, but maybe not.

And this again raises the question that I asked in by blog The Jesus Truck: Did the person who went to all that trouble, printing the signs, driving posts into the ground, and bolting the signs on, really think it would ever make a difference to even one person passing by? Like, maybe some truck driver would see the sign and say, "Gosh! What was I thinking! I guess I won't visit that prostitute tonight after all!"

Get real. Those signs are, once again, more for the person who put them up, to bolster his ego.

Tags: religion ten commandments atheist atheism christian christianity gay homosexual