Morality/Mitt Romney/Religion

VTech shooting

After the horrible killings at Virginia Tech, there are once again calls for religion to be taught in schools.
Teaching morality is fine, but not all individuals in schools are Christians or even religious. To force the children of the nonreligious or non Christians to undergo a Christian religious education fundamentally violates their free exercise of religion.
Moral rules can be taught without referring to a specific deity. Not harming one's fellow man is a universal rule worldwide. Teaching this would honor the beliefs of students who aren't of the majority religious belief.


Romney, hypocrite

Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has stated that we needed elected officials who are “people of faith.” I guess he thinks an atheist combat veteran with a degree in government could not be trusted to be a county clerk.
An atheist believes one must use one's own reason and common sense for problem-solving, be it in everyday life or in the Oval Office. Many religious people do this every day but use religion to support governmental policies such as those who oppose same-sex marriage or the right to die.
For a nation of 300 million people, appeals to religion won't do. Not all Americans would agree with policies based solely on the Bible or another religious book.
An atheist president might believe rights don't come from a god but are the result of evolutionary forces that produced a man who needs, desires and yearns for liberty. If God is true, it doesn't require our country to elect a person to keep telling us that God is true.


Foundation for our morality

Helen Doss wrote, “The last six commandments are the civil law.” But Thomas Jefferson wrote to Dr. Thomas Cooper in 1814: “For we know that the common law is that system of law which was introduced by the Saxons on their settlement of England, and altered from time to time by proper legislative authority from that time to the date of the Magna Charta, which terminates the period of the common law. ... This settlement took place about the middle of the fifth century. But Christianity was not introduced till the seventh century.”
So, the Ten Commandments aren’t the source of our law.
Second, not all religious individuals believe they are worshiping the one true God, as Doss asserts. Some are polytheists and worship more then one God, such as Hindus. The Ten Commandments are obviously about the God of the Old Testament, no other god. To state that it can be applied to other religions is absurd.
Yes, society does need laws, but we are a secular state set up to support a secular government. That was the view of our founders, who stated in the Treaty of Tripoli that the “United States government was not founded in any sense on the Christian religion.”