Something to bash on

[Taem]

In order to teach "right from wrong" you have to define what that is. Just saying "Kids need to know right from wrong" might get a round of applause, but that's only because it's so utterly vague that nobody will ever disagree with it. Is the problem that kids actually don't know that something they do will get them in trouble, or is it that they don't care? I don't think the problem is a lack of knowledge but a lack of caring. It takes nurturing to get kids caring about other people.

Can't morality be defined or at least interpreted threw our laws? In college, I took a couple of interpersonal communication classes and I'll tell you that they didn't teach me a thing about what was "right" and what was "wrong", however the information gleamed from these classes made people [think] about the actions they were taking. It is the process of thinking about the consequences of ones actions before committing to them that harvested concepts such as right and wrong IMO, and I believe this tool can be used to help our little ones deal with moral situations better than children who have never had such instruction.

Personally, I don't think the Ten Commandments are at all profound and the fact that people insist on parading them around like they're Newton's Principia tells me that we have a lot of people who are either impressed by very little or they've never really thought about just how obvious some of the commandments really are. The prohibitions against killing, theft, and adultery are obvious enough that their presence in the Ten Commandments is probably a result of borrowing them from whatever law existed in the time and place that they were scribbled down; laws against such things surely pre-date the Bible. The prohibitions against blasphemy are specific to religion and do nothing to ensure people will be decent to one another, and I wouldn't at all be surprised if those ideas were borrowed from other religions.

But I wholeheartedly disagree with your stance that the Ten Commandments ought be posted for the knowledge they present. They don't present any knowledge that people capable of reading don't already have. But neither do they teach people how to apply that knowledge. So... what do they do? Advertise. Posting the Ten Commandments is an advertising campaign, folks. It advertises Christianity, primarily. Personally, I got sick of advertising two years ago, and I avoid it whenever possible. I haven't watched T.V. since.

Fair enough. I really don't have a strong enough argument against what you said to make a proper rebuttal, however I think in this instance we can agree to disagree. Without any types of positive enforced moral stipulations in public view - there are plenty of negative ones, such as vandalism - it seems almost counterintuitive to society to complexly remove all the good ones, but this is just my opinion.