Swearing In By The Koran?
National Review Online:
The Constitution Protects Multiculturalism
Column by Eugene Volokh, CBS News
Snippets:
"Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to the United States Congress, has announced that he will not take his oath of office on the Bible, but on the bible of Islam, the Koran."
"The U.S. Constitution is a multiculturalist document. Not in all senses, of course: It tries to forge a common national culture as well as tolerating other cultures. But it is indeed multiculturalist in important ways."
"To begin with, the oath is a religious ritual, both in its origins and its use by the devout today. The oath invokes God as a witness to one's promise, as a means of making the promise more weighty on the oathtaker's conscience."
The US government is supposedly one that backs up a separation from religion. And so why should any religious book whatsoever be used for a swearing in? In a supposed civilized nation, why not bypass the gods and make the promise by the 'oathtaker's conscience': "I promise to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America." Period. No god book. One's own oath should be weighty enough in the best of all possible worlds, the world of knowledge and rational thought.
Paul Brians
Washington State University
"Voltaire's most famous work, Candide, satirizes the arguments of Leibnitz [here spelled Leibniz] and Pope that 'all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.'"
Voltair "never dreamed of creating a perfect world (despite the utopia depicted in Candide). He only argued that the world could be less bad than it is if we replaced ignorance and superstition with knowledge and rational thought."
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