AHA Article: No Bibles, No Quarans in Courts
A court of appeals in North Carolina is considering adding the Koran as a valid book to swear upon.
This AHA article talks about how absurd this is even if the intentions are clearly a support for religious diversity. Today non-theists or theists of any religion can take the stand in all 50 states. But, what does it mean when they have no Bible or Koran to swear upon?
Isn't it time we came up with some other means of saying we will tell the truth or should we just start relying on the justice system and the punishments for perjury to protect us? Maybe we should base this on swearing an oath to the constitution or some other politically based document rather than a religious one.
It seems to me that holding on to this old tradition of swearing on a bible is saying that we can't believe a person if they are not Christian or at least not religious; which is just blatantly false. Maybe a better solution is to base it on a person's reputation. We could have a system like the financial credit score system that tracks a person's reputation then you could gauge whether or not to trust a person on their reputation score. This solution sounds a bit ludicrous to me also and there are a lot of inherent problems in how we define the reputation score and who gets to manage it.
But, this is yet another aspect where Religion has played a valid role and we need to replace that capability with some secular solution.
I'd love to hear ideas on this, so feel free to comment on the post and make your own suggestion.
