Posted on 11/13/2006 10:57:02 PM PST by B4Ranch
FAITH UNDER FIRE
Ten Commandments stunner:
Feds lying at Supreme Court
Government tells modern visitors
it's Bill of Rights being honored
Every argument before the U.S. Supreme Court and every opinion the judges deliver comes in the presence of the Ten Commandments, God's law given to Moses on a fire-scorched mountain, and now represented for the United States in the very artwork embedded in the high court structure.
In today's world of revisionist history, the proof comes through the work of a California pastor who visited the Supreme Court building recently when he was in Washington and was surprised that what the tour guides were telling him wasn't the same thing as what he was seeing.
Todd DuBord, pastor of the Lake Almanor Community Church in California, said he was traveling with his wife, Tracy, and was more than startled during recent visits to the courthouse and two other historic locations to discover that the stories of the nation's heritage had been sterilized of Christian references.
His entire research compilation is available online.
"Having done some research (before the trip), I absolutely was not expecting to hear those remarks," which, he told WND, simply "denied history."
So he's written to the Supreme Court, and several other groups, asking them to restore the historic Christian influences to their information, and he's documented his research to explain to those interested what the history is and how it's been subverted.
"I would like to see the record rectified and the proper Christian and Judeo-Christian depictions taught in these places," he told WND.
He was most disturbed by what appears to be revisionism in the presentations given to visitors at the Supreme Court. There, he said, his tour guide was describing the marble frieze directly above the justices' bench.
"Between the images of the people depicting the Majesty of the Law and Power of Government, there is a tablet with ten Roman numerals, the first five down the left side and the last five down the right. This tablet represents the first ten amendments of the Bill of Rights," she said.
The ten what? was DuBord's thought.
Unwilling to be confrontational, he went home and started some research.
One official Supreme Court document, he found, cited a letter from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman that said the "pylon" carved with Roman numerals I to X "symbolizes the first ten amendments to the Constitution." But the letter was anomalous; it didn't have a number of certifying marks that were typical of others.
So he continued looking and after calling in some assistance in his hunt for evidence, he found a 1975 official U.S. Supreme Court Handbook, prepared under the direction of Mark Cannon, administrative assistant to the chief justice. It said, "Directly above the Bench are two central figures, depicting Majesty of the Law and Power of Government. Between them is a tableau of the Ten Commandments…"
Further research produced information that in 1987 the building was designated a National Historic Landmark, and came under control of the U.S. Department of the Interior, and under the new management the handbook was rewritten in 1988. The Ten Commandments reference was left out of that edition, and nothing replaced it.
The next reference found said only the frieze "symbolizes early written laws" and then in 1999, the reference first appeared to that depiction being the "Ten Amendments to the Bill of Rights."
"The more I got into it (his research), the more I saw Christianity had been abandoned from history," he told WND.
When he asked, his recent tour guide denied there were any Ten Commandments representations in the Supreme Court building, he said.
One who was not surprised by the circumstances, however, was Judge Roy Moore, a WND columnist and the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. He was removed from office on a federal judge's order because he refused to remove a depiction of the Ten Commandments from the Alabama courthouse.
"They've distorted history to come up with their own version of things," he told WND. What such changes do, he said, "is divorce ourselves from an understanding of where our rights come from."
Without rights coming from God, he noted, government "assumes control over everything, including what you think."
"Why would they say the Ten Commandments weren't there? They had to come up with something. I could see the progressive disappearance of the word 'commandment' from their literature," said DuBord.
He had just returned from a trip to Turkey, where ancient Ephesus is.
"The tour guide was Muslim, and went on to say, with all respect to all of you, I need to say something to you about the Apostle Paul. ... And he went into an apologetic of Paul's teachings."
"He told us, 'These things happened here,'" DuBord said.
But then to return to the U.S. and find Christianity edited from history left him almost speechless.
"I thought, we started as a Christian nation, and we can't even get this here."
DeBord also noted that during his research of the "Weinman letter," he found another memorial in Washington, "The Oscar Solomon Memorial," noting the accomplishments of the first Jew to serve in a president's cabinet. It's on 14th Street between Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues.
It also was designed by Weinman, and like the Supreme Court image, depicts a human figure leaning on the same table with Roman numerals just as the East Wall Frieze.
But this time, an artist's letter confirms the tablets represent the Ten Commandments.
"Would Weinman have sculpted two identical tablets, in the same city, each with the Roman numerals I through V on one side and VI through X on the other, but with totally different identities?" DuBord wondered. "It seems very unlikely."
The current information office at the Supreme Court declined to talk on the record with WND when asked about Ten Commandments representations on the building, referring questioners to the website.
There, a document does indicate "Moses" is one of various lawgivers portrayed in the friezes, but the site doesn't mention "Ten Commandments." It does mention the "Ten Amendments."
DuBord said he knew of other representations, such as the lower part of the inside of each of the oak doors where people enter the inner Court Chamber, where two tablets carry Roman numerals I-V and VI-X.
But DuBord's tour guide said those – too – were the Ten Amendments.
He then asked, "If there are no other depictions of Moses or the Ten Commandments on the building except on the South Wall Frieze in the U.S. Supreme Court, then what about on the east side of the building where Moses is the central figure among others, holding both tablets of the Ten Commandments, one in each arm?"
"Her response shocked me as much as the guide inside the Court chamber. 'There is no depiction of Moses and the Ten Commandments like that on the U.S. Supreme Court,'" DuBord said he was told.
He asked if there were any pictures of the representation, and she pulled one out.
"Her eyes widened in surprise. There was Moses in photo and description as the central figure, holding the Ten Commandments (tablets), one in each hand," DuBord wrote.
Although there are six depictions of Moses and-or the Ten Commandments at the Supreme Court, the tour guides had been trained to admit to only the one on Moses, he said.
One doesn't have to be Christian, or endorse Christianity, to recognize its influence in history, he said.
"I am … respectfully requesting that the complete educational history regarding the depictions of Moses and The Ten Commandments be rediscovered and retaught to U.S. Supreme Court guides and to the public in the U.S. Supreme Court Building," he suggested in a letter to the court.
DuBord grew up without religion, but during seven years of academic study at Bethany University and Fuller Theological Seminary accepted that the claims of Christianity are true.
He's served in various prison, drug and alcohol rehab ministries and worked as a youth pastor and associate pastor before assuming his duties in Lake Almanor.
His messages can be downloaded at www.iTunes.com, by typing in "almanor" or "dubord."
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore bump.
I haven't the foggiest.
Perhaps there is no standardized training program for the tour guides. I seem to recall, although it is a little hazy, that the tour guide mentioned that being a tour guide was not her full time job; rather, she was intern for the Court and part of her job was giving tours. If this was the case, it might make sense that there isn't a set program for these people--which might lead to slightly different versions of the tour from time to time.
Thank you. I greatly appreciate your compliment.
Keep in mind we believe in a jealous God. Good works without faith is dead. Even though your arguments make sense, the glory is not given to God. He will remove His grace from us if we don't come back to Him.
Another poster (rather unskilfully) pointed out a possible variance between Pastor DuBord's claims and the fact of the matter. Specifically, DuBord said that the SC information desk directed him to a 'website' (DuBord neglected to identify it) which mentions the ten amendments but not the Ten Commandments in regards to the SC artwork. The official SC website does refer to the artwork as depicting the Ten Commandments in the South Wall Frieze and says nothing about the ten amendments.
The unfortunate thing about that discrepancy is that by making a false case (if he is) Pastor DuBord has undermined the credibility of eveyone else who has a legitimate complaint. Marxist leftism is a reality and does have a potent agenda aimed at expunging the 'American way' of representative government from America and the face of the earth. It is rather more insidious and more dangerous than the Islamo-fascist threat as it is not waged in the open. If DuBord has ginned up his case then he has done no one who fights for liberty a favor.
Thanks for posting this B4Ranch
James Madison wrote and spoke many significantly important and revealing things. Here is one just for you:
"The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the World and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities to be impressed with it."*
Nancee
*AMERICA'S God and Country, p. 412
Yes, thank you!
Nancee
Muhammad? That won't sit well with many people. But I doubt they are going to tear the south wall frieze down.
It's removing Judaism.
Yeah, shame on me. How indecent of me to not realize you missed the link in the article! I beg your forgiveness.
BTW, I think a person with "an ounce of common sense" would have read DuBord's article *before* commenting on the thread. Look, when you read an AP story about a NYT article (for example), do you assume the AP's version is accurate, or do you read the NYT article to get the original story? I don't know about you, but I go to the source anytime I read an article about another article. *That's* common sense if you ask me.
You started out with an attitude of arrogant condescension riding on a raft of false statements (which I patiently rebutted with facts) and finally you get around to the ad hominem. Sooner or later people show themselves for what they are.
I'm not trying to be rude, but I honestly think if you had followed the link in Unruh's article, you wouldn't have been so confused. It's nothing personal, and it's not just you. Your comment #14 just happened to be the one I noticed first. There's plenty of others on this thread who also misunderstood Unruh's article and wrongly concluded that there's workers in the Supreme Court building saying essentially, "That's not Moses on that frieze, and that's not the 10 Commandments in his hands." (See replies 60 and 40 and 41 and 46 for some examples.) Either Unruh's a horrible writer or he *wanted* his readers to come away with that wrong impression. Either way, I can understand why you misread his article; his article is crap.
However, what I *don't* understand is why you're having such difficulty understanding what *I* was writing (which btw is why I pointed out your reading comprehension problem). Look, multiple times you called me a liar, and each time I showed you why you were wrong and how I wasn't lying, but somehow you missed each correction and proceeded to call me a liar again and continued to not understand my posts. Yet somehow it's wrong for me to point out your inability to comprehend my posts? Please, spare me your indignation, *especially* while in the same breath you're calling me a liar for the umpteenth time. That dog don't hunt, particularly now that you've actually read DuBord's piece--there's no longer any reason for you to *still* find my posts incomprehensible.
I did read the article you FINALLY gave a link to, after umpteen verbose and rambling posts
"FINALLY"? In fact, I told you about the link as soon as I realized you had overlooked it in Unruh's article. You seriously think *I'm* somehow at fault for not having spoon-fed Unruh's article to you? Why on earth would I have presumed from the get-go that you didn't see the link in the article? Get real. You were posting on the thread; forgive me for assuming that you had actually read the article at issue.
Oops! Silly me; how could I forget? The link to DuBord's article isn't *really* in Unruh's article! I made that up! It was one of my many lies which you caught and corrected me on. Remember? ;-)
Yeah right; keep dreaming.
Anyway, it's time for my meds. I'm done with this thread. Later.
That's a bogus quote-- Madison never said that.
I say that it is possible if one looks at the context of the two sculptures.
In the context of the Oscar Solomon memorial, he is remembered for his accomplishments as a Jew. A clearly religious reference. A reference to the Ten Commandments is not unexpected nor is it unusual.
In the context of the other sculpture, the frieze in the Supreme Court, the figures are representing the Majesty of the Law and Power of Government. Two concepts that are clearly not a reference to religion. The presence of a tablet representing the Bill of Rights is not an unexpected nor unusual thing to see depicted there.
I do not disagree with Mr. DuBord's assertion that there is a concerted effort to revise our history as a nation.
But I do disagree with his statement as quoted above that the identities of the tablets in two different sculptures being different is unlikely. It is as likely as unlikely.
Glad to be of service.
Yes, I probably should have said, "Judea-Christian" to be more precise.
AMERICA'S God and Country p.411. I will be happy to research this further using cross references just to make certain that he did say or did write it. Thank you for bringing your concerns to me regarding this quotation. Do you think that the following is a bogus quotation as well:
"It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage...Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe."*
Again, thank you. I will get back to all who have read this quotation and either retract it or further document its veracity.
Nancee
*1Ibid., p. 410
Getting harder and harder to pretend otherwise, isn't it...
Nancee
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