Thursday, August 9, 2007

More on the Ten Commandments Commisssion

Last week I wrote about the Ten Commandments Commission and H.RES. 598.

A blogger from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State picked up on the story and wrote more about the Ten Commandments Commission:

The list of endorsers reads like a veritable Who’s Who among the Religious Right. It includes John Hagee, Pat Robertson, Rod Parsley, Jay Sekulow, Benny Hinn, David Barton, Gary Bauer, Charles Colson, Roberta Combs, James Dobson, D.
James Kennedy, Tony Perkins, Rick Scarborough, Lou Sheldon, Paul Weyrich, Don Wildmon and Ted Haggard (yep, his name is still on the list).

The organization is headed by Ron Wexler, an Orthodox Jew and Israeli native whose online bio makes him sound like a tourism official.

...

Wexler sounds like quite a piece of work. After the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005, one fundamentalist writer quoted him saying, “It was revealed to me that in numerology, the numerical value of the Hebrew letters that make up the name Rita + God is equal 620. The number of all the Hebrew letters that make up the Ten Commandments is…. 620! Is there a connection?… Could this now be the spirit of God above the water? Rita + God equal 620 equal the Ten Commandments? Could this be the wake up call for the nation? Now when the Ten Commandments are thrown out of schools and out of courts, could there be a connection? Just think for a moment that there is a correlation.”

Last year, Wexler claimed to have located “an inscription of the Ten Commandments in ancient Hebrew has been dated at more than five hundred years old” at a remote mountain in New Mexico.

Reported one Web site, “This mysterious, ancient inscription of God’s foundational law for all mankind, found in the American wilderness, causes thoughtful people to wonder if God indeed had His mighty hand on the United States of America hundreds of years before it was even founded, said Wexler.”

H.RES. 598 has been refered to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. You can read text here and here.

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