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this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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Just because a thing is common doesn’t make it correct, or even harmless. It just makes it common.
Our legal system is not based on religious belief, and it’s a reflection of poor judgment to quote meaningless and legally-irrelevant texts.
Would you respect a judge that quotes Harry Potter in official documents on a regular basis? It’s unprofessional, and it suggests a poor decision-making process which produces the actual harm.
YES! If the judge used the Harry Potter quotes to advance sound legal reasoning, I'd consider it a potentially clever and humorous way to inject some levity into something that's otherwise likely mundane and dry. Also I guarantee you a judge has quoted those books in opinions, along with every other popular piece of literature.
I'm sorry to remind everybody incensed here, but the professionals in the profession get to decide what is and is not professional, and the legal profession has a long history of quoting material that's non-germane. You can be upset about it if you want, but we're fortunate that judges explain their reasoning at all.
Quoting a book you don't like doesn't make a decision bad. A decision is bad if it's wrong on the law, and as I think everybody in this thread knows, the Bible isn't the law of the land! Quoting non-law in order to bolster a line of reasoning isn't good, bad, harmful, or harmless by itself, because the reasoning is the important thing. The Bible has been used to stand for many bad positions--but if it hadn't been, those positions would still have been bad!
While you lot are pulling out your pitchforks because a judge quoted the Bible for the billionth time in the last 200 years, did any of you even bother to find out what the decisions actually were?
Good points.
It's also worth noting that the article attributes the Separation of Church and State to James Madison's interpretation of the Bible, but never raises an issue with this fact as it did with more recent biblical analogies.
I think you make some good points. Ultimately I think that religious reasoning should be avoided in governing as much as possible, but given the fact that the Bible is nothing more than a book, there is no reason that it cannot be evoked by a judge so long as it is clear that it is being used to help explain the logic of the decision, not that the biblical text is leading the judge's position.
Even as an Atheist I have found myself quoting Bible stories. They aren't all dogmatic.