Town Council being bullied into changing centuries-old tradition

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

You can imagine one as a contrast.

I'm sorry, I don't think it's helpful. Though, of course the obvious unbiased judge would naturally be God (see how he's useful like that? Francis Bacon wrote an essay on this).

Emotional sympathies are many times harder to work around than lack of information. And PVC, I am not saying that christian judges are bad. But isn't praying publicly each day before the trial a sign that he is bringing too much of his theology into his application of the law? It doesn't seem to be a sign of temperance, experience, or reflection.

Who says the atheist only has an un-emotional prejudice? Or that the Christian judge isn't using his practical expereince of the Church to inform his decision? It comes down, as I said, wholly to the quality of the judge and how he uses his experience.

As to his paying every day, and what this reflects, that would depend entirely on the type of prayer he was ingaged in, be it liturgical, affective, diadactic or contemplative. I am assuming from your comment that you don't have any direct expereince of varied forms of prayer, and you may be thinking of the more recent fashion for ecstatic prayer5, which is different again.

I accept the point about the 3rd world nature of most of the religious governments...but doesn't saying that the good governments are post-Christian make my point for me? We've moved past the state being religious, though we still have relics:

Do you suppose a post-Christian philosophy is the same as a post-Islamic one? Modern British Law and its distinction between guilty action and guilty intent were born in the confessional around 1000 AD, while the modern atheist demand for Freedom of concience has it's root in the dissenter's demand for the same in the wake of the Reformation and under the influence of the original Humanists. How different would our institutions be if we had an Islamic tradition of a deterministic religion to build on instead of the Christian tradition of Free Will?

We won't know until we haver a post-Islamic society to consider.