And I was worried about Romney...

With the mild backlash Romney felt after his little religious ditty a few weeks back, one would think all the candidates would tread lightly on the whole god thing. However, on Monday in Michigan, Mike Huckabee said that the constitution should be rewritten in the word of the "living God." Specifically he said, "I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."

The idea that our constitution, a document that for better or worse has served the United States pretty darn well for the past 200 years, could be turned into a religious document that dictates the law of the land is far scarier to me than Mitt Romney or either of the Bushes stating a post-theist like myself has no place in this country.

The pretentiousness of Mike Huckabee is truly frightening. This idea sounds way too much like Muslim sharia. Sharia, as defined succinctly by wikipedia is "the legal framework within which the public and some private aspects of life are regulated for those living in a legal system based on Muslim principles of jurisprudence and for Muslims living outside the domain." Are we to take the word Muslims out of that and replace it Christians? What are we to think, that a constitution rewritten with the ideals of the bible is going to be any different than sharia?

Mike Huckabee, a former minister, supposedly believes in biblical inerrancy, that the bible should be taken word for word as truth. However, even moderately educated individuals can easily pick out inaccuracies, contradictions and human rights violations throughout all religious texts, even the bible. Some early Greek philosophers thought it was wrought with contradiction. Porphyry, a philosopher who lived about 100 years after some of the gospels were written said,"the evangelists were fiction-writers -- not observers or eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus. Each of the four contradicts the other." Here we are, 2000 years later and none the wiser? The fact that Mr. Huckabee believes so stringently in the bible and that it is the word of god lends credence to the idea that he believes a biblically constructed constitution should assume a role much like the Qur'an sharia does in Muslim society.

The Bible, Qur'an and even the Book of Mormon have presented numerous generations with "moral compasses." Due to poor educational frameworks, religion was a necessary vehicle of this guidance. But, many of us are truly aware of the equally horrible ideals presented by the bible. Imagine, a whopping third of the nation would have to be converted or done away with right off (nonbelievers, all bad children, homosexuals). Slavery could be reinstituted and all the rights minorities and women have been fighting for all these years could be swept under the carpet. Frightening, to be sure.

Those individuals that had a hand in writing our Constitution were absolutely swayed by their religious histories. Generations before them, sculpted them into the people they were and gave them the foundation to found a new country on the basis of freedom. Religion therefore played a critical role in the founding of this country and in the writing of it's laws. But the country and it's laws are not based directly on the bible as so many believe. They are based on thousands of years of moral guidance from religious institutions in an educational vacuum. Regardless of their religious backgrounds the founders all ended up agreeing that for the American experiment to work, there could be no establishment of a state religion and laws had to be free of religious pretext. It's right there in the First Amendment.

What Mr. Huckabee wants to do flies in the face of the freedom of religion set forth in the First Amendment of the very document he want to change. Religious egocentrists, like Huckabee, Romney and Bush have no right to force religion down the throats of any other American, period, it is the law. I am an independant voter, I am not a liberal, I am not a democrat, I have even voted republican in the past and I had high hopes that Mr. Huckabee would cancel out any fears I had of Mitt Romney filling the most important office in this country with dogma, but I may have been mistaken. Mike Huckabee should retract his statement. It is, by definition, un-constitutional and therefore, un-American.