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yjftsjthsd-h 2 days ago

> There's another old practice of refusing to swear on the Bible before telling the truth, as that would imply that they weren't telling the truth before they were sworn in.

I've always found it extremely odd that anyone swears on the Bible, since it pretty plainly says not to do that:

Matthew 5:33-37

“Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ But I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.

https://www.esv.org/Matthew+5/

n4r9 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

There's a great John Stuart Mill quotation from On Liberty related to this. In the UK it used to be the case that you were barred from testifying in court if you declared yourself an atheist.

> Under pretence that atheists must be liars, it admits the testimony of all atheists who are willing to lie, and rejects only those who brave the obloquy of publicly confessing a detested creed rather than affirm a falsehood.

treetalker a day ago | parent [-]

In law school we were taught that swearing on the Bible (and/or belief in God or some higher power) had been thought necessary to give competent testimony because that belief ensured truthfulness (or made it more likely) on the premise that, even if a falsehood were not detected and punished in court, the higher power would surely punish it later or in the afterlife. (In other words, fear-based testimony.)

And we were taught that the need to swear or affirm truthfulness nowadays simply evinces the requisite understanding of the seriousness of testimony in court / under oath — and, by extension, that the testimony must therefore be truthful in order to duly perform the judicial function of arriving at an accurate understanding of past events and realities.

n4r9 a day ago | parent [-]

Yeah, it makes sense from the Christian perspective. But it falls flat when the person giving testimony doesn't believe in the afterlife. It's as if they think atheists are just being performative.

UncleSlacky 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's also why you can't be forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_State_Board_of_E...

"In the 1930s, the president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, Joseph Franklin Rutherford, began objecting to state laws requiring school students to salute the flag as a means of instilling patriotism, and in 1936 he declared that baptized Jehovah's Witnesses who saluted the flag were breaking their covenant with God and were committing idolatry."