annot close it without offering this parting shot across Carrier’s bow. If you recall, the primary claim that Carrier was attempting to prove was that the founders did not base our legal system upon the Ten Commandments of the Bible. In his effort to do so, it was Carrier who suggested that we search for any reference to these Commandments in John Adams’ Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America. We have seen that, in that book, Adams was critical of Solon, and he spoke favorably of the Law of Moses. But the clearest example of Carrier’s error is found in the fact that Adams actually mentions the Ten Commandments themselves in this book. In the fourth chapter, Adams wrote the following:
If, as Harrington says, the ten commandments were voted by the people of Israel, and have been enacted as laws by all other nations; and if we should presume to say, that nations had a civil right to repeal them, no nation would think proper to repeal the fifth, which enjoins honor to parents.
Here we have Adams recognizing the probability that the Ten Commandments were adopted by Israel through a popular vote, that those same Commandments have been part of the foundation of all other legal codes, and that it would be presumptuous to say that any nation had a right to repeal those Commandments. In short, this one sentence, from the very source that Carrier recommends, disproves everything that Carrier sought to establish about the founding of our great nation.