The only things in common between the Commandments and most state or federal laws are prohibitions on killing and stealing ... It's about power

The Founders Confront Judge Moore: "November 20, 2003 by CommonDreams.org | by Thom Hartmann

Judge Moore, the 'Ten Commandments Judge' in Alabama, says the controversy he and Fox news have stirred up is about religion.

But it's not about religion. It's about power. A power that seeks, ultimately, to replace democracy.

... The judge's main arguments for keeping a graven image of the Ten Commandments in the Alabama Supreme Court rotunda were, he said, that America is a Judeo/Christian nation founded by Christians, and that the foundation of American law is the Bible and the Ten Commandments.

The most well-known of the Founders and Framers of this nation - those who wrote the Declaration of Independence, led the Revolutionary war, and wrote the Constitution - would strongly disagree on all counts.

Instead, the record tells us that many of the Founders and Framers believed that secular democracy is a more powerful unifying force for a decent and peaceful civil society than any religion ever was or could be. Although most were spiritual in their own ways, and many were also openly religious, as students of history the Founders and Framers knew the damage that organized religion could do when it gained access to the reigns of political power.

The Founders clearly divided power into four categories: military, religious, wealth/corporate, and political. The interaction of these types of power produced the three historic types of tyranny - warlord kings; theocratic popes; and wealthy feudal lords or monopolistic corporations like the East India Company.
..
Thus, political power would only be held by "We the People," and never again shared with military, corporate, or religious agencies.
...
For example, to keep political power from combining with military power in the new United States of America, the army was put under the civilian control of the elected President, and he, in turn, was legally incapable of declaring war (that power being given solely to Congress). As James Madison pointed out on April 20, 1795, presidents will always be tempted to gain excessive power by becoming warlords, which is why Congress must withhold from presidents the power to make war.
...
And, with the memory of the Salem witch trials and other religious atrocities still fresh in their minds, the Founders knew that those among the organized religions who sought to combine political power with their existing religious power would be unrelenting and could be deadly to democracy.

While our Founders were well schooled in the history of the Crusades they also knew from first-hand experience how oppressive religious men could be with even small amounts of political power. Ben Franklin fled Boston when he was a teenager in part to escape the oppressive environment created by politically powerful preachers, and for the rest of his life was openly hostile to the idea of secular political power being wielded by those who also hold religious power. Although he was enthralled by the "mystery" of the spiritual experience, Franklin had little use for the organized religions of the day. In his autobiographical "Toward The Mystery," he wrote, "I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies."
...
In fact, President George Washington supervised the language of a treaty with African Muslims that explicitly stated that the United States was a secular nation.

The Treaty With Tripoli, worked out under Washington's guidance and then signed into law by John Adams in 1797, reads: "As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,--as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,--and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
...
For example, on February 21, 1811, President James Madison vetoed a bill passed by Congress that authorized government payments to a church in Washington, DC to help the poor. Faith-based initiatives were a clear violation, in Madison's mind, of the doctrine of separation of church and state, and could lead to a dangerous transfer of political power to religious leaders.
...
Yet in the days of the Founders, like today, there were many religious leaders who aspired to political power. They claimed that their right to influence government was legitimate because, they said, government itself was founded on their territory - the Ten Commandments. Because our system of laws was founded on the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments, the religious leaders said, they and their Commandments should play a large and powerful role in government and be able to both take from the public purse and influence the courts and laws.

This assertion - that British common law and American law derived from the Ten Commandments - was particularly infuriating to the Founders.

First, there's the simple fact that there isn't that much overlap. Our laws don't specify a single god who must be worshipped, ban graven images, require us to take a day off work every week, mandate that we "honor" our parents, make it illegal for men to "covet" other men's wives or sleep with unmarried women, or make it illegal to lie (in fact, corporations have recently asserted the explicit "right to lie" under the First Amendment). The only things in common between the Commandments and most state or federal laws are prohibitions on killing and stealing, which most people figure have always been pretty obvious.
...
In a January 24, 1814 letter to John Adams, Jefferson went through a detailed lawyer's brief to show that the entire idea that the laws of both England and the United States came from Judaism, Christianity, or the Ten Commandments rests on a single man's mistranslation in 1658, often repeated, and totally false.

"It is not only the sacred volumes they [the churches] have thus interpolated, gutted, and falsified, but the works of others relating to them, and even the laws of the land," he wrote. "Our judges, too, have lent a ready hand to further these frauds, and have been willing to lay the yoke of their own opinions on the necks of others; to extend the coercions of municipal law to the dogmas of their religion, by declaring that these make a part of the law of the land."
...
It was a long-running topic of agreement between Jefferson and John Adams, who, on September 24, 1821, wrote to Jefferson noting their mutual hope that America would embrace a purely secular, rational view of what human society could become:

"Hope springs eternal. Eight millions of Jews hope for a Messiah more powerful and glorious than Moses, David, or Solomon; who is to make them as powerful as he pleases. Some hundreds of millions of Mussulmans expect another prophet more powerful than Mahomet, who is to spread Islamism over the whole earth. Hundreds of millions of Christians expect and hope for a millennium in which Jesus is to reign for a thousand years over the whole world before it is burnt up. The Hindoos expect another and final incarnation of Vishnu, who is to do great and wonderful things, I know not what." But, Adams noted, the hope for a positive future for America was - in his mind and Jefferson's - grounded in rationality and government, not in religion. "You and I hope for splendid improvements in human society, and vast amelioration in the condition of mankind," he wrote. "Our faith may be supposed by more rational arguments than any of the former."

And yet the true faith of our Founders - the faith in a secular political system uncontaminated by warlord presidents, wealthy corporations, or grasping religious leaders - is under attack once again.
...
Jefferson concluded his letter by denouncing the efforts of churchmen to seize the fledgling United States of America, and paraphrased a 1732 play by Henry Fielding, "The Lottery," in which a character says "Sing Tantararara, Fools all, Fools all," lamenting that in the lottery of life, the fools win out all too often.

"What a conspiracy this," Jefferson closed his 1824 letter to Cartwright, "between Church and State! Sing Tantarara, rogues all, rogues all, Sing Tantarara, rogues all!"