Throughout history, we've seen that religions have influenced laws of some nations/cities/towns at one time or another. In some cases, they continue to do so. As far as I know, many states in the middle east derive some of their laws from Islam (such as Sharia Law). While you could say that beheadings, whippings and hangings are purely detrimental, I think it would be unfair to say that religion(s) is incapable of providing beneficial laws and/or outlooks.

An ancient chinese teacher named Confucius [who founded Confucianism] developed a system of ethics that has had a tremendous effect on chinese culture; which probably includes laws. In his teachings, Confucius stressed the importance of honesty, justice and loyalty.

So what do you guys think; is it OK for a religion to influence laws?

I wouldn't really call Confucianism a religion as it is far more like a philosophy.

Anyway, my beef with religion influencing laws is that religions tend to have a lot of harsh stances on trivial matters. For example, homosexuality. Is there any benefit to us as a society to ban homosexual marriages or even homosexuality? No. Yet there are many who would have us do this simply because their religion says it's wrong. As another example you've got the blue laws in some US states which make selling alcohol on Sunday illegal. To anyone but a Christian these laws seem absolutely absurd (the reason why I single out Christians is because Muslims and Jews do not view Sunday as the sabbath).

I personally can't think of a law influenced by religion that has any objective logic behind it. I know that theists love to point to their religions' stances against crimes like murder and theft as proof that all law systems owe their existence to religion, but laws against violent crime and theft are laws that you would expect to see in any society for the obvious reason that without them your society is going to crumble apart. Furthermore, most laws don't have any basis in religion (traffic laws, government regulations, trade laws, etc). All you get when you involve religion with legal decision making is a bunch of laws that enforce an incredibly arbitrary moral viewpoint that would only be agreed to have validity by followers of that particular religion.

I don't buy into the idea at all that prohibitions against murder are even partially influenced by religion. A society needs rules against damaging crimes like murder, theft, and rape or else it will not be able to function since everyone will be more concerned with their own self-defense and safety than doing anything productive. I highly doubt that there was ever a point in human history where a society existed in which it was perfectly acceptable to randomly kill other people at your leisure. Indeed, the fact that even in chimpanzee groups you see chimps punish individual members of a group for transgressions that harm the rest of the group suggests that laws arise simply due to the need to keep social order.

I would argue that when it comes to things like murder, rape, and theft that religion did not influence law at all but rather such rules come about as a result of a human predisposition against those crimes and the obvious need to prevent them in order to maintain social order. The fact that religions preach against these same things can be traced back to said predispositions as well.