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The Ten Commandments |
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The point being, ten rules for better living that were appropriate 2000 years ago aren't necessarily of any use today, and it's therefore pretty ridiculous that people give them such importance in this modern era. Imagine if there were 10 rules for practicing medicine listed in the Bible, rules based on the best knowledge of the time? Rules that covered such vital topics as leeching off "bad blood", banging loud stones to frighten away evil spirits, and so on. Can you imagine anyone wanting to post those in doctor's offices and insisting that people practice medicine based on them? It's an absurd example, and that's exactly my point. Why should the moral code or ideas of a society from more than 2000 years ago be given any special weight today? True, the morals that lead to a peaceful society are far less changed over time than medical knowledge, but the principle is the same. This page collects my comments from various blogs on the subject of the Ten Commandments. More recent stuff is listed on top.
Amusing Ten Commandments news
of late. A born-again judge, Chief Justice Roy Moore, in Alabama has
worked to impose his view of Christianity upon US law for his entire career. His
latest efforts have been trying to get the Ten Commandments on display in his
courtrooms. He's been blocked from doing so, since it's quite obviously a
violation of various separation of church and state edits in the US
Constitution. Not content to obey the laws (an odd state of affairs for an
elected judge) he had a big Ten Commandments statue made at his own expense, and
then had workers drag it into the federal courthouse where he worked, and bolt
it to the floor in the middle of the night. Since then he's been doing all
he can to block efforts to have it removed. A federal judge ruled that it must be removed, but Roy Moore and his attorney
are vowing to fight on, saying they'll probably appeal to the Supreme Court.
I really have no idea what legal precedent they think they can appeal to, other
than the, "We're religious and we really really want everyone else to live
under our religion." plan. Which, while compelling to them, isn't
exactly legally binding in the United States in 2002. There are a couple of pictures
of the statue here, with the highly-paraphrased Ten Commandments legible in
the stone. The larger question, in my mind, is why people are trying to
include the Ten Commandments in US courts or laws anyway. Hardly any of
them are actually illegal, nor should they be. I wrote about this in the
past, so I won't belabor it again today.
One of the oddest things about The Ten Commandments is how some religious judge or school administrator is always trying to get them posted in a courthouse or school office or police station. It's odd because the Ten Commandments have very little to do with the legal system in the United States. Hardly any of them are even illegal, to tell the truth. Don't believe it? Read on. There's a funny article about protesters in Philadelphia, where they are covering up the Ten Commandments on some courthouse wall. I can't really imagine a more obvious conflict of the whole "separation of church and state" than posting biblical verses on the side of a courthouse, so what is the objection? Obviously it's religious people who have a personal stake in their beliefs being imposed on others, right? But do they have a point? Are the 10 Commandments something valid in the modern world, and something we should be posting on courthouses or in schools? I tried a quick web search and got a site that sounded promising, www.tencommandments.org. One of their main nav bar links is "Against Homosexuality", and has this right at the top of the page:
Odd that he left it out of the Ten Commandments if he felt so strongly about it, huh? I mean he had space for admonitions against being mean to your parents, but couldn't shoehorn in a word about manlove. Aside from the rather tortured grammar and occasional misspelled word, they certainly have open-minded and modern people running that site, huh? I can't imagine that we wouldn't want legal documents from from a book that breeds this sort of understanding and intelligence posted on our public courthouse walls. Anyway, they do list the Biblical quotation from where the 10 Commandments are taken.
So let's recap: 1) Mandatory Christianity. Not only is this not legal, it's clearly illegal and un-American, not to mention Taliban-esque. 2) Religious icons are Illegal. This is pretty clearly not enforced, and never will be. Gather up all your Jesus paintings and statues, rosary beads, that Buddha statue from the Chinese restaurant, all crosses and crucifixes, and that tortilla with the blurry shape that looks sort of like the Virgin Mary, and turn them in at the nearest police station, where they'll be held in evidence for your trial. 3) Saying "Goddamn" is illegal. This isn't illegal, would violate several sections of the Bill of Rights and various constitutional amendments. 4) Working on Sunday is illegal. No it's not, and it certainly would be a disaster if this were enforced. So no police, firemen, air-traffic controllers, etc, on weekends? 5) Respect your parents. Nice advice, but certainly not legally enforceable, and what if they are criminals, or drug addicts, or deserted you? 6) Murder is illegal. At last, something that's actually similar to a law. Of course you can murder if it's self defense, you are stopping a crime, the victim is condemned to death, etc. 7) No adultery. A nice guideline, but certainly not against the law, and since the only way a lot of long term marriages stay together is by the couple allowing each other to cheat a bit... 8) No stealing. At last, #8 and we actually have an indisputable crime. Unless of course the person stole to get what you are stealing from them, or you are an officer of the law and what they have is illegal, and therefore your stealing it from them is legally "impounding". But hey, stealing is almost always wrong, so while it's a pretty minor crime, at least it's a start. And it only took us 8 "commandments" to get here. 9) No lying about your neighbor. This is sort of an odd one, and why is it just about your neighbor? So you can lie about strangers, or foreigners? Lying isn't against the law either, except in court. Plus you can very often have two or three people telling the absolute truth, as they remember it or saw it, and all contradicting each other. So who is bearing false witness then? 10) Don't be jealous of anything. Another reasonable guideline, but certainly legally unenforceable. And anyway, jealously is what fuels most human endeavor. We work hard to buy nicer things, after seeing someone rich who has what we want in the first place.
My tally is 1 of the 10 commandments (#8, Stealing) is actually illegal in almost all cases, and one more (#6, Murder) is usually illegal. #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10 are clearly far outside the realm of law enforcement, and #7 (Adultery) and #9 (False Witness) can be illegal, or at least unethical. So we want to have this posted on courthouses for what reason, exactly? There are thousands of laws you can break without breaking any of these Biblical commandments, and you can break 8 or 9 of the 10 commandments without breaking any actual laws. Does that not totally invalidate them as any sort of a legal guideline? Yes, it's a rhetorical question. |
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He has a point, but what he says applies to pretty much every "holy" book, and I don't see how it contradicts anything I say in my article. The various books that have been compiled to create "The Bible" were relatively accurate and useful when they were written, and contained the world view, history, criminal code, sociology, theology, etc of people back then. The question is what validity or usefulness they have in the modern world, when everything else has changed so greatly. Holy books are all creations of their time, written by people living 1000 or 1500 or 2000 or however many years ago. Very few of them claimed to be divinely-inspired then; it's just that over the years as they've been edited and worshipped, they've come to be considered as the Word of God. All of that is fine; most people need to believe in something, some higher power to make them feel like the world isn't just chaos and injustice and fleetingly temporary. The problem comes when people try and cling to millennium-outdated morals or criminal codes, especially when their only defense of them is that they are in this really old book. Can you imagine if the same principles were applied to the criminal codes, or medicine, or science? (Well, there are the ridiculous Christian Scientists with their Noah's Ark and 8,000 year old flat earth nonsense.) Most of the Western World is horrified by the brutality and patriarchal nature of Islamic Law, and we try to impose our value systems on other traditional laws, such as the practice of female genital mutilation practiced in much of Africa. So why are a select few of the laws from way back then held up as enduring and timeless guidelines, while all the rest of the outdated stuff is thrown out? And why do 10 Commandment types allow new laws to be created, when there's no mention of them in the Bible? What, God didn't intend the book to last forever as a universal arbiter of justice? Not to mention the fact that such things as slavery and incest and warfare and child labor were entirely acceptable and encouraged elsewhere in these holy books. |
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All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
hile
the Ten Commandments are a very hot topic for a lot of people, I regard them
with bemusement. Since I don't believe in any supernatural spirits or
deities, I don't give the words in the Bible any special importance. To me
they are what factual evidence suggests; the collected mythologies and
literature of ancient Middle Eastern tribes. Of course their original
writings on scrolls covered far far more than is in the modern Bible, and the
modern Bible is highly-edited and has been updated over the centuries, but
that's a subject for another articles page.