Biblical Evil #3--The Ten Commandments

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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The Ten Commandments NKJV. The evil here is not just the instances of false morality, but mixing them with true morality in order to give the false morality a false authority.

Exodus 20:2-17
Deuteronomy 5:6-21

I>> 2 I am the LORD your God, which have brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. 3 You shall have no other gods before me.
6 I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. 7 You shall have none other gods before me.

Who is “You”? This addresses all that follows to the Israelites. How then is it applicable to me, a non-Jew or Israelite? (BTW, What is the difference between an Israelite and an Israeli?)

II>> 4 You shall not make unto you any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: 5 You shall not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;
6 And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my Commandments. 8 You shall not make you any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth: 9 You shall not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, 10 And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my Commandments.

The initial part is absurd. According to this, even taking a picture of an animal is immoral. But the worst part of the whole 10 Commandments is that we are damned to the 3rd and 4th generation (and how come that part isn’t in the Exodus 2nd Commandment). While bowing down and worshiping and idol may be stupid or lacking in virtue, it doesn’t hurt anyone else, so it isn’t immoral.

III>> 7 You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
11 You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain: for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

I’ve never have understood this one exactly. It means not to swear falsely in the Lord’s name is indeed immoral. Shouldn’t it be immoral to swear falsely at all? But it’s also been taken to mean you shouldn’t say goddammit or something, which is not an example of immorality.

IV>> 8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days shall you labour, and do all your work: 10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD your God: in it you shall not do any work, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger that is within your gates: 11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
12 Keep the sabbath day to sanctify it, as the LORD your God has commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labour, and do all your work: 14 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD your God: in it you shall not do any work, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of your cattle, nor your stranger that is within your gates; that your manservant and your maidservant may rest as well as you. 15 And remember that you were a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD your God brought you out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

This is another inane example of something that’s presented as immoral that isn’t, on top of being addressed only to Israelites. It could indeed be a good idea to set aside time for meditation or thought about philosophical issues, but does it have to be on the sabbath instead of maybe spreading it out during the week as time permits. Then there’s the modern idea that this means moral people go to church on the sabbath or Sunday and put money in the plate and participate in the mind-numbing indoctrinating rituals and observances. And finally, there’s the addendum to this in Num 15:35, “And the LORD said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death (for gathering sticks on the sabbath): all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp”, which is about as evil as you can get.

V>> 12 Honour your father and your mother: that your days may be long upon the land which the LORD your God giveth you.
16 Honour your father and your mother, as the LORD your God has commanded you; that your days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with you, in the land which the LORD your God giveth you.

Here again, this is advice on how to be virtuous concerning parents that are worthy of honor, not a moral necessity, especially if your parents are perverts or otherwise evil.

VI>> 13 You shall not kill.
17 You shall not kill.

Yes, “kill” has been correctly re-translated in later versions as murder. But what about all those centuries where the only English translation was “kill”? Some people took it literally that you couldn’t even kill in self-defense, and some liberals are abiding by it that way even though they ridicule the Bible. I don’t know of anyone who took it to include animals and plants, but they could have.

VII>> 14 You shall not commit adultery.
18 Neither shall you commit adultery.

If you swore fidelity, yes.

VIII>> 15 You shall not steal.
19 Neither shall you steal.

No problem with that.

IX>> 16 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.
20 Neither shall you bear false witness against your neighbour.

…or against anyone, sworn or otherwise.

X>> 17 You shall not covet your neighbour’s house, you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is your neighbour’s.
21 Neither shall you desire your neighbour’s wife, neither shall you covet your neighbour’s house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or any thing that is your neighbour’s.

Can we control what’s in our heart? If your neighbor’s wife is really hot, can you blank it out of your mind? No. But acting on it in regard to that any of these things is immoral, which includes the act of tempting his wife to be unfaithful to her husband.

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except, of course, to stone someone to death who gathers sticks on saturday. but, you know, that goes without saying. OBVIOUSLY you can kill that person.

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A good post, you obviously put some work in here.

The initial part isn’t specifically claiming it is immoral; even worse! It forbids it and claims it as a sin. This precipice doesn’t even make sense with the presupposition that this is the word of God. It offers no reason. It’s tyrannical to demand an obligatory love of God, there is no option apparently.

This is another interesting example of how religion uses things thhat are completely natural to us (and in fact part of us inherently as humans) against us. The most common of our desires used against us is sexual desire, which although as moral beings we should inhibit it to a degree, it is completely unfair to ask us not to even think about it.

For me, almost all of these commands elicit a means of imposing authority, as you said.

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This is obviosuly the one exception in all circumstances.

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ya, last saturday i saw this dude gathering sticks, and i was like, “bro, come on man, you know what i gotta do now.” and he put his head down and he was like, “ya, i know, i’m sorry, get it over with,” and then i cut his head off. such a shame, he was a really nice guy too.

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You probably should have stoned him, to be honest. If he’s gotta die, might as well turn it into a sport.

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nah, he told me he likes getting stoned. says he’d do it every day if he had the chance.

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Wouldn’t we all…

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Killing actually has several further declarations in the “Law”.
It’s doesn’t really stop at “don’t kill”.

The Hebrew doesn’t even say that.
Here’s the Hebrew:
לֹא תִרְצָח

This would be what it would be for “don’t kill”.
לֹא להרג

Instead, it is לֹא תִרְצָח, which translates best to “don’t murder”.
Well…kind of.
לֹא translates mostly to “negative verb”, so it’s kind of like saying, “not murder”.

This conceptually is the same as saying, “Don’t”, but it’s not inherently a command to “do not”.
Instead it’s a command to “not murder”, or rather, “negate murder” is another way of thinking of it.

In either case, the concept of “murder” in this same culture that produced this rule was that it was not that which fell into line with the “Law” regarding what was acceptable grounds for killing someone.

There are several “Laws” for such.
If none apply to your case, then you have “murdered”, and if you have “murdered”, then the culture needs to “negate murder” since “not murder” (same phrasing, flipping which meaning of interpretation is used since both are implied) was not accomplished.
Meaning; a balance would be needed to “negate murder”.

People really need to keep in mind that this was a people that were developing civilized law for self-governing without really much to base the ideas from.
If there’s one thing that freaks most humans out, it’s unreasonable (meaning, for reasons you or the society you are part of cannot identify with in imagination) killing…murder.

We call the extremes of these today sociopathic murderers, and often are serial in behavior.

Alright, I’ll stop there, sorry…didn’t want to hijack anything, just thought I’d help with the clarification there.

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I said that, and my point was that if this is God’s word, it would have been translated that way at the very least, for centuries. But it wasn’t, which begs the question, how much else was mistranslated or written down wrong in the first place. We’re dealing with the word of men, not God.

But it’s presented as being given by God directly, and in the case of the Ten Commandments, inscribed directly by Him. He was taking care of them, they were His children, He watched over them night and day–they didn’t have to develop anything.

Of course I don’t believe that, but it’s what we’re expected to believe and what many have believed for 2-3000 years.

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As you and I both know…shitloads.

I don’t think you really needed to tell me that did you?

I mean…come on; you and I have worked together on enough textual work to know our minds on the subject matter.
Who cares what is alleged to be the accepted variation.

Coming from your positing, I can certainly be guaranteed that what you are going to aim at is going to be anything but.

Ah…right, I just remembered that you like to throw out the reds for the passer-by reading that may find something they didn’t know.
Alright, to entertain that end…

To assert that in some concept of a literal passing is to dismiss a massive array of Hebrew symbolism and meaning.

Before anything of the sort can be asserted, one would first have to answer what the Hebrews of the time relatively thought regarding the concept of their god in the first place; what his role was (shut the fuck up to anyone reading that just thought about gender bias…deal with it, the Hebrews referred to their damn god as a him; they had a separate goddess that was female…their god wasn’t it); and how that correlated into any sort of reason for their future development as a people.

If someone cannot answer that, then, in my opinion, they can’t really validly start asserting what the hell took place according to the record of what capacity the Hebrew’s may have understood their Law to arrive to them, and why.

All that they can assert is that they have religious belief that it took place in some manner they hold to.

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I’ve found myself wondering exactly what constitutes taking a name in vain as such. Of course, I came to the same conclusion, which is “to swear falsely”, but I still have no clue what that means referring to God. I pretty much gathered that the intended meaning is essentially not to profess a false belief in, or allegiance to, God. I agree with you in that professing a false belief, or false loyalty, should be considered immoral altogether, if anything (though certain contexts may provide exception). However, this applies only to God, and is unconditional. By the commandments, you would be committing an immoral act if you professed a false belief in God in order to save your child from a murderer. The funny part is that the gravity of this commandment has been taken so far out of context in modern interpretations that it has become more a matter of ‘manners’ than morality.

Now it seems that most typical Christians consider this commandment broken simply by using “God” as the object of a sentence or statement, rather than the subject.

An even more disturbing notion, to me, is what has been willingly modified for personal gain.

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If you look at this as man-made, then the answer is shamelessly…all of it.

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Yes. Didn’t think you were decidedly in that camp though.

Has there been a recent change in…IDK…outlook?

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No…I’ve always held that view.
Hell, that conversation through PM I offered a while back about the book of Mathew, etc… is founded on using the error rates investigatively to determine likely starting points.

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Even if some religious text actually did come from some divine conduit, it would likely have still been corrupted almost in its entirety, by now.

I do admittedly think of it as man-made, which makes notions like blind faith and religious extremists all that much more deranged, delusive, indulgent, and deviant to me. I see an underlying ‘evil’ to it all, which causes something of a paradox for me – desire is the essence of man, it is wholly natural. Indulgence of that desire is no less natural, but can be detrimental in certain contexts. So, is it the desire we seek to understand or the contexts in which, or ‘things’ that, we desire?

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See, that’s why I don’t like the divine approach.
If we assume divine authorship, then it means we must then accept that vial and evil Disney characters later altered the construct.

If we assume inspired men wrote the texts, then it means we only must assume that man does the best he can and jacks up like man does.

The difference?
Purely evil (for apparently no other reason than being evil) Jafar.

vs.
The often vial, but pragmatic, political Al Swearengen

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If we accept divine authorship, we must assume divine protection of that material. Otherwise, it would become corrupt almost immediately. And if mortal authorship, it would be corrupt to begin with unless we can prove its historical aspects, or logically deduce a rational foundation for its wisdom–which would be indistinguishable from our reaction for unprotected divine authorship plus the additional question of how we could know if something was originally divine and so protected.

IOW, if God doesn’t reveal Himself along with whatever He is saying or doing, how do we know what “He” says or does is actually Him.

BTW, that cuts two ways. If a pillar of cloud/fire parted the Red Sea as described and then sat watch over me and showered manna on me six mornings a week for 40 years, I’d believe it was God, especially 3000 years ago. Instead, the Israelites built a golden calf idol in its very presence, which for me is proof that we’re dealing with inconsistent human authorship and/or legend to begin with.

You point to Disney’s evil bad guys. I know there’s explanations, but Michelangelo’s horned Moses is pretty foreboding as well:

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The image of Moses deserves the horns poetically.
The account in the Biblical texts is one that would have Moses be as one among the most vial, ruthless, and merciless military leaders in history.
Moses is then contrasted by being the wise that holds a staff that always turns into nachash (the serpent), which means that he can wield the wiles of wisdom.
The last nachash was in the Garden of Eden.

Michaelangelo is playing upon these attributes mixing in confusion based on the linking of nachash to the late translation of Lucifer to Satan; all being related to “serpent” during this era.

Moses is then being shown as questionable; a quandary to the Christian (at least of the time of Michaelangelo).
A man that is both the wielder of wisdom, the leader of the people towards truth, and yet also every negative attribute of man in violence; and represented in power by the symbol of the devil (at least at the time of Michaelangelo).

Regardless of the interpretations by either you or I; clearly, the Michaelangelo’s Moses shows just how confusing of an image can be created when the Satan is mixed with other images that are not literal links of that same figure.
When “Lucifer” the myth was linked to Lucifer of Isaiah, and then linked to Satan of Job, the devil of Matthew, and the nachash serpent of Genesis…I don’t think anyone readily realized that they just empowered Moses with a lineage of evil while at the same time the texts praise him as among the single most revered source of the knowledge of God.
Michaelangelo, however - apparently, did.

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Wiki says: “When Saint Jerome translated the Old Testament into Latin, he thought no one but Christ should glow with rays of light — so he advanced the secondary translation.[125][126] However, writer J. Stephen Lang points out that Jerome’s version actually described Moses as “giving off hornlike rays,” and he “rather clumsily translated it to mean ‘having horns.’”[127]”

I think Michelangelo could well have understood the controversy and recognized the chance to be ironic with the Bible’s blessing.