The 10 Commandmends: A Closer Look

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
1

Here in the U.S., some religious folks are constantly trying to get the ten commandments placed as a display into public court houses, or somehow otherwise sanctioned by the government. They claim that the ten commandments are the foundation of law in Western civilization and what this country was ‘based on’. This argument seems to depend on people having a general sort of impression of the ten commandments as some “good basic rules” of society. Some people think it’s a bunch of stuff like “don’t steal”, “don’t kill” and so on, and see no problem. But let’s take a closer look at just what the ten commandments say (using the protestant version here, since these are most often the folks pushing this here)…

1) I am the Lord Thy God, you shall have no other gods before me.
This is a clear violation of the freedom of religion - a constitutional value held in high regard in the U.S. Furthermore, having the state declare someone as our ‘lord and God’ would be a violation of the American principle of separation of church and state.

2) You shall not make for yourself an idol.
Also a violation of religious freedom.

3) You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God.
This is a violation of freedom of speech, also and American foundational value.

4) Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.
Forced religious observance? Unamerican.

5) Honor your father and mother.
Good advice, but not something that should be law.

6) You shall not murder.
This is a good one, and should be a part of U.S. law - for many reasons.

7) You shall not commit adultery.
This should be filed under “good ethical principles” but not something held to be punishable by law.

8) You shall not steal.
A second good one, that should also be a part of the law.

9) You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
This is good ethical advice in general. If we’re talking about bearing witness in a trial then this should be law, but if we’re talking about fibbing about random things outside of trials, then it should not.

10) You shall not covet your neighbor’s house or wife.
Thought control? The law should not get into what people are ‘thinking’ about.

So, while many people seem to have this vague notion that the ten commandments are a bunch of generic civic lessons about good behavior, we can see here they are nothing of the sort. Only TWO of the ten commandments would be anything we would want to have as a part of U.S. law, or any legal system (perhaps three if you count the in-trial context of #9). The rest are irrelevant to U.S. law, and several of them are contrary in their very spirit to everything America stands for. They certainly aren’t generic, general, or universal. The ten commandments were not the basis of U.S. law. Rather, it was the enlightenment that provided the philosophical basis to U.S. law - an enlightenment that was, in large part, brought about by looking back at ancient Greek philosophy. In other words - pre-Christian pagans.

For a better group of 10 American principles, try the Bill of Rights.

2

I actually live in Alabama where all that shit went down with the big monument to the 10 comandments. It was in the Birmingham courthouse just down the street. The guy, Roy Moore, who was responsible is all but bansihed from real politics here. After they made him remove the monument, he kept moving it around to other public places, then donated it or something to some people who kept trying to do the same thing. I’m not sure where is is now.

The problem I think is really a 1st amendment issue.
You’ve got the free exercise clause…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Exerc … _Amendment
which makes them think it’s ok to put up the monument.

Then you’ve got the establishment clause…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishm … _Amendment
which says you can’t really put it up in a public courthouse.

It’s like they want thier free exercise but they want to violate the establishment clause in freely exercising. I don’t know man. This guy was like a supreme court justice in this state, and should have known better. I believe he has been thrown off the court.

Here’s the guy.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Moore

What a chump.

3

An excellent point Smears. The separation is a two part principle: the free exercise of religion AND the restriction of the government from promoting it. This is similar to the common misrepresentation of prayer in public U.S. schools. That subset of Christians commonly says that kids ‘can’t pray in school’. But those court rulings never restricted kids from praying. It wasn’t about restricting the people - those rulings were about the state restricting itself, saying that government agents cannot lead people in prayer and you can’t use publicly purchased equipment or time to do so. But the children themselves commonly form bible clubs, pray together, and so on all they want on the schools as long as they’re not disrupting class time.

It seems hard to believe that so many of these conservative Christians really don’t understand the difference - that they really think that when you tell them they can’t use public property or facilities to enforce prayer on others that this is somehow a violation of their right of expression. It’s really baffling.

4

I would really like to know how much of this is religious folks “trying to get the 10 commandments placed” here and there, and how much of this is the ACLU trying to get the 10 commandments removed from places where they have always been. Like the Alabama Courthouse example, did he put those there as some recent political statement, or had they been there for generations and the Feds just recently decided it was bad, or somewhere in between? Makes a huge difference to me.

5

In the case of Moore, he brought them with him during his circuit court days and that got him in trouble. Then when he was on the Alabama Supreme Court, he commissioned the momument.

6

Well yeah, then it seems to me he doesn’t have any ground to stand on. He tried to change the way things were, the law said ‘no’, and that should have been that.

7

I know that on several church/state lists I’m on, I get notices all the time of new efforts happening. In addition, I’m sure there are also a lot of longtime violations out there being challenged as well. I honestly don’t know what the exact proportions are of each - just that both happen quite a bit. In any case, I’m not sure I see a difference. It’s either inappropriate or it’s not - regardless of how long its been inappropriate. If one were arguing for some sort of traditional basis, then can you imagine arguing for leaving a “whites only” sign on some public building because it had always been there? This may not seem like the same thing to most Christians, but to Buddhists, Humanists, atheists, and other minority faiths (all tax-paying, full and equal citizens), it pretty much implies the equivalent: “Christians only”.

The response to this is often that ‘this is a Christian nation’ or was founded as one, but that’s not really accurate. (1) it was actually founded as a secular government - which was quite intentional and controversial at the time of the constitution’s writing. Leaving out any reference to God, it was criticized as being ‘godless’ at a time when all other constitutions normally had such mention (it’s only mention was, in fact, in the separation clauses mentioned in earlier posts in this thread). (2) When we talk about it having been there a ‘long time’ we’re not talking about the founding of the nation. Rather, most of these things (including things like God being injected into the national anthem and on the standard-circulation money) were added during the 1950s McCarthy era when atheism was being wrongly associated with communism and to question these things would be like questioning why we got attacked after 9/11. So, it truly is just an example of an inappropriate violation of American principle that’s managed to hold on for a long time - versus any sort of ‘traditionalist’ or ‘original founding’ notion.

8

If there were a representation of the Ten Commandments on the facade of the Supreme Court that had been there since 1791, I’d want it chiseled off and replaced with some symbol representing law, based on justice, that is equally applied to all.

But…

While Moses is there, the tablets are blank!
This is a very enlightening article at Snopes, one part of which (the Madison quote) I debunked in a column several years ago. Meanwhile, we should definitely take “In God We Trust” off of our money as a start, and replace it with “In Truth We Trust”. :sunglasses:

snopes.com/politics/religion/capital.asp

9

I was embarrassed that I did not know that there were in fact TWO different sets of ten commandments WITHIN THE HEBREW BIBLE ITSELF! People act like the ten commandments are unique timeless rules. Yet sitting right in front of us are two different lists! The first (Exodus 20) were smashed by Moses. God supposedly hand wrote the second list that was “the words that were on the first” tablets. Uhhh… God?.. The list is not the same words. A little mistake. I guess God didn’t remember the first correctly. :astonished: See below or check it out for yourself in the bible:

The First Tables of Stone (Ex. 20) (later smashed by Moses)

  1. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me.
  2. You shall not make for yourself a graven image. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.
  3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
  4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
  5. Honor your father and your mother.
  6. You shall not kill.
  7. You shall not commit adultery.
  8. You shall not steal.
  9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
  10. You shall not covet.

The Second Tables of Stone (Ex. 34) (“the words that were on the first”)

  1. Thou shalt worship no other god (For the Lord is a jealous god).
  2. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
  3. The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep in the month when the ear is on the corn.
  4. All the first-born are mine.
  5. Six days shalt thou work, but on the seventh thou shalt rest.
  6. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, even of the first fruits of the wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year’s end.
  7. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread.
  8. The fat of my feast shall not remain all night until the morning.
  9. The first of the first fruits of thy ground thou shalt bring unto the house of the Lord thy God.
  10. Thou shalt not seethe (cook) a kid (young goat) in its mother’s milk.

A photo reference to #10 version 2.0
Funny… I don’t remember seeing anything about goats etched in stone in front of the courthouse…

10

I disagree…marriage is a contract. There are benefits to being married that the government doles out, like with taxes, and if you breach that contract then you can be held responsible by the government. In Pennsylvania it’s even on the books that a woman must give back her engagement ring if they break the relationship off before the marriage because the woman entered into a contract by accepting the ring; it’s not a gift.

Of course, if you want to get around the adultery bit, just take that part out of the vows.

I don’t necessarily agree with the notion, but the state has some say in the institution the way it’s set up.

11

I agree with Anthem.

It is a contract and a state honors such contracts. But some state also guarantee the right to individuals of have sex with almost anyone (or anything) even in exchange for money.

12

I guess people who needed to be told these were actually doing the opposite.
It means they were killing, stealing, lying, cheating, etc … what a life they had. Well, some of us are still living in similar situation, though.
And the poor god thing wasn’t even worshiped enough. It had to nearly beg for the better treatment. :smiley:

Sounds more like primitive tribal rules.
I don’t think It would really fit to someone living today and far from middle-east.

13

You know in all the versions of the commandments presented here, #1 clearly states there are other existing Gods, not just one. :laughing: Does anyone else see that? Seems to me that god was only talking to those particular folks. :laughing:

14

Yeah that had been raised and misinterpreted for quite some time now.

But I think this connotes idolatry. And I think idolatry in the Paulean sense of the word.

15

Exactly. It continually has God saying that He is the God of Israel. The preface of the first commandment is: “I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” He’s only talking about/to the House of Israel. Whether the other gods were false gods or not appears to be irrelevant. The important point is that the Israelites should worship only its one God, and if you violated that rule, God would visit “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me”. (The mothers, I suppose, would have been stoned immediately so as not to have to worry about any more such “generations” from her.) :confused:

16

He just did it all of a sudden. He paid for it out of his own pocket and it weighed like 2 tons. Stuck in right in the courthouse lobby just out of nowhere.

17

I agree. You get the feeling, when reading the old testament, that God is threatened by other rival Gods. “Please worship me! Not those other Gods.” It would seem silly for God to care about ‘other gods’. He knows he’s the only God, so if other tribes are worshiping God, why isn’t it him as well? It just seems so petty that is so insistent on worshipping him and not other Gods. There ARE NOT OTHER GODS, so why does he continue to be threatened by them? I’ll tell you why, because all the different tribes were making their Gods. They had to insist that their God was the ‘correct’ one.

18

My god is better than your god, My god is better than yours, My god is better because he loves us and not you. My god is better than yours,( sung to the old commercial dog food song for Ken’l Ration, I think)

Well it seems to me that it sort of makes us pawns in a very complex chess game, if we read the 1st commandment that way… Oh goody goody :-"