Moore's LawThe immorality of the Ten Commandments.
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2003, at 5:04 PM ET
The row over the boulder-sized version of the so-called "Ten Commandments," and as to whether they should be exhibited in such massive shape on public property, misses the opportunity to consider these top-10 divine ordinances and their relationship to original intent. Judge Roy Moore is clearly, as well as a fool and a publicity-hound, a man who identifies the Mount Sinai orders to Moses with a certain interpretation of Protestantism. But we may ask ourselves why any sect, however primitive, would want to base itself on such vague pre-Christian desert morality (assuming Moses to be pre-Christian).
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StumbleUponThe first four of the commandments have little to do with either law or morality, and the first three suggest a terrific insecurity on the part of the person supposedly issuing them. I am the lord thy god and thou shalt have no other ... no graven images ... no taking of my name in vain: surely these could have been compressed into a more general injunction to show respect. The ensuing order to set aside a holy day is scarcely a moral or ethical one, unless you assume that other days are somehow profane. (The Rev. Ian Paisley, I remember, used to refuse interviewers for Sunday newspapers even after it was pointed out to him that it's the Monday edition that is prepared on Sunday.) Whereas a day of rest, as prefigured in the opening passages of Genesis, is no more than organized labor might have demanded, perhaps during the arduous days of unpaid pyramid erection.
So the first four commandments have almost nothing to do with moral conduct and cannot in any case be enforced by law unless the state forbids certain sorts of art all week, including religious and iconographic art—and all activity on the Sabbath (which the words of the fourth commandment do not actually require). The next instruction is to honor one's parents: a harmless enough idea, but again unenforceable in law and inapplicable to the many orphans that nature or god sees fit to create. That there should be no itemized utterance enjoining the protection of children seems odd, given that the commandments are addressed in the first instance to adults. But then, the same god frequently urged his followers to exterminate various forgotten enemy tribes down to the last infant, sparing only the virgins, so this may be a case where hand-tying or absolute prohibitions were best avoided.
There has never yet been any society, Confucian or Buddhist or Islamic, where the legal codes did not frown upon murder and theft. These offenses were certainly crimes in the Pharaonic Egypt from which the children of Israel had, if the story is to be believed, just escaped. So the middle-ranking commandments, of which the chief one has long been confusingly rendered "thou shalt not kill," leave us none the wiser as to whether the almighty considers warfare to be murder, or taxation and confiscation to be theft. Tautology hovers over the whole enterprise.
In much the same way, few if any courts in any recorded society have approved the idea of perjury, so the idea that witnesses should tell the truth can scarcely have required a divine spark in order to take root. To how many of its original audience, I mean to say, can this have come with the force of revelation? Then it's a swift wrap-up with a condemnation of adultery (from which humans actually can refrain) and a prohibition upon covetousness (from which they cannot). To insist that people not annex their neighbor's cattle or wife "or anything that is his" might be reasonable, even if it does place the wife in the same category as the cattle, and presumably to that extent diminishes the offense of adultery. But to demand "don't even think about it" is absurd and totalitarian, and furthermore inhibiting to the Protestant spirit of entrepreneurship and competition.
One is presuming (is one not?) that this is the same god who actually created the audience he was addressing. This leaves us with the insoluble mystery of why he would have molded ("in his own image," yet) a covetous, murderous, disrespectful, lying, and adulterous species. Create them sick, and then command them to be well? What a mad despot this is, and how fortunate we are that he exists only in the minds of his worshippers.
It's obviously too much to expect that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse, drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality, or to demand prayer in the schools. Still, to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is to have been negligent to some degree, even by the lax standards of the time. I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries? There are many more than 10 commandments in the Old Testament, and I live for the day when Americans are obliged to observe all of them, including the ox-goring and witch-burning ones. (Who is Judge Moore to pick and choose?) Too many editorialists have described the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism, when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with it.
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Remark from the Fray:
…it may be that the first four commandments serve no place in our culture, but do they really seem so out of place in the context of a theocracy? granted hitchens doesn't believe in God, but he's playing the reductio ad absurdum game so all i need to do is demonstrate coherency within the Biblical system.
there's a reason, after all, those first four commandments are the first four commandments. the ones that come after are predicated entirely on the authority of God Himself. why not steal? why not kill? why not covet? because God says so. if you don't respect God, why would you respect God's law? i'm not saying atheists can't be moral, what i'm saying is, if i'm laying down the law on the basis of God's authority alone, then that authority must be absolute, unquestioned, and treated with the utmost respect.
sensing this, hitchens supposes no real God would be so insecure …
rape, he says, was left out. well no, it wasn't. rape is a form of theft, after all. it's taking someone else's body without their consent. oh, it's dealt with specifically later on in the mosaic law but one needn't be a torah scholar to see that it's against the rules. and genocide. genocide is what happens when one group of human beings, on their own authority, exterminate another. when God exterminates a group of human beings, it's called judgment. in the OT, God Himself commanded the conquest of cannan and the extermination of the wicked tribes that lived there. maybe that doesn't sound very Godlike to you or hitch, but sometimes things that would be wrong for us are perfectly just for God … if there is a God, He has the right to judge humanity whenever and however He sees fit, and could certainly make His wishes known beyond any shadow of a doubt. finally, if we're made in God's image, why are we so bad? again, the Bible passes the consistency test: we weren't made bad, we became that way after rebelling against God. at that point, our perfect nature was corrupted and we became slaves to sin. the mosaic law exists not because we are expected to follow it … but to demonstrate to us our imperfect nature, the mercy of God, and the need for a savior.
…hitch's real problem is that he, as an atheist, obeys what he thinks of as the really important commandments while flouting the first four. so why bother with the tired old symbol at all? it's very simple, really: hitch lives a moral life … because it seems good to him to do so … if in the final analysis laws are merely a contrivance of man then we have no real reason to obey them. if someday the clear majority of the human race decides that stealing and killing are ok, then that's it. there is no higher court of appeal.
"ah," says hitch "but we are smarter than that."
are we? atheists love to bash the Biblical accounts of genocide, but the major accounts of genocide in the last century were authored by the godless, or rather, by those who stood in the place of God themselves. stalin killed twenty million, hitler killed six million jews alone, pol pot killed two or three million of his own people, hussein killed around one million. there was no one, they thought, to tell them otherwise.
and hitchens can't condemn them.
oh, he can say that their conduct was offensive and outrageous and that he found it personally distasteful and that's all fine, but he could never say that it was wrong because wrong, to him, never means anything more than "inconvenient." he could use the word "wrong," trying to get the emotional impact of a violation of an absolute moral imperative, but that's empty sophistry: no such thing exists to him. and yet we know that there are absolute moral imperatives … locdog thinks atheists do too.
--locdog
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