Warning: This blog will deal with what most consider to be religious issues. Some who read it may be offended. If you are possibly one of those, hit the delete button now. On the other hand, if you don’t read it, how will you know that you are offended. Oh, what the hell, most of you have read stuff a lot worse than this could ever be. Give it a read, then decide.
I grew up a Southern Baptist. Well, that’s a stretch. Actually my earliest memories of things religious date from my fifth or sixth grade year. I dunno what happened, church wise before then, but I have clear memories of the Hillcrest Baptist Church in 1953. My mother had a murky religious background until she married my father, born Catholic. He, evidently, lost favor with the church and was excommunicated when dear mom refused commit to raising any future children in the shadow of the confessional. So we became baptists. To be more precise, we became Southern Baptists. To say that Hillcrest was a fundamentalist church is an understatement of monumental proportions. Church wasn’t just church, it was a way of life. Sunday school followed by Sunday church service, followed by Training Union followed by Sunday evening service, followed by Royal Ambassador’s (boys only) followed by Wednesday’s Prayer Meeting, followed by Thursday choir practice followed by the occasional Revival Meeting, followed by summer’s Vacation Bible School. Hell, if the janitor opened the door to let the cat out, we went to church.
I pretty much liked all of it, although I must admit I didn’t pay much attention to the sermons, and I hated missing Maverick on Sunday evening television. I advanced to the highest level of the Royal Ambassadors (RA’s), and learned the books of the bible backwards and forwards (literally), and got a certificate for perfect attendance, if not demeanor, at vacation bible school. I was particularly good at a bible game called Sword Drill in which one competed to be the first to locate a bible verse called out by the youth leader. I always won. I must admit now that I had lightly marked the spot at which the Old Testament ended and the New Testament began in my well worn King James Version (KJV) of the Holy Bible which gave me a little edge. I think I would have won anyway, but I didn’t want to take any chances.
It was a Sword Drill session that got me in trouble. Well, actually it wasn’t Sword Drill itself, it was the target verse that got me in trouble. It really wasn’t the verse then, it was what our youth leader said about it sometime later that caused me to suffer my first deadly doubt. Here’s how it happened. The youth leader called out “Exodus 20:04″ which was an easy get for me as I knew that it’s in Exodus 20 that the Ten Commandments first appear. BTW, they also appear two books later at Deuteronomy 5. No one has ever provided an entirely satisfactory explanation for why they are included twice but there you are; another biblical mystery. I knew pretty much where Exodus was in my KJV and got there in a flash, proudly stood to signal I had the verse, then, I was asked to read the verse to prove I actually had it. You would of thought that being a church and all that they would have believed me, but that’s not how it worked. I won’t bore you with the entire verse, but I’ve recorded here only the part pertinent to my point …”for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents into the third and fourth generation of those who hate me…”. The content made no impact on me at that moment, and in fact, it was more than a year later that this passage and an extraordinary discussion with yet another youth group leader led me to the edge of the religious abyss…doubt. This isn’t the time or place for theological debates, so I will save this discussion for another time. nb…I was crowned king of the Sword Drill for yet another year.
All of the foregoing is to get to The Ten Commandments which is really my focus here. No, I am not a religious scholar, nor am I a religious zealot (far from it), but I have read and studied the bible (KJV) more than the average citizen due to my upbringing in the church, my later time in the classroom at Baylor University, and general interest in various religions of the world. As I indicated above, the KJV has two renditions of the Ten Commandments (TC’s) neither of which can I read as only ten…commandments. In one reading I find twelve, in the next, eleven. I guess it’s all about how you parse them down. As you know, in some circles, the TC’s are referred to as the Decalogue. I suspect that’s another reason, to go with ten and not twelve. I’ve listed them, in my own short hand, for later reference:
1. Have no other gods before me
2. No graven images
3. Don’t bow down before them
4. Keep my commandments
5. Don’t use god’s name for swearing
6. Remember the sabbath and don’t work on it
7. Honor your mom and dad
8. No killing
9. No hanky panky with the other guys wife
10. No stealing
11. No lying
12. No coveting
Numbers three and four above don’t make the cut in most lists and I guess that’s how you get to ten. But they are there….read for yourself if you have a bible handy. There are some problems with the others as well. Number two precludes “graven images”, but not one person I’ve talked to has the faintest idea what “graven” is, and even dictionaries are pretty confused about it. If you look long enough, you will conclude that the contextual definition is likely “sculptured representations”. Hmm? Does this just mean images of god, or does it include Jesus as well? Most churches I know of would be in violation of this one from the get go. How about not working on Sunday? This one is clearly a non-starter. After all, who would cut the grass, wash dishes in the restaurants, and fight wars. What about the NFL? And no lying…that would seem to doom all politicians, and most of the rest of us to damnation. Lying is at best, part of the human condition, and is often an absolute domestic necessity. How, for instance, could you ever answer your wife’s question, “dear, what do you think about my new hairdo?”. I’m ok with not stealing, because I hate people that take my stuff, except for the government, that is. No adultery is a good aspirational goal, but if we’re going to try to “walk the talk”, we are going to have a lot of full confessionals and people on their knees all the time. The “don’t take my name in vain” is ok with me because there are plenty of other perfectly good swear words when you really need them. Likewise, I agree, killing is bad, except, of course, for wars with people who don’t agree with us or make us mad and, of course, capital punishment cases. We have to be able to kill people for a just cause don’t you think. I wonder if god gave Moses any latitude for situational exceptions. I’m drawing the line at number ten, the no coveting one. No one is going to convince me that I shouldn’t be able to covet what I don’t have and really want…from my neighbor or anyone else. Hell, that’s un-american or socialist, and may even be communist for all I know. I think, at the minimum, we should take that one out, and if we just have to have ten, add back the one on no bowing down. It’s kind of harmless.
If you ask me, the real problem with the TC’s of Moses is what they don’t say. I know that god had to put in the first four as a sort of rules of the road for an orderly religion, but you would have thought he might have said something about slavery being bad, or how about a prohibition against child pornography, or maybe that we shouldn’t use of WMD’s (nuclear or otherwise). These seem to be really big misses to me. I’d like to think that if there is a god and he’s hanging around today he would rethink his original list and put out a new list on Facebook or something. They might even get more attention as tweets. I can assure you that more people would read them there than in the old KJV. And you must admit they are a little complicated, even confusing. In fact, one wonders, what with all the problems with them, why small town mayors all over the southern part of the United States want to have statues of them in the town square, or why they are proffered by many as the moral foundation of the world as we know it, at least the American part of the world.
It may surprise some to know it, but there are lots of other religions, and many of them were even invented before Christianity. Hindu, for example, predates it Christianity by about 2000 years, and Jainism and Zoroastrianism got their start about five hundred years earlier than Christianity. Not surprisingly, each of these religions has their own set of rules of the road as well. None of them have exactly ten, and there is a lot of overlap in content. For example, Jainism’s five tenets are:
1. Avoid any intentional hurt to any living thing
2. Be truthful
3. Don’t steal or cheat
4. Have sex only with your wife
5. Only own what you need.
Sound familiar? These particular rules of the road, which sound suspiciously like the operating part of Moses’ list, were set down at least five hundred years before Christianity started to claim the moral high ground.. Granted, the Jains don’t have anything about honor your mom and dad, but I personally think that’s a given for any self-respecting religion. BTW, the best date I can get for the Moses thing is 1441 BCE. Don’t ask me how I know this, you have to take it on faith. Faith, as you probably know is the belief in something which has not or cannot be proven. Of course, no one knows for sure, because it’s not known who wrote Exodus, or Deuteronomy, or the rest of the bible for that matter. But if it’s good enough for Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nycea, it’s good enough for me.
Zoroastrianism, which is the world’s second oldest religion if measured by start date, has a similar but vastly simplified creed. Think good thoughts, do good deeds, and speak good words and you will find their particular brand of salvation. Wow, that’s pretty snappy. You wouldn’t need a lot of sunday school classes to understand those. These guys also were the first to come up with the idea of having only one god…mono-theism.
Taoism, which some might claim is a philosophy, not a religion (I think that’s splitting hairs) has their own, I guess you would call them, Five Commandments:
1. No murdering
2. No stealing
3. No sexual misconduct
4. No false speech
5. No drinking intoxicants
While I’m dead set against number five, you can see that Moses did not have an exclusive on a moral code for the ages.
Once you get in to this commandment thing, it really gets interesting. Ray Teller (of Penn and Teller magician fame) wrote what he calls the Atheist Ten Commandments (ATC’s) which includes prohibitions on lying and stealing as well as supporting your family, which, I assume, includes your mom and pop, but it also directs you to not put things or ideas above other human beings. Not bad for a non church type, eh? My favorite attempt at rules of the road are from Richard Dawkins (author of The God Delusion among other writings on the subject) who has his own top ten, which I like very much. I’ll just give you a sampling: 1) Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty and respect; 2) Live life with a sense of joy and wonder; 3) Test all things; check your ideas against the facts and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them; and most importantly 4) Question everything. You must admit that whatever side of the religious line you are on, these are really pretty good. I wonder if we could combine some of these with Moses’. I see no reason why we couldn’t have fifteen or twenty really good, pertinent ones.
Everyone has their own spiritual journey. Some are straight and certain, others proceed in fits and starts and twists and turns and are punctuated by doubt. My own started with a bible game and continues even today. I haven’t yet ratified my own definitive list of rules of the road, but I rather like the proclamation of Abraham Lincoln when he said, “when I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That is my religion.” Ol’ Abe had a pretty good way with words. I wish I had thought of it first.
