http://slate.msn.com/id/2087621/
Moore's Law
The immorality of the Ten Commandments.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Wednesday, August 27, 2003, at 2:04 PM PT
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).
The 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
