An entry in our back pages directory in sidebar caught my eye the other day, and I clicked on its New Ten Commandments link to revisit them and see whether I even remembered them. (When I formulated them, ten years ago, I hadn’t put up a stone monument of them in my front yard to remind me, and, even though I did inscribe them in my back pages, I don’t read them every Sunday, let alone every day.)
The first commandment, right off, is kind of a shocker: “1. Imagine that ‘God’ exists if doing so somehow comforts or inspires you, but don’t fall down and worship it.” (I would never – although I confess I used to, in my distant past – make a special trip someplace once a week in order to worship.)
As I read down the list, I realized that, rather than commandments in the strict sense – injunctions to act thus and so – the items in my list are, rather, expressions of my personal values. (Apparently, I had come not to value worshipping gods.)
But then it dawned on me that the same judgment seems to apply to the so-called Ten Commandments of the Judeo-Christian Bible – they were an expression of the community values of the primitive Israelite tribe that wrote them down in their Holy Book. Of course, my own list plays off those Israelites’ list (as did Richard Dawkins’s list, and the lists of the late Christopher Hitchens and George Carlin – Carlin’s list was very short*).
My motivation for formulating a new list was to bring the originals up to date, and at the time I thought I was performing a service for all modern individuals.
Of course, as recently as the Alabama special election to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s seat in the United States Senate, we were reminded that when the Republicans’ candidate (Roy Moore, the individual Carlin refers to in the footnote, lest you have forgotten) was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, he got in trouble (in November 2003) for refusing a federal court’s order to remove the marble monument of the Ten Commandments that he had installed in the lobby of the Alabama Judicial Building.
The point is that people are all over the place as to personal values. (Contemporary Americans are a bit less homogeneous than those ancient Israelites – in part because of [or is it in spite of?] social media.) You who are reading this may be (1) solidly with former Judge Moore, (2) more or less with me, or (3) somewhere either (a) in between us or (b) outside the range and more extreme than either of us.
If your core values are at least somewhat different from the core values enumerated on the former Judge Moore’s monument (see image above), what might your “New Ten Commandments” look like? (For your convenience – so you don’t have to visit the sidebar – here is a link to my New Ten Commandments.)
_______________
* [The late George Carlin’s shorter version of the commandments:]
First: “Thou shalt always be honest and faithful, especially to the provider of thy nookie.”u
And second: “Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless, of course, they pray to a different invisible avenger than the one you pray to.”
Two is all you need, folks. Moses could have carried them down the hill in his pocket. And if we had a list like that, I wouldn’t mind that brilliant judge in Alabama displaying it prominently in his courthouse lobby. As long he included one additional commandment:
“Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself!!!“
–From George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops (2004)
| Copyright © 2017 by Moristotle |
No comments:
Post a Comment