Carlin did Moses, Dawkins, and me eight better

Richard Dawkins

Revising the Ten Commandments

By Moristotle

[Author’s Note: Originally published on July 8, 2008.]

When I took Richard Dawkins up on his suggestion in The God Delusion that the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament needed updating to align them with the advances mankind has made in understanding what’s what (and what ought to be what), I rather slavishly followed him in retaining the number 10 when I developed “My ‘New Ten Commandments’.” Of course, he was only following Moses, so why not?

À-propos "Thou shalt not kill"

In Jean Rostand's 1939 book, Thoughts of a Biologist, he writes¹:

Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conquerer. Kill them all, and you are a god.

How apt to have read this only hours after writing yesterday's post, and then to read this morning the following paragraph in Tom Engelhardt's June 29 dispatch, "The Good News in Iraq (Don't Count on It)," about the United States's use of air power in Iraq:

Consider, for instance, a small passage from a recent piece by New York Times correspondent Thom Shanker on inter-service rivalries in Iraq. The U.S. Army, he reports, is now ramping up its own air arm (just as it did in the Vietnam era). In the last year, it has launched Task Force ODIN, the name being an acronym for "observe, detect, identify and neutralize," but also the über-god of Norse mythology (and perhaps a reminder of the godlike attitudes [emphasis mine] those in the air can develop towards those being "neutralized" on the ground).

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1. According to Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, 2007