Moses Addresses the Israelites

Trump Style

By Tom Harley

[Originally posted on Sheep and Goats, March 26, 2020. Republished here by permission of the author.]

And the sons of Israel proceeded to come out of the Red Sea. They congregated and Moses addressed them:

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?

Thor's Day: How many folds?

How many times should you fold your toilet paper?

By Morris Dean

[Published originally on February 10 & 11, 2007, in the posts, "How many folds?" and "Should," respectively.]

We humans want answers to the important questions of life. Several years ago a success coach was addressing a large number of young professional women. The audience responded gratefully when she met their need to know how many times to fold their toilet paper, especially before a business meeting. (Twelve layers, she said.^*)

Christopher Hitchens's new commandments

Front of dust jacket

Standing at the counter in UNC's undergraduate library last week, waiting to pick up the book I was told was being held for me, I could see across the way the relatively few books there for pick-up. One stood out, its broad spine in bright yellow (as in most libraries, the dust jacket had been removed). Must be four inches wide, I said to myself. I hope that isn't it. I was already carrying the book I'd commuted with that day and I was hoping for this new book to be of normal size.
    But the yellow book it was: Christopher Hitchens's most recent collection of essays, Arguably, which was listed in Sunday's New York Times Book Review as one of the five best non-fiction books of 2011. Of the book the Times says:

Our intellectual omnivore's latest collection could be his last (he's dying of esophageal cancer [note: Hitchens has insisted that he's living with it, not dying of it]). The book is almost 800 pages, contains more than 100 essays, and addresses a ridiculously wide range of topics, including Afghanistan, Harry Potter, Thomas Jefferson, waterboarding, Henry VIII, Saul Bellow, and the Ten Commandments, which Hitchens helpfully revises.

"Ridiculously wide range" is admiringly ironic, of course. The first two essays I read were about Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ezra Pound.
    The third was about the Ten Commandments. Hitchens begins this essay by trying to identify just which commandments the Ten are, "since the giving of the divine Law by Moses appears in three or four wildly different scriptural versions." [p. 414] Having settled on the "first and most famous set...in Exodus 20," which "ends with Moses himself smashing the supposedly most sacred artifacts known to man," Hitchens proceeds to review each.
    For example, Commandment VI, Thou shalt not kill.

We can be fairly sure that the "original intent" is not in any way pacifistic, because immediately after he breaks the original tablets in a fit of rage, Moses summons the Levite faction and says (Exodus 32:27-28):

Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor. And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.

The whole book of Exodus is...littered with other fierce orders to slay people for numberless minor offenses (including violations of the Sabbath) and also includes the sinister, ominous verse "Thou shalt not suffer [permit] [Hitchens's comment] a witch to live," which was taken as a divine instruction by Christians until relatively recently in human history. Some work is obviously needed here: What is a first-degree or third-degree killing and what isn't? Distinguishing killing from murder is not a job easily left to mortals: What are we to do if God himself can't tell the difference? [p. 417]

Hitchens concludes the essay with a quiet statement of some ethical principles for today:

It's difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words "Thou shalt not." But who cannot summon the confidence to say: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them? Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us. Denounce all jihad-ists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form. [pp. 421-422]

    Here endeth the reading for today.
    And reading that concluding paragraph makes me wish that I could have written my own New Ten Commandments so flowingly well. Not even numbered! And I feel no compunction to count them.

Oh, one more thing. The book isn't four inches thick. It's only two and three-eighths. It must be that bright yellow spine.
    What essay shall I read next? Maybe the one in which Hitchens describes being waterboarded for the purpose of journalistic research.

Beatings will continue

Beatings will continue
until morale improves

I heard a good one yesterday: The theology of the Old Testament, like a cartoon, can be accurately captioned as the corporate dictum: "Beatings will continue until morale improves."
    I "heard" this from Bart D. Ehrman's 2008 book, which I'm currently reading, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer. He's surveying the so-called "major" and "minor" prophets of the Old Testament (the designations mean nothing more than the relative word counts of their prophetic books) to show how they tried to explain why the God of the ancient Israelites was treating them so horribly. That is, it was the prophets' answer to that "most important question."
    By the way, it's because the Bible fails to answer the question to Ehrman's satisfaction that he recanted his devout Christian faith and became an agnostic. He went to Moody Bible College in his teens, then to evangelical Wheaton College, and on to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he decided to become a Biblical scholar. He's now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
    Ehrman points out that those "prophecies" applied only to the times in which they were written, and to the people to whom they were written, so the jehovahs (as I familiarly term Jehovah's Witnesses), and everyone else, for that matter, have no basis for claiming that the Bible foretells what is happening today.
    Nevertheless, "the beatings will continue" made me think of the Holocaust. The Jews took quite a beating from the Nazis (and from many hypocrites around the world who silently approved the Nazis' attitude and actions to kill Jews). Is the Jews' God still trying to improve their morale by helping Muslim jihadists to wipe Israel off the map?

Of course not. But this does raise the question in my mind whether there might be something else going on to explain why the Jews have been persecuted continually down through the ages (besides their having been tagged Christ-killers, which I don't think explains why the Muslims hate them so much).
    It occurred to me to wonder whether it might be the fact that they invented monotheism? (Some credit Moses with the invention.)
    Sure, orthodox Christians and Muslims are proud to believe in the "one, true God," but consider that they might be proud only in the part of their mind that they're conscious of. A twentieth-century Jew by the name of Sigmund Freud taught us that our unconscious can be quite out of step with our conscious.
    The unconscious of a devout believer can have as many misgivings about a God who allows us to suffer (and may even cause us to suffer, to punish us or try to get us to shape up) as the conscious mind of Bart D. Ehrman can.
    What if even devout believers, in their unconscious, are sick at heart that they even believe in God in the first place? Might they not seek a scapegoat on whom to unleash their anger and otherwise self-disgust (all the while preserving their conscious belief, in which they're too invested to join Ehrman in recanting)?

An amusing conjecture, at any rate.

Why commandments, anyway?

A reader's recent question about my "New Ten Commandments" occasioned my reading them afresh to reconsider doing something about the fact that several of them can be combined.¹ The only reason for specifying precisely ten originally was of course an allusion to The Old Testament (ignoring Mel Brooks's suggestion, in his 1981 film, History of the World, Part I, that Moses had actually received three tablets from God, with fifteen commandments, but had clumsily dropped and shattered one of them). And, as I admitted on July 8, 2008, George Carlin did Moses, Dawkins, and me eight better by pretty cogently (for a stage entertainer) boiling the ten down to two. I don't propose to compete with Mr. Carlin, however.
    In fact, I'm still very much in cogitation mode about this. Why have commandments anyway (over against civil laws)? What purpose could such a list serve, if little general assent could ever be gained for them, in competition as they would be with a multitude of local customs variously at odds with one another, even if they shared some common evolutionary features? In what sense would they be commandments, anyway? I suspect that this whole business of Mel Brooks's and George Carlin's satires, as well as of Richard Dawkins's revisionist suggestion in The God Delusion [p. 263], is about coming to terms intellectually with human cultural history. We want to understand who we are, in the best (truest) terms we can. And we want to help by sweeping out discredited understandings and recommending progressive insights. (And, of course, the folks rabble-rousing for displaying The Ten Commandments in our court houses want to continue to rail against us progressive upstarts.)

    By the way, the accompanying pictures are of The Georgia Guidestones, a large granite monument in Elbert County, Georgia. Says Wikipedia:

A message comprising ten guides is inscribed on the structure in eight modern languages, and a shorter message is inscribed at the top of the structure in four ancient languages' scripts: Babylonian, Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

For example, Guide #4:"Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason."
    The monument has been attacked by Christian fundamentalists as "The Ten Commandments of the Anti-Christ." Of course, a self-reinforcing principle of fundamentalist belief is that the less sense something makes, or the more difficult it is to believe it, then all the more glorious is the faith that it is true.

My Commandment #1, Imagine that "God" exists if doing so somehow comforts or inspires you, but don't fall down and worship it, was my wry, finger-in-your-eye take on belief in God, implying that nothing that followed emanated from "Him" because "He" didn't exist and so never issued any. That Book of Moses was brilliant creative writing, though.

My Commandment #2, In all things, try to do no harm, is suspect from the get-go with its "try," revealing that doing no harm is practically impossible. Even the Jains occasionally step on a bug, try as they might not to. Someone who trys to do utterly no harm surely harms himself occasionally in his attempts, if only in inner turmoil.

With #3, Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you, I was opting for the negative version of the Golden Rule, but I personally like the positive version better, with its call to take action (positive) rather than refrain from action (negative). I like to "do good," to help others, more than I like to simply avoid harming them. Obviously, both versions are worthy and have an august history (not that I'm intimately familiar with it). But it may make more sense to command avoidance than to command commission. I think that Jesus wasn't commanding people to do good (positive), but mainly trying to show them a way to live better, to realize "the Kingdom of Heaven" within. He didn't command anyone to love, he was giving them loving advice for personal betterment.

In the case of #4, Don't rush to judgment but give everyone the benefit of an open mind, I overlooked that mammals have evolved to act automatically, for self-preservation, to not give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I'm not sure I can advise anyone to try to reason with a desperate person who has dynamite strapped around his (or her) torso, whether for religious or other reasons. People do tend to be more closed-minded than they "ought" to be, however, for living harmoniously and progressively in civilized society.

About #5, though, Formulate laws as if you didn't know what your position in the pecking order would be, I cannot be too enthusiastic. Political philosopher John Rawls's principle of the "original position" was a brilliant concept for social justice. But who of us here on the street ever formulates a law?

My #6, Treat all living creatures humanely, is as noble a principle as there is and, in our age of caged animals raised for the commercial food industry, more dishonored than heeded. To stand on a corner with the principle lettered on one's sandwich boards would be a foolish use of one's time and energy. If "God" actually created the food chain (and was thus the first entity to dishonor this principle), then the captains of the food industry are his devoted disciples.

Ha, #7, Always be willing to revise your beliefs according to evidence and reason! Don't we wish! Few of us are able to cast the first stone. At sixty-seven, I've won my beliefs by effort and have waning energy and power to continue revising them, although I have read (in a science article in The New York Times) that "continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you 'bump up against people and ideas' that are different." Still, I hope I have the sense, until the minute of my death, to change my mind because of new evidence or consideration.

#8, Do not indoctrinate your children, but teach them how to think for themselves, is the chicken or the egg of significant cultural advance. If the huge majority of parents could and would stop indoctrinating their children against reason and evidence, religion could die a painless death in a generation or two. But what are the chances of that? Crying The Eighth New Commandment is pissing into the wind. No one is listening, no one will be commanded in this. Or few, anyway.

Speaking of pissing, #9, Support your country when it is right, oppose it when it is wrong, was another pee-pee of mine on the administration of George W. Bush. See my post of December 27, 2006, "Some Dogs I've Known."

And, finally, #10, Question authority; challenge authority that appears illegitimate, is just eighth-grade civics. Still, it's sad that so many downtrodden people (and peoples) of the earth haven't the power to challenge authority, they are so firmly under its boot.
_______________

1. The version currently displayed in my sidebar I formulated on December 29, 2007.

Carlin did Moses, Dawkins, and me eight better

When I took Richard Dawkins up on his suggestion in The God Delusion that the Ten Commandments 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. Of course, he was only following Moses, so why not?
 
 
 
 

But since then George Carlin died (on June 22) and I've been looking into this great man's work. At a UNC library (on June 30) I listened to a CD recording of a live performance he gave not long after 9/11/2001. I was struck by the final segment of his performance, titled on the liner notes, "Why we don't need 10 commandments." Unfortunately, I didn't take notes, or I'd have shared this with you sooner. But fortunately, I discovered yesterday that in the library's copy of Carlin's 2004 book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, there's a section titled "The Two Commandments" [pp. 14-18, emphasis mine] that contains the same material (possibily edited and improved).

Carlin shows his brilliance right off. Unlike Dawkins and me, he's sensitive to having a numerical

problem with the Ten Commandments....Why are there ten? We don't need that many. I think the list of commandments was deliberately and artificially inflated to get it up to ten. It's clearly a padded list.
    Here's how it happened: About five thousand years ago, a bunch of religious and political hustlers....

Of course, Dawkins and I too knew about the hustlers, so why didn't we follow suit, perhaps along Carlin's lines:

...Ten sounds important. Ten is the basis for the decimal system; it's a decade. It's a psychologically satisfying number: the top ten; the ten most wanted; the ten best dressed. So deciding on ten commandments was clearly a marketing decision. And it's obviously a bullshit list....

In all fairness, I have to acknowledge Mel Brooks for having a similar insight. In his 1981 movie, "History of the World, Part I," Moses comes down from Sinai bearing three tablets and begins to explain them as "the "Fift—" but he drops and breaks one..."the Ten Commandments...."

Back to Carlin:

Okay, right off the bat, the first three commandments—pure bullshit. "Sabbath day," "Lord's name," "strange gods." [He's using the Catholic version "because those are the ones I was fed as a little boy."]...Spooky language designed to scare and control primitive people. In no way does superstitious mumbo jumbo like this apply to the lives of intelligent, civilized humans in the twenty-first century.

That leaves seven. Then he's quickly down to six by observing that the next commandment (about honoring thy father and mother) overlooks that

obedience and respect should not be granted automatically. They should be earned. They should be based on the parents' (or the authority figure's) performance. Some parents deserve respect. Most of them don't.

Then, in the interest of logic ("something religion has a really hard time with"), he skips the fifth commandment for a bit and proceeds to the sixth and seventh (against stealing and bearing false witness), which he points out "cover the same sort of behavior: dishonesty." He combines them as "Thou shalt not be dishonest." Down to five.

And then quickly down to four with the combination of the eighth and ninth (about adultery and coveting thy neighbor's wife) as "Thou shalt not be unfaithful."

And when you think about it further, honesty and fidelity are actually part of the same overall value. So, in truth, we could combine the two honesty commandments with the two fidelity commandments, and, using positive language instead of negative, call the whole thing "Thou shalt always be honest and faithful." And now we're down to three.

And the next (the final one on Moses's list),

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods" [note "that coveting takes place in the mind"]
    ...is just plain stupid. Coveting your neighbor's goods is what keeps the economy going: Your neighbor gets a vibrator that plays "Oh Come All Ye Faithful," you want to get one, too. Coveting creates jobs....You throw out coveting and you're down to two...,

one of which is the one we skipped, the fifth:

Thou shalt not kill.
    Murder....But, if you give it a little thought, you realize that religion has never really had a problem with murder. Not really. More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason.
    To cite a few examples, just think about Irish history, the Middle Ages, the Crusades, the Inquisition, our own abortion-doctor killings and, yes, the World Trade Center¹ to see how seriously religious people take Thou Shalt Not Kill. Apparently, to religious folks—especially the truly devout—murder is negotiable. It just depends on who's doing the killing and who's getting killed.²

He offers the revision,

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.

Finally,

Two is all you need, folks. Moses could have carried them down the hill in his pocket.

Carlin can be heard and seen delivering this deconstruction.
_______________

1. The World Trade Center is where Sam Harris starts in his own heraldic 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.
2. "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." – Thoughts of a Biologist, Jean Rostand, 1939.

Magical Thinking

In 1990, after I came down with CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) and its usually associated depression, I started seeing a psychotherapist. My "Youie Summer" of 1989 was then still recent and powerful in my psyche, so naturally I told him about it: the marvelous coincidences I had experienced, the wondrous signs I had seen. How taken aback I was when he characterized my experiences as "magical thinking." It had never occurred to me that that was a psychiatric term:

A conviction that thinking equates with doing. Occurs in dreams in children, in primitive peoples, and in patients under a variety of conditions. Characterized by lack of realistic relationship between cause and effect.^*

Of course, now that I've suggested that much of our thinking about God amounts to magical thinking, I'm wondering if it really is. And I'm wondering in what sense much of the thinking we humans engage in every day as we try to stay afloat might also be "magical thinking" in the psychiatric sense.
_____________________
* John F. Abess, M.D., his Glossary of Terms in the field of Psychiatry and Neurology. Note to myself: read The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion.

Graven Images

Yesterday's utterance here about the god of the Old Testament's being a literary character made me realize that it was rather clever of Moses to exempt reports of what that god had said to him from that god's supposed injunction against graven images.

How many folds?

How many times should you fold your toilet paper?

We humans want answers to the important questions of life. Several years ago a success coach was addressing a large number of young professional women. The audience responded gratefully when she met their need to know how many times to fold their toilet paper, especially before a business meeting. (Twelve layers^*, she said.)

Don't doubt that this was an important question. You too have many particularly vivid memories of a parent or a neighbor or a friend imparting some such information to yourself. I can remember clearly a college roommate's telling me what his father had told him about shaving with or against the grain of the beard and, before that, my dad's showing me how to fold...toilet paper. Oh, you don't just wad it up?

And there are other questions that don't seem so mundane. "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" to quote Paul Gauguin's famous painting, "D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?":

We want answers to such questions. And to get them we often look for someone we trust to tell us. A Tony Robbins or a Wayne Dyer or an M. Scott Peck or Norman Vincent Peale. The last two are dead now, but they were big not many years ago. Or someone who claimed to speak for or from God, like Moses or Jesus Christ or Muhammad. Those last ones have stood the "tests" of lots of other people following them and of their having done so for a long, long time. And two 19th century American prophets, the Latter Day Saint Joseph Smith and Jehovah's Witness Charles Taze Russell, have had their respective international followers for a while, too.

Whichever source we accept is almost always one that our friends or our family or the members of our community accept. If it isn't a natural philosopher or Moses or Muhammad, but it is Joseph Smith, then it's likely the Mormons for us too.

It helps if whatever source is near to hand gives answers more or less like the ones we want to believe. In our rebellious stage, if we had one, we were disinclined to believe what our family or our neighbors believed. We left, to return later perhaps as a prodigal child, to look anew at the source familiar to our childhood and adolescence.

If we've traveled or read a bit, we may now be aware that that source isn't the only one. If it had been Jesus, it might now include the possibility of a humanist philosopher or of Gautama or Muhammad. The question may have become whether to choose one of these or...?

[more to be unfolded later]

______________
*How many folds to get twelve layers depends on whether you're using one- or two-ply paper. The speaker didn't cover this, but I've found that an efficient way to get twelve layers with one-ply paper is to

1. Unroll twelve squares (or an equivalent length).
2. Fold in half (lengthwise).
3. Fold in half again.
4. Fold over one third.
5. Fold over the other third.

With two-ply, unroll six squares and skip the third step.