A Small Aside on the Ten Commandments

An Excerpt from Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion

In his article, Eckstein brilliantly dissects the claim that the justice system is based on a short list of rules for late-Bronze-Age Israelites (i.e., the Ten Commandments). Here's a small taste:

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The first problem is the version to be displayed. My own discussion will be largely based on the traditional King James Version. But there are currently well over a dozen other Protestant translations on the mass market, as well as several Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish translations. Should a state legislature choose one translation favored by just one segment of the Judeo-Christian tradition while excluding those favored by all the others?

Most public displays - including Justice Moore's version - are not the full Ten Commandments. They are abridgments of the originals - Reader's Digest versions - that exclude many of the thornier passages. The King James Version contains 334 words, but Moore has taken it upon himself to whittle them down to a mere 75.

The First Commandment begins, "I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt." An increasing number of Americans are Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Shintoists, Taoists, Confucians, adherents of Native American religions, animists, agnostics, and atheists - few of whom claim descent from the Israelite tribes who fled Egypt. Should a state government be in the business of declaring to all its citizens that they shall "have no other gods" above the God of the Israelites?

The Second Commandment forbids making any "graven," or carved, image - and bowing down to one. This warning also ignores the wide range of religious practice. Some Hindus bow before graven images of their gods, and some Catholics genuflect before graven images of their saints. The Vatican is filled with graven images of Christ, saints, and popes. Nor are most state governments innocent of this practice. In Michigan the capitol lawn holds at least six graven images - a stone eagle atop a war memorial, two stags on the state seal, a wolverine on an historical marker, two soldiers, and an imposing statue of the state's Civil War governor. Should these statues display a warning from the legislature that God forbids the making of graven images?

The Second Commandment also threatens to visit "the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." Should a child visiting the capitol start to worry that she may be punished because decades ago a great grandfather she never knew may have hit his thumb with a hammer and impulsively used the name of the Lord in vain? Does any American law seek to punish children, let alone grandchildren and great-grandchildren, for the transgressions of their fathers?

If the founders used the Ten Commandments in drafting the federal Constitution, they did a masterful job of disguising that fact. Not one key word from the Commandments appears in the text. The only allusion to them is to the Second Commandment, and it is a decidedly negative one - an absolute rejection of "Corruption of Blood," the philosophy of punishing children for the crimes of their parents. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote, "It is the essence of the institutions of liberty that it be recognized that guilt is personal." Isn't such recognition a sounder foundation for our laws than the intergenerational vengeance propounded by the Second Commandment?

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So none of these seven Commandments can be seen in any way as part of the "bedrock" of law today. Only three enjoin behavior for which most states currently punish people: the Sixth forbids killing, the Eighth forbids stealing, and the Ninth forbids bearing false witness. But these have been criminal offenses in many societies the world over that were quite innocent of the Ten Commandments. They were part of criminal law in ancient Babylon and Egypt centuries before the time of Moses. The Romans included them as early as the fifth century B.C.E., when they were still worshipping a whole stable of morally flawed gods, led by the lecherous Jupiter. Many indigenous peoples of North America, Africa, and the South Pacific islands had comparable taboos.

[NOTE: Eckstein's many footnotes/references are available in the printed version.]