“These Fifteen Ten, Ten Commandments“… one of my favorites!
Whenever I show this video that makes fun of the OT, specifically Moses and the Ten Commandments, I remind my largely Xian audience that like Lewis Black, this is his (Mel Brooks’) book, this is their book… they can make fun of it:
Most of you know that there’s not only two versions in the OT, first Exodus and then Deuteronomy, but of course the various divisions of Xianity split those up further into at least seven different versions going well back before the Reformers Luther and Calvin to Augustine and Philo.
And the believers wonder why us skeptical types wont take this stuff seriously. Somehow these Commandments that are supposed to be from “on High” (yeah, somebody was high when they dreamed this whole scheme up), that we must base our life upon or be relegated to an utter and complete lack of objective morals and impending eternal fire thereby, are yet subject to the whims of interpretation and format of the “great” Xian theologians each with their direct pipeline to God who know what He really, really meant.
The absurdity of religious thought knows no bounds.
And how relevant are they? For that answer I defer to the late Christopher Hitchens:
We always hear from liberal Xians how the NT superseded and softened the nastiness of the OT, how “Jesus changed all that”. Well, like Hitch suggests, where are the truly relevant missing Commandments? How ’bout:
11. Thou shalt not own other human beings.
That would have been a good one. Jesus or Paul had ample chance to right that wrong 1800 years before us lowly humans figured it out on our own that our brothers, our conspecifics, our fellow humans of any creed or stripe didn’t really like a life in chains and we shouldn’t do that to one another anymore. Think of the suffering that tiny bit of enlightenment could have saved.
12. Thou shalt not rape.
The god of the OT would have had to edit too much of his book I suppose if JC or Paul had weighed in on that. And patriarchal cultures and their religions all over the world could have used a shining example to emulate in the religion of love, but no, eliminating or lessening the degradation and suffering of women just wasn’t on their agenda.
We’re still working on that one.
(587)
