Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publication: msn.com
Date: August 27, 2003
URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2087621/
The immorality of the Ten Commandments.
The row over the boulder-sized version
of the so-called "Ten Commandments," and as to whether they should be exhibited
in such massive shape on public property, misses the opportunity to consider
these top-10 divine ordinances and their relationship to original intent.
Judge Roy Moore is clearly, as well as a fool and a publicity- hound, a
man who identifies the Mount Sinai orders to Moses with a certain interpretation
of Protestantism. But we may ask ourselves why any sect, however primitive,
would want to base itself on such vague pre- Christian desert morality
(assuming Moses to be pre-Christian).
The first four of the commandments
have little to do with either law or morality, and the first three suggest
a terrific insecurity on the part of the person supposedly issuing them.
I am the lord thy god and thou shalt have no other ... no graven images
... no taking of my name in vain: surely these could have been compressed
into a more general injunction to show respect. The ensuing order to set
aside a holy day is scarcely a moral or ethical one, unless you assume
that other days are somehow profane. (The Rev. Ian Paisley, I remember,
used to refuse interviewers for Sunday newspapers even after it was pointed
out to him that it's the Monday edition that is prepared on Sunday.) Whereas
a day of rest, as prefigured in the opening passages of Genesis, is no
more than organized labor might have demanded, perhaps during the arduous
days of unpaid pyramid erection.
So the first four commandments have
almost nothing to do with moral conduct and cannot in any case be enforced
by law unless the state forbids certain sorts of art all week, including
religious and iconographic art-and all activity on the Sabbath (which the
words of the fourth commandment do not actually require). The next instruction
is to honor one's parents: a harmless enough idea, but again unenforceable
in law and inapplicable to the many orphans that nature or god sees fit
to create. That there should be no itemized utterance enjoining the protection
of children seems odd, given that the commandments are addressed in the
first instance to adults. But then, the same god frequently urged his followers
to exterminate various forgotten enemy tribes down to the last infant,
sparing only the virgins, so this may be a case where hand-tying or absolute
prohibitions were best avoided.
There has never yet been any society,
Confucian or Buddhist or Islamic, where the legal codes did not frown upon
murder and theft. These offenses were certainly crimes in the Pharaonic
Egypt from which the children of Israel had, if the story is to be believed,
just escaped. So the middle-ranking commandments, of which the chief one
has long been confusingly rendered "thou shalt not kill," leave us none
the wiser as to whether the almighty considers warfare to be murder, or
taxation and confiscation to be theft. Tautology hovers over the whole
enterprise.
In much the same way, few if any
courts in any recorded society have approved the idea of perjury, so the
idea that witnesses should tell the truth can scarcely have required a
divine spark in order to take root. To how many of its original audience,
I mean to say, can this have come with the force of revelation? Then it's
a swift wrap-up with a condemnation of adultery (from which humans actually
can refrain) and a prohibition upon covetousness (from which they cannot).
To insist that people not annex their neighbor's cattle or wife "or anything
that is his" might be reasonable, even if it does place the wife in the
same category as the cattle, and presumably to that extent diminishes the
offense of adultery. But to demand "don't even think about it" is absurd
and totalitarian, and furthermore inhibiting to the Protestant spirit of
entrepreneurship and competition.
One is presuming (is one not?) that
this is the same god who actually created the audience he was addressing.
This leaves us with the insoluble mystery of why he would have molded ("in
his own image," yet) a covetous, murderous, disrespectful, lying, and adulterous
species. Create them sick, and then command them to be well? What a mad
despot this is, and how fortunate we are that he exists only in the minds
of his worshippers.
It's obviously too much to expect
that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse,
drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality, or to demand prayer
in the schools. Still, to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and
slavery out of the account is to have been negligent to some degree, even
by the lax standards of the time. I wonder what would happen if secularists
were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend
enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised
on the walls of, say, public libraries? There are many more than 10 commandments
in the Old Testament, and I live for the day when Americans are obliged
to observe all of them, including the ox-goring and witch-burning ones.
(Who is Judge Moore to pick and choose?) Too many editorialists have described
the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism,
when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not
just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with
it.