There are many axioms that people adopt as desirable guidelines to live by, such as the Golden Rule or Kant’s Categorical Imperative, all designed to help us treat people well There is also the one that I prefer which is less elegant, which is ‘Don’t Be A Jerk‘. The guidelines that I consider the most useless are the biblical Ten Commandments. But in the US, the Ten Commandments have been used to make extraordinary claims, such that if it were only posted in public spaces such as school rooms and city halls and grounds, then many of society’s problem would disappear. They claim that it is the removal of the Bible and religious teaching in schools that is the source of all the problems in US society and that posting the Ten Commandments in every schoolroom would make our children become upstanding moral adults.
The commandments take different forms depending on the source religious text but usually the first four consist of telling people how to grovel before God, which is not particularly useful when it comes to dealing with other people. One of the next six tells us to honor our parents, which is fine but pretty limited and vague (what form does this honor take?). Another four tell us not to murder, lie, steal, or engage in adultery which are clear and specific but do we really need to be reminded of them? And the last one is the one I get the biggest laugh out of which is ““Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house; thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s”, weirdly including the neighbor’s wives in the list of possessions. And forbidding coveting the neighbor’s ass is something that will bring a smile to any school children in the US today. Also, what exactly is the problem with coveting things if one does not resort to murder, lying, or stealing in order to obtain them?
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