Republicans Support Indoctrination in Public Schools After All

Republicans are hypocritically supporting the mandatory display of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

realityslaststand.com

When the 3rd grade reading level is only 49 percent, I don’t see why the state wants to spend money on lawyers for a probably unconstitutional law making the Ten Commandments mandatory just to virtue signal a side in a culture war. Actually use conservative reforms to fix the schools instead of putting up posters half the 3rd grade cannot even read.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.

... Secularism means that no particular ideology is being forwarded and getting special treatment. Go have your belief. Believe what you want. Privately. You don’t get special treatment because you believe this with tons of conviction. Secularism means that your belief in your faith covers none of the distance to proving that it’s true. Conviction is not evidence of much of anything. Except conviction. -- James Lindsay

“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”

Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.

Ten Commandments for Our Time

Toward a Provisional Rational Decalogue

michaelshermer.substack.com

In my previous Skeptic column, Deconstructing the Decalogue, I offered a personal view on how to think about the Ten Commandments from the perspective of 3,000 years of moral progress since they were first presented in two books of the Old Testament (Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:4-21). Here I would like to reconstruct them from the perspective of a science- and reason-based moral system, a fuller version of which I developed in my 2015 book The Moral Arc, from which this material is partially excerpted.

Note: This is a purely intellectual exercise. I am not a preacher or teacher of moral values, nor do I hold myself up as some standard-bearer of morality. Since I do not believe in God, nor do I think that there are any rational reasons to believe that morals derive from any source outside of ourselves, I feel the necessity to offer an alternative to religious- and faith-based morality, both descriptively (where do morals come from if not God?) and prescriptively (how should we act if there is no God?), which I have done in 30 years of publishing Skeptic magazine and in a number of my books, including How We Believe (1999), The Science of Good and Evil (2004), and the aforementioned The Moral Arc. Here I am building on the work of secular philosophers and scholars from the ancient Greeks through the Enlightenment and into the modern era where a massive literature exists addressing these deep and important matters.

The problem with any religious moral code that is set in stone is just that—it is set in stone. Anything that can never be changed has within its DNA the seeds of its own extinction. A science-based morality has the virtue of having built into it a self-correcting mechanism that does not just allow redaction, correction, and improvement; it insists upon it. Science and reason can be employed to inform—and in some cases even determine—moral values.

Science thrives on change, on improvement, on updating and upgrading its methods and conclusions. So it should be for a science of morality. No one knows for sure what is right and wrong in all circumstances for all people everywhere, so the goal of a science-based morality should be to construct a set of provisional moral precepts that are true for most people in most circumstances most of the time—as assessed by empirical inquiry and rational analysis—but admit exceptions and revisions where appropriate. Indeed, as humanity’s concept of “who and what is human, and entitled to protection” has expanded over the centuries, so we have extended moral protection to categories once thought beneath our notice.

Here are some suggested commandments for our time. Feel free to add your own in the comments section below.

1. The Golden-Rule Principle: Behave toward others as you would desire that they behave toward you.

The golden rule is a derivative of the basic principle of exchange reciprocity and reciprocal altruism, and thus evolved in our Paleolithic ancestors as one of the primary moral sentiments. In this principle there are two moral agents: the moral doer and the moral receiver. A moral question arises when the moral doer is uncertain how the moral receiver will accept and respond to the action in question. In its essence this is what the golden rule is telling us to do. By asking yourself, “how would I feel if this were done unto me?” you are asking “how would others feel if I did it unto them?”

2. The Ask-First Principle: To find out whether an action is right or wrong, ask first.

The Golden Rule principle has a limitation to it: what if the moral receiver thinks differently from the moral doer? What if you would not mind having action X done unto you, but someone else would mind it? Smokers cannot ask themselves how they would feel if other people smoked in a restaurant where they were dining because they probably wouldn’t mind. It’s the nonsmokers who must be asked how they feel. That is, the moral doer should ask the moral receiver whether the behavior in question is moral or immoral. In other words, the Golden Rule is still about you. But morality is more than just about you, and the Ask-First Principle makes morality about others.

3. The Happiness Principle: It is a higher moral principle to always seek happiness with someone else’s happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else’s unhappiness through force or fraud.

Humans have a host of moral and immoral passions, including being selfless and selfish, cooperative and competitive, nice and nasty. It is natural and normal to try to increase our own happiness by whatever means available, even if that means being selfish, competitive, and nasty. Fortunately, evolution created both sets of passions, such that by nature we also seek to increase our own happiness by being selfless, cooperative, and nice. Since we have within us both moral and immoral sentiments, and we have the capacity to think rationally and intuitively to override our baser instincts, and we have the freedom to choose to do so, at the core of morality is choosing to do the right thing by acting morally and applying the happiness principle. (The modifier “force or fraud” was added to clarify that there are many activities that do not involve morality, such as a sporting contest, in which the goal is not to seek happiness with your opponent’s happiness in mind, but simply to win, fairly of course.)

4. The Liberty Principle: It is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else’s liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else’s loss of liberty through force or fraud.

The Liberty Principle is an extrapolation from the fundamental principle of all liberty as practiced in Western society: The freedom to think, believe, and act as we choose so long as our thoughts, beliefs, and actions do not infringe on the equal freedom of others. What makes the Liberty Principle a moral principle is that in addition to asking the moral receiver how he or she might respond to a moral action, and considering how that action might lead to your own and the moral receiver’s happiness or unhappiness, there is an even higher moral level toward which we can strive, and that is the freedom and autonomy of yourself and the moral receiver, or what we shall simply refer to here as liberty. Liberty is the freedom to pursue happiness and the autonomy to make decisions and act on them in order to achieve that happiness.

Only in the last couple of centuries have we witnessed the worldwide spread of liberty as a concept that applies to all peoples everywhere, regardless of their race, religion, rank or social and political status in the power hierarchy. Liberty has yet to achieve worldwide status, particularly among those states dominated by theocracies and autocracies that encourage intolerance, and dictate that only some people deserve liberty, but the overall trend since the Enlightenment has been to grant greater liberty, for more people, everywhere. Although there are setbacks still, and periodically violations of liberties disrupt the overall historical flow from less to more liberty for all, the general trajectory of increasing liberty for all continues, so every time you apply the liberty principle you have advanced humanity one small step forward.

5. The Fairness Principle: When contemplating a moral action imagine that you do not know if you will be the moral doer or receiver, and when in doubt err on the side of the other person.

This is based on the philosopher John Rawls’ concepts of the “veil of ignorance” and the “original position” in which moral actors are ignorant of their position in society when determining rules and laws that affect everyone, because of the self-serving bias in human decision making. Given a choice, most people who enact moral rules and legislative laws would do so based on their position in society (their gender, race, class, sexual orientation, religion, political party, etc.) in a way that would most benefit themselves and their kin and kind. Not knowing ahead of time how the moral precept or legal law will affect you pushes you to strive for greater fairness for all. A simpler version is in the example of cutting a cake fairly: if I cut the cake you choose which piece you want, and if you cut the cake then I choose which piece I want.

6. The Reason Principle: Try to find rational reasons for your moral actions that are not self-justifications or rationalizations by consulting others first.

Ever since the Enlightenment the study of morality has shifted from considering moral principles as based on God-given, Divinely-inspired, Holy book-derived, Authority-dictated precepts from the top down, to bottom-up individual-considered, reason-based, rationality-constructed, science-grounded propositions in which one is expected to have reasons for one’s moral actions, especially reasons that consider the other person affected by the moral act. This is an especially difficult moral commandment to carry out because of the all-too natural propensity to slip from rationality to rationalization, from justification to self-justification, from reason to emotion. As in the first commandment to “ask first,” whenever possible one should consult others about one’s reasons for a moral action in order to get constructive feedback and to pull oneself out of a moral bubble in which whatever you want to do happens to be the most moral thing to do.

7. The Responsibility and Forgiveness Principle: Take full responsibility for your own moral actions and be prepared to be genuinely sorry and make restitution for your own wrong doing to others; hold others fully accountable for their moral actions and be open to forgiving moral transgressors who are genuinely sorry and prepared to make restitution for their wrong doing.

This is another difficult commandment to uphold in both directions. First, there is the “moralization gap” between victims and perpetrators, in which victims almost always perceive themselves as innocent and thus any injustice committed against them must be the result of nothing more than evil on the part of the perpetrator; and in which perpetrators may perceive themselves to have been acting morally in righting a wrong, redressing an immoral act, or defending the honor of oneself or family and friends. The self-serving bias, the hindsight bias, and the confirmation bias practically ensure that we all feel we didn’t do anything wrong, and whatever we did was justified, and thus there is no need to apologize and ask for forgiveness.

As well, the sense of justice and revenge is a deeply evolved moral emotion that serves three primary purposes: (1) to right wrongs committed by transgressors, (2) as a deterrent to possible future bad behavior, (3) to serve as a social signal to others that should they commit a similar moral transgression the same fate of your moral indignation and revenge awaits them.

8. The Defend Others Principle: Stand up to evil people and moral transgressors, and defend the defenseless when they are victimized.

There are people in the world who will commit moral transgressions against us and our fellow group members. Either through the logic of violence and aggression in which perpetrators of evil always feel justified in their acts, or through such conditions as psychopathy, a non-negligible portion of a population will commit selfish or cruel acts. We must stand up against them.

9. The Expanding Moral Category Principle: Try to consider other people not of your gender, sexual orientation, class, family, tribe, race, religion, or nation as an honorary group member equal to you in moral standing.

We have a moral obligation not only to ourselves, our kin and kind, our family and friends, and our fellow in-group members; we also owe it to those people who are different from us in a variety of ways, who in the past have been discriminated against for no other reason than that they were different in some measurable way. Even though our first moral obligation is to take care of ourselves and our immediate family and friends, it is a higher moral value to consider the moral values of others, and in the long run it is better for yourself, your kin and kind, and your in-group to consider members of other groups to be honorary members of your own group, as long as they so honor you and your group (see #8 above).

10. The Biophilia Principle: Try to contribute to the survival and flourishing of other sentient beings, their ecosystems, and the biosphere as a whole.

Biophilia is the love of nature, of which we are a part. Expanding the moral sphere to include the environments that sustain sentient beings is the loftiest of moral commandments.

If by fiat I had to reduce these Ten Commandments to just one it would be this:

Try to expand the moral sphere and to push the arc of the moral universe just a bit further toward truth, justice, and freedom for more sentient beings in more places more of the time.

How can we reconcile God’s commandment not to kill anyone with his commandment to kill everyone? In light of this account [Ex 32:27-28], and many others like it, the sixth commandment should perhaps read thus: "Thou shalt not kill—not unless the Lord thy God says so. Then shalt thou slaughter thine enemies with abandon." -- Michael Shermer

Deconstructing the Decalogue

Or, How to Think About the Ten Commandments

michaelshermer.substack.com

There is arguably no better known set of moral precepts than the Ten Commandments. As an exercise in moral casuistry, in this essay, excerpted from my chapter on religion in my 2015 book The Moral Arc, let’s consider them again in the context of how far the moral arc has bent since they were decreed over three millennia ago. (The Ten Commandments are stated in two books of the Old Testament, Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:4-21. I quote from Exodus, King James Version.) In the next essay I shall reconstruct them from the perspective of a science- and reason-based moral system.

I. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

First, this commandment reveals that polytheism was commonplace at the time and that Yahweh was, among other things, a jealous god (see God’s own clarification in Commandment 2). Second, it violates the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in that it restricts freedom of religious expression (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”), making the posting of the Ten Commandments in public places such as schools and courthouses unconstitutional.

II. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.

This commandment is also in violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of the freedom of speech, of which artistic expression is included by precedence of many Supreme Court cases (“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech”). It also brings to mind what the Taliban did in Afghanistan when they destroyed ancient religious relics not approved by their Islamist masters. Elsewhere in the Bible, the word “idol” is synonymously used, with the Hebrew word pesel translated as an object carved or hewn out of stone, wood or metal.

What, then, are we to make of the crucifix, worn by millions of Christians as an image, an idol, a symbol of what Jesus suffered for their sins? The crucifix is a graven image of torture as it was commonly practiced by the Romans. If Jews today were suddenly to start sporting little gas chambers on gold necklaces the shocked public reaction would be as unsurprising as it would be unmistakable.

I the LORD thy God am a jealous God.

That might explain the genocides, wars, conquests, and mass exterminations commanded by the deity of the Old Testament. These humanlike emotions reveal Yahweh to be more like a Greek god, and much like an adolescent, who lacks the wisdom to control his passions.

The last part of this commandment—visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me—violates the most fundamental principle of Western jurisprudence developed over centuries of legal precedence that one can be only be guilty of one’s own sins and not the sins of one’s parents, grandparents, great grandparents, or anyone else for that matter.  

III. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

This commandment is once again an infringement on our Constitutionally-guaranteed right to free speech and religious expression, and another indication of Yahweh’s petty jealousies and un-Godlike ways.

IV. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Again, freedom of speech and religious expression means we may or may not choose to treat the Sabbath as holy, and the rest of this commandment—For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy—make it clear that its purpose is to once again pay homage to Yahweh.

Thus far, the first four commandments have nothing whatsoever to do with morality as we understand it today in terms of how we are to interact with others, resolve conflicts, or improve the survival and flourishing of other sentient beings. At this point the Decalogue is entirely concerned with the relationship of humans and god, not humans and humans.

V. Honor thy father and thy mother.

As a father myself, this commandment feels right and reasonable, since most of us parents appreciate being honored by our children, especially because we’ve invested considerable love, attention, and resources into them. But “commanding” honor—much less love—doesn’t ring true to me as a parent, since such sentiments usually come naturally anyway. Plus, commanding honor is an oxymoron, made all the worse by the hint of a reward for so doing, as in the rest of that commandment: “that thy days may be long upon the land which the lord thy God giveth thee.” Honor either happens naturally as a result of a loving and fulfilling relationship between parents and offspring, or it doesn’t. For a precept to be moral, it must involve an element of choice between doing something entirely self-serving and doing something that helps another, even at the cost of oneself.    

VI. Thou shalt not kill.

Finally, we get a genuine moral principle worth our attention and respect. Yet even here, much ink has been spilled by biblical scholars and theologians about the difference between murder and killing (such as in self-defense), not to mention all the different types of killing, from first-degree murder to manslaughter, along with mitigating circumstances and exclusions, such as self-defense, provocation, accidental killings, capital punishment, euthanasia, and of course war.

Many Hebrew scholars believe that the prohibition is against murder only. But what are we to make of the story in Exodus (32:27-28) in which Moses brought down from the mountain top the first set of tablets, which he smashed in anger, and then commanded the Levites: “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.”

How can we reconcile God’s commandment not to kill anyone with his commandment to kill everyone? In light of this account, and many others like it, the sixth commandment should perhaps read thus: Thou shalt not kill—not unless the Lord thy God says so. Then shalt thou slaughter thine enemies with abandon.

VII. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Coming from a deity who impregnated somebody else’s fiancé, that’s a bit rich. However, the bigger issue is that this commandment, like all the others, is a blunt instrument that doesn’t take into account the wide variety of circumstances in which people find themselves. Surely grownups in intimate relationships can and should negotiate the details of their relationship for themselves, and one hopes that they’ll act honorably toward their partner out of a sense of integrity, and not because a deity told them to.     

VII. Thou shalt not steal.

Again, do we really need a deity to command this? All cultures had and have moral rules and legal codes about theft.

IX. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Anyone who has been lied to or gossiped about can explain why this moral commandment makes sense and is needed, so chalk one up for the Bible’s authors whose insights here were spot on.

X. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.

Consider what it means to covet something—to crave or want or desire it—so this commandment is the world’s first thought crime, which goes against centuries of Western legal codes. More to the point, the very foundation of capitalism is the coveting or desire for things and, ironically, it is Bible-quoting Christian conservatives who most defend the very coveting forbidden in this final mandate.

The late Christopher Hitchens best summed up the implications of taking this commandment seriously, in an April 2010 Vanity Fair essay: “Leaving aside the many jokes about whether or not it’s okay or kosher to covet thy neighbor’s wife’s ass, you are bound to notice once again that, like the Sabbath order, it’s addressed to the servant-owning and property-owning class. Moreover, it lumps the wife in with the rest of the chattel (and in that epoch could have been rendered as ‘thy neighbor’s wives,’ to boot).”

After demolishing the Decalogue in his inimitable style, Hitchens proffered his own list of commandments:

• 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 jihadists 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.”

Hitchens caps his list in summary judgment: “In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.”

Now, that is a rational prescription! In my next Skeptic column here I will offer my own “Provisional Rational Decalogue.” So you don’t miss it please consider subscribing below.

Christopher Hitchens’ New 10 Commandments

1. Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. 2. Do not even think about using people as private propriety, as owned or as slave. 3. Despise those who use violence (or the threat of it) in a sexual relationship. 4. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. 5. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature. 6. Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature; think and act accordingly. 7. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. 8. Turn off that fucking cellphone. You have no idea how unimportant your call is to us. 9. Denounce all Jihadists and Crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions (and terrible sexual repressions). 10. Be willing to renounce any God or any religion, if any holy commandment should contradict any of the above.

And the Lord said unto Moses, Come up to me into the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; that thou mayest teach them.

And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God.

And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.

And Moses turned, and went down from the mount, and the two tables of the testimony were in his hand: the tables were written on both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written.

And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables.

And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said unto Moses, There is a noise of war in the camp.

And he said, It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome: but the noise of them that sing do I hear.

And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.

And the Lord said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest.

And be ready in the morning, and come up in the morning unto mount Sinai, and present thyself there to me in the top of the mount.

And no man shall come up with thee, neither let any man be seen throughout all the mount; neither let the flocks nor herds feed before that mount.

And he hewed two tables of stone like unto the first; and Moses rose up early in the morning, and went up unto mount Sinai, as the Lord had commanded him, and took in his hand the two tables of stone.

And the Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord.

And the Lord said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel.

And he was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.

And it came to pass, when Moses came down from mount Sinai with the two tables of testimony in Moses' hand, when he came down from the mount, that Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him.

And when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come nigh him.

And Moses called unto them; and Aaron and all the rulers of the congregation returned unto him: and Moses talked with them.

And afterward all the children of Israel came nigh: and he gave them in commandment all that the Lord had spoken with him in mount Sinai.

Introduction

If you've ever read the whole Bible you are well aware of just how big this book is. With an estimated word count of well over 700,000 words, the book is not an undertaking for the casual reader. In addition to the lengthiness of the book it can also be a very tedious and boring read as well. This turns many people off to wanting to commit any time to understanding the foundational doctrine of Christianity.

However, as atheists we really need to have at least a basic understanding of the Bible if we are going to make a judgment call about the religion. You see, no matter which sect of Christianity someone subscribes to the Bible is the foundation of Christian belief. So what I offer here is a mere 7,000 words to tell a slimmed down version of the basic story of the Bible. I've tried to make it humorous and something that could be fun to read.

I've stripped away all the philosophy and metaphor and simply offered the story as it is in its most basic form. Because of this, what I offer here is more a literary critique and artistic rendering than a theological examination. What I want to focus on is the narrative rather than any underlying allegory or metaphor inherent in the narrative. And what I want the reader to ask themselves is if this story is actually believable or not. I want to challenge the notion of biblical literalism by showing the story in its most basic form is simply too fantastic for any rational person to believe it as fact.

You see, if the story broken down to its most basic form doesn't make sense, it won't make more sense if you just complicate it by throwing in even more outrageous claims. I think by the time the reader finishes this story they will come to an understanding of just how silly biblical literalism truly is.

--

Forward

What I'm going to offer here is a bit of blasphemy, or at least in the eyes of Christians it is. This is the story of the Bible broken down into sheer simplicity. Broken down and simplified in this manner it becomes abundantly apparent just how ridiculous the whole thing is. I hope you enjoy.

In The Beginning

In an alternate dimension outside of space and time lives the most powerful wizard ever known. He's so powerful that he can speak things into existence. One day he is sitting around bored and thinks, "Let me make myself some other beings that can bask in the glory of how awesome I am." So he spent six days thinking and speaking the whole universe and everything in it into existence. Then he took a nap, because that was a lot of talking to do.

One of the many things the wizard, let's call him The Wiz, created was people. He made people extra special out of dirt like a mud golem to look and think like him. Basically like little The Wiz dolls. But at first it's just this one dude named Adam and he's very lonely and bored. So The Wiz rips out one of Adam's ribs and says, "Alakadabra!" and the rib turns into another person. But this person has nipples that actually serve a purpose.

So The Wiz sets these two up with a sweet little place in a garden with everything they could ever need and then says, "Oh, by the way, I created a tree in that garden that will kill you. Just to spice things up a bit, ya know. Don't eat the fruit off that tree."

Well one day a talking snake shows up and sees the person with the functioning nipples, her name was Eve, and says, "You simply must try the fruit on that one tree! It's divine!" So she does and she shares it with Adam because it's very tasty and instead of dying they just get smarter and notice they're naked. So they hide when The Wiz comes back around, because of being naked and all, and The Wiz immediately knows something is wrong. So he says, "What the fuck guys? I told you not to eat that fruit. Now I'm going to have to kick you out of the garden."

So they get kicked out and The Wiz is double pissed at Eve so he makes her menstruate and makes childbirth really painful for her. They have two boys named Cain and Abel, which end up fighting because The Wiz likes meat better than vegetables and Cain kills Abel. So The Wiz sends Cain to live in some weird land called Nod and he finds a wife there and does his thing. In the meantime, Adam and Eve have many more children and a couple thousand years go by in which the earth fills up with people.

When it Rains it Pours

Now it's thousands of years later and for some reason no one is worshipping The Wiz, which really makes him angry since he made these people specifically to glorify himself. There's this one guy named Noah though who still thinks The Wiz is super awesome. So The Wiz tells Noah, "Build a big boat and put two of every animal on the boat along with your family because I'm fixing to drown all these other assholes." Noah builds the boat and the animals come. He packs up his family and then The Wiz sets about flooding the whole world and drowning everyone. POOF - now you're a corpse. Neat trick.

After about a month and a half, once The Wiz was sure everyone was good and dead, he makes the flood waters recede some and Noah sends a dove who fetches a branch from a tree that somehow withstood the torrential floods and let's Noah know there is land ho. Noah lands the boat on a mountain, because screw you physics, he's got a wizard for a bff. Then The Wiz pops a rainbow into the sky and tells Noah that this is a sign that he won't murder everyone in that particular fashion again, because The Wiz likes to keep you guessing.

So Noah and his family repopulate the earth (let's try to gloss over the incest part). Eventually this guy Abraham comes on the scene and The Wiz really takes a liking to this dude. The Wiz tells Abraham that he's doing a super awesome job worshipping The Wiz, but unfortunately Abraham is going to need to murder his son Isaac because The Wiz likes blood. Abraham says, "Sure thing", and proceeds to carry this out. At the last minute The Wiz sends one of his personal minions to stop Abraham and tell him that The Wiz was just pranking him. Haha! Almost made you kill your kid!

Turn by Turn Mis-navigation

So we flash forward a bit more and one of Abraham's descendants named Moses gets tossed in a basket and thrown into a river. He floats to Egypt and gets found by some of pharaoh's folks who think he's cute and adopt him. But it turns out that Pharaoh has captured all the descendants of Abraham called the Jews and enslaved them. When Moses grows up and realizes he's a Jew, The Wiz tells him that Pharaoh needs to let these people go. The Wiz tells Moses to go to Pharaoh and ask him to release the Jews, but when Moses does this The Wiz has put Pharaoh under hypnosis or something and Pharaoh refuses. So The Wiz sends plagues and murders all the firstborn in Egypt to teach Pharaoh not to fall for The Wiz using magic to make him intentionally obstinate.

Eventually Moses gets all the Jews out of Egypt, but Pharaoh sends troops after them. They get to the Red Sea and they're stuck, but then Moses says, "The Wiz taught me a trick" and he pounds a walking stick on the ground. The sea splits in two and all the Jews walk over to the other side. The Egyptian troops try to follow them and The Wiz makes the sea fall back on them and drown them. POOF - now you're a corpse. (That trick is getting old)

So now Moses and the Jews are free and The Wiz tells them he has a special place for them to live. But before they can get there Moses has a one on one with The Wiz and is given a bunch of rules for how to properly worship The Wiz. When Moses goes to tell all the Jews the new rules, they've made a cow out of gold and are worshipping it.... because hamburgers!

Moses gets all huffy and throws down the rocks he wrote the rules on and breaks them. The Wiz is pretty peeved about the whole cow worship thing too so he makes everyone confused about how to walk a straight line and causes them to wander around on like 40 acres of desert for 40 years. They finally find the place they're supposed to live but Moses doesn't get to live there because The Wiz is fickle like that.

To Be Continued...

So that basically wraps up the Old Testament and the whole Jewish thing. In the next segment I'll break down the New Testament and the story of this Jesus fellow.

[The Ten Commandments] are, after all, the only passages in the Bible so profound that the creator of the universe felt the need to physically write them himself and in stone. As such, one would expect these to be the greatest lines ever written, on any subject, in any language. Here they are. Get ready...

1. You shall have no other gods before me.
2. You shall not make for yourself a graven image.
3. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.
4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
5. Honor your father and your mother.
6. You shall not murder.
7. You shall not commit adultery.
8. You shall not steal.
9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
10. You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's.

The first four of these injunctions have nothing whatsoever to do with morality. As stated, they forbid the practice of any non—Judeo-Christian faith (like Hinduism), most religious art, utterances like "God damn it!," and all ordinary work on the Sabbath—all under penalty of death. We might well wonder how vital these precepts are to the maintenance of civilization.

Commandments 5 through 9 do address morality, though it is questionable how many human beings ever honored their parents or abstained from committing murder, adultery, theft, or perjury because of them. Admonishments of this kind are found in virtually every culture throughout recorded history. There is nothing especially compelling about their presentation in the Bible. There are obvious biological reasons why people tend to treat their parents well, and to think badly of murderers, adulterers, thieves, and liars. It is a scientific fact that moral emotions—like a sense of fair play or an abhorrence of cruelty—precede any exposure to scripture. Indeed, studies of primate behavior reveal that these emotions (in some form) precede humanity itself. All of our primate cousins are partial to their own kin and generally intolerant of murder and theft. They tend not to like deception or sexual betrayal much, either. Chimpanzees, especially, display many of the complex social concerns that you would expect to see in our closest relatives in the natural world. It seems rather unlikely, therefore, that the average American will receive necessary moral instruction by seeing these precepts chiseled in marble whenever he enters a courthouse. And what are we to make of the fact that, in bringing his treatise to a close, the creator of our universe could think of no human concerns more pressing and durable than the coveting of servants and livestock?

If we are going to take the God of the Bible seriously, we should admit that He never gives us the freedom to follow the commandments we like and neglect the rest. Nor does He tell us that we can relax the penalties He has imposed for breaking them.

If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: "Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being." Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a theologically defensible reading of the Bible. It is impossible to behave this way by adhering to the principles of Jainism. How, then, can you argue that the Bible provides the clearest statement of morality the world has ever seen?

-- Sam Harris, “Letter To a Christian Nation” (2006)

"Is it too modern to notice that there is nothing [in the ten commandments] about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or is it too exactingly 'in context' to notice that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended?"

-- Christopher Hitchens

"Of the commandments. the first two or three are entirely about fearing the author of the orders -- entirely about being terrified of someone who you are enjoined to love...

I don't know about you, ladies and gentlemen, but the idea of compulsory love has always struck me as a bit shady... especially if you are ordered to love someone you absolutely must fear."

-- Christopher Hitchens

“I read the Ten Commandments.

Is this the all-powerful creator of the universe, or a jealous 16-year-old girlfriend?”

-- Ian Harris