No kidding.
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A silly debate over Commandments
Sean Gonsalves - Cape Cod Times
03.09.05 - I imagine God getting some knee-slapping laughs over this
week's phrase: "The Ten Commandment debate."
I know symbols are important and that the Ten Commandments symbolize the
foundation of law and morality for many Americans, but this Ten
Commandments debate is a joke.
Just one small example: When my grandfather was my age, public displays
of religious symbols were common. It was also a time when a black man,
woman or child was being lynched in America every few days by
"God-fearing Christians" as Billie Holiday sang about so poignantly --
"Southern Trees Bear The Strangest Fruit."
Or consider the last commandment: "thou shalt not covet." As comedian
George Carlin points out, coveting is the very lifeblood of our
free-market economy.
Without coveting, how would the GDP grow? A quick perusal of advertising
literature shows just how clear Madison Avenue is about this. Keepin' Up
With The Joneses is what it's all about. I think everybody in America is
guilty of breaking that commandment many times, except maybe for the
Amish.
In Latin, coveting was originally defined as yearning with greed but
eventually the concept was narrowed with the word cupido (mother of the
word cupid) -- the personification of carnal desire, which may help shed
light on why so many Christians are hung up on sexual ethics and show
little concern for social ethics.
But the English language gets the word covet from the Old French verb
for "desire avidly," or coveiter.
Go tell a conservative Christian that their avid participation in the
"free-market" aids and abets coveting on a global scale and they'll
treat you as if you had just slammed the Holy Tablets from Mount Sinai
on the ground before their very eyes.
Conservative Christian, Proverb-quoting James Dobson of Focus on the
Family is using his massive influence to promote the public display of
the Ten Commandments. But you won't hear Dobson preaching on this
Proverb: "Those that oppress the poor to increase their riches, and
those that give to the rich shall surely come to want" (Proverbs 22:16).
With Dobson, you'll get plenty of "spare the rod, spoil the child" and
perhaps discussion about "sluggards" but not a peep of "There is a
generation whose teeth are like swords, and their jaws like knives, who
devour the poor from the earth, and the needy from among men" (Proverbs
30:14).
I say let them post the Ten Commandments all over the public square. If
you don't believe in them, treat them like all of those billboards we've
all come to accept. Or pay attention to them and use them as a teaching
tool.
It's all in the approach. An atheist, for example, could use the
occassion to pose Plato's question: Is an action wrong/immoral because
the gods say so or do the gods say so because certain behavior is
inherently wrong/immoral? Or what about how the number 10 has come to
symbolize perfection, as in "she/he is a 10," the gymnast scored a
perfect 10, today's top 10 list...etc?
At the very least, the public posting of the Ten Commandments would
expose the hypocritical self-righteous confusion of many Bible-thumpers.
Martin Zender, author of "How to Quit Church Without Quitting God: 7
Good Reasons to Escape the Box," reminds his fellow Bible-believers that
God replaced the Ten Commandments with grace. "But somehow," he says,
"the Religious Right never got the message."
Zender rightly calls this debate "a joke," arguing that posting the Ten
Commandments will be a step backward for morality. "It will make people
worse, not better. The Decalogue produces frustrated religious
hypocrites who damn other people for not being as moral as them. How
moral is it to damn somebody?"
Zender believes this is all divine Providence at work. "The Ten
Commandments were meant to be contrasted with the grace of Christ. Jesus
delivered us from thou shalts and thou shalt nots, but nobody could have
appreciated that without the backdrop of law. I'm not saying it's okay
to covet your neighbor's wife now. I'm saying that we refrain from it
now because of God's love in our heart, not because we have to obey
God's rules or else. It's 'want to' versus 'have to.'
"Going back to the Ten Commandments from this era of spiritual
enlightenment is like ditching the space shuttle for a donkey cart. Wake
up, Jerry (Falwell). God has done something spectacularly new."
Amen.
(c) 2005, Cape Cod Times
URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=18689
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John Hachmann aa #1782
Intelligent Design has as much to do with science as reality
television has to do with reality. - Barry Lynn on CNN 12/25/04
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