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Two Commandments

Entry 553, on 2007-06-13 at 16:55:50 (Rating 4, Religion)

The debate about the significance of Christianity to our current society here in New Zealand is settling down a bit, but various questions continue to be discussed. One of the more common is whether our laws are based on the Ten Commandments of the Bible. I had a look at the commandments, and the first problem is that there seems to be two sets of them: in Exodus 20 and Exodus 34. And neither of these is convincing as a basis for our laws, in my opinion.

OK, so some of the commandments are still relevant: thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal are still part of our law, but the other eight aren't really particularly relevant from a legal perspective. I mean, who cares about "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." That's clearly irrelevant. And some are completely contrary to law, for example "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." Ever heard of freedom of religion?

And God really seems to have a thing about asses. For example "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's."

The stuff in Exodus 34 is even less relevant. For example "Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven; neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning." Uh huh, that's pretty important all right.

So really, like the rest of the Bible, this stuff is just a pile of laughably irrelevant garbage. The occasional relevant point which we might discover in the Bible is usually a universal value shared with other philosophies, and generally appropriated by Christianity for its own purposes.

So I don't think our laws are based on the Ten Commandments at all. The law shares some aspects of them (thou shalt not kill, etc) but that is really more because the commandments and the law both share a common human morality.

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