Ten commandments

[zyncod]

I think that a prerequisite for putting up the Ten Commandments in any publicly-funded forum should be that they also have to put up the following verses (and Moses is in there, so it should make everyone happy!):

14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army-the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds-who returned from the battle.

15 "Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them. 16 "They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the LORD's people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
(Numbers 31:14-18)

Just to give the idea of what Judeo-Christianity has been about from the beginning - say one thing and do another. Like - Thou shalt not kill but um.. yeah, go ahead and kill all the men and women except for the virgins you're going to rape. Or the multitude of Jesus' sayings about charity and poverty - but the really important thing is to stop the homos from getting married.

 

[Throckmorton]

Hi zyncod,

Why anybody thinks it's the government's business to post mandates to worship a certain jealous God is beyond me. I am a huge fan of the decalogue but one's choice of who and how to worship is a personal rather than a governmental decision.

Those who say that the Constitution is based on the 10 Commandments don't have a clue. The Constitution gives us the right to worship the "wrong" god(s), commit idolatry, commit blasphemy, and violate the Sabbath. The Ten Commandments are all about prohibiting such activities and the OT mandates death for things such as worshiping the "wrong" god(s), blasphemy, and idolatry.

 

[Silas]

I'm surprised there hasn't been a thread about the death sentence which was commuted this week (ref: the London Daily Telegraph Tuesday) because in order to reach their verdict of death, the jury in a case (oh, and never was there a more unconstitutional thing than for sentence to be determined by jury), consulted a Bible. Apparently with particular reference to "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth".

It might have interested the jurors to know that the two oldest religious strands which use the Bible, ie Judaism and the Catholic Church, are both quite emphatic about the wrongness and inapplicability of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". But this all goes back to my basic problem with American Fundamentalist Christianity (which has a pernicious effect on nearly all aspects of life there) - that it has no theology, no understanding of two thousand years of religious history.

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/9829

 

[Jinoda]

I e-mailed these verses to my Mother, and this was her response:

In the Old Testament, it was before Jesus had been crucified, so it
was before the "Age of Grace". We live in the "Age of Grace" now.
Back then, the Ten Commandments required everyone to follow those
laws, and the punishment for adultery was being stoned. If a person
disobeyed, he was going to die. In the verses before in the same
chapter, God had commanded Moses to kill the Midianites, but he didn't
specify who specifically, so Moses took that to mean EVERYONE. He was
obeying God. They were worshipping a man called "Balaam" as if he was
God.

Moses had not actually seen God with his own eyes, but he spent 40
days up in a mountain by himself and talked to God directly and heard
his voice. That must have been quite an experience! He knew from his
own experience how holy God was, and how angry God would get for any
sin that man committed. When they made a golden calf to worship while
Moses was gone, God punished everyone and 3,000 people died in one day
as punishment for worshipping this idol that they made. This included
men, women and children.

She knows much more about Christianity than I, so there you go.

And for the atheists in the crowd: "dont'chu talk 'bout my momma!"

 

[Jinoda]

Oh, she sent another e-mail, about the "rape part":

The part of where they were allowed to rape the virgins, I don't think
that was the reason that the virgins were saved. My opinion is that
virgins weren't connected or influenced by any man who worshipped
Balaam, and virgins were highly respected in those days. This part is
hard to understand, because in other instances, when a war was going
on, the country that won the war would be allowed to ransack and take
everything the country owned - all their belongings, plus their women,
which wasn't necessarily done by Godly people, but evil people. I
have to further investigate this, okay?