Ten Commandments

We are all probably familiar with the Ten Commandments of Exodus and Deuteronomy in the Bible. It is often claimed that they are instrumental to the development of our nation's set of laws. David Limbaugh wrote, "Much of our Bill of Rights is biblically based, as well, and the Ten Commandments and further laws set out in the book of Exodus form the basis of our Western law."

Are they? Are they really the basis of our modern law?

Here's the list as found in Exodus 20:3-17. This is the traditional Christian way of dividing it up, you might have learned it a little differently.

1. You shall have no other gods before me.
2. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
3. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
4. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
5. Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
6. You shall not murder.
7. You shall not commit adultery.
8. You shall not steal.
9. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

 For ease of discussion, let's shorten it up a bit.

1. One god
2. No idols
3. Don't misuse name of god
4. No work on holy Sabbath by anyone/anything
5. Honor parents
6. No murder
7. No screwin' around on your spouse
8. No theft
9. No perjury
10. Don't want other people's spouses and stuff

Can these be seen as the genesis of American law? I don't think there is a case.

First, there is the pesky First Amendment in the Bill of Rights which guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of religious involvement. So the first four commandments are impossible to rectify with the Constitution, and therefore American law. We permit all religions to peacefully coexist, we defend the artist's right to respectfully depict gods in their work even if it is offensive (the taboo against offending Muslims with representations of Allah is not in US law), we protect the right to even religiously offensive speech so long as it is not obscene or directly inciting violence, and even religious bookstores are open seven days a week.

There goes 40% of the case against the Ten Commandments influencing our laws.

I think it's a generally good idea to honor your parents. In the absolute worst case scenario, you must respect that if they had not met you would never have been born. In the best scenarios, they fed, taught, protected and nurtured you into an adult who still relies on their counsel often. I also think it's a generally good idea not to cheat on your spouse or to crave your neighbor's things. But nowhere in US law are these notions actually legislated.

There are some local laws against adultery and "deviant" sexual behavior, but these are being struck down on a regular basis because they are simply not supported by the Bill of Rights. And laws which require you to treat your parents with any more respect than other human beings or police your wants and desires would be seen as repugnant by thinking people, and cannot be supported by legal precedent in the US.

We are down to three remaining Commandments - the ones against murder, theft, and perjury. And these three are quite illegal in the US. So do we then have a 30% case for the Ten Commandments?

Not quite. The Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu (c. 2100-2050 BCE) is the oldest verifiable prohibition of murder, robbery and perjury. By contrast, the book of Exodus was not written much prior to 600 BCE. In other words, if I wrote something based on the Canterbury Tales, it would not be original work but a derivative - and the time between Ur-Nammu and the writer of Exodus is double the span of time between now and the 14th century.

Laws against murder, theft and perjury were not new in 600 BCE, they had been so for a millennia plus. Saying a work written in 600 BCE is the basis for our laws against stealing and killing and lying is like saying that the books by Emily Post are the reason we are polite to each other, or that Roe v Wade is the reason abortions started.

The facts are clear. 3 of these Commandments restate already established laws, and the other 7 just have no representation in American jurisprudence. Any argument that they form any basis for our system of laws, or the basis for any modern legal system, is simply baseless and wrong.

Posting these Commandments in a government building is not an homage to our laws and nation. It is a bald-faced homage to a deity, and that irksome First Amendment expressly forbids it. Remember than when you vote.

Throwing Away Ideas, Not Observations

Why do people believe in a god or gods? Two simple reasons.

1. They cannot explain the world around them (death, disease, natural disaster, etc.) with reason, so they guess that someone is playing a trick on them, or making things happen behind the scenes.
2. They were taught to - sometimes gently, sometimes harshly - at a relatively young age. If they doubt their beliefs, they fear reprisal from family as well as the "man upstairs".

No person is born with an innate knowledge of the existence of any god. I admit this is a bold statement and I probably can't prove it. But I can show why it is extremely likely to be so.

If I said that no one is born with an innate knowledge of the English language, or of juggling balls, or of making a fire, not one person would challenge me, because obviously we needed to learn these things ourselves before we knew them. There are many people alive today who cannot speak English, juggle balls, or make a fire without some sort of special technology. Clearly these are not innate.

However, we can argue that we have the innate ability to communicate, to manipulate objects, to experiment with phenomena we observe. I don't think anyone will argue these. It's those innate skills that led our predecessors to invent formal language, juggling and ignition.

And we also teach these skills with care to not abuse them. We tell our children what sort of language is permissible in certain places and situations, and which words would result in a less than favorable result for them if used. Jugglers are aware that they need a safe distance from others to perform the feat, and that the whimsical nature of it does not blend well with certain more sober situations. And we keep matches and lighters away from children while we let them plan our fire escape plan, and we collectively support the very socialist notion of a local fire department so even those who cannot afford to pay for such property and life rescue can benefit.

I think it is innate that we reason. I think it is innate that we look at things fall and notice that they never fall up. We see that fast things hitting objects perform more spectacularly than slow things. We notice that it is light out for about half a day, then it is dark out. All of these observations make us curious and drive us to understand more about the reality we find ourselves in.

The trouble is what happens when we can't reason it out. A few thousand years ago we did not understand why tides rose and fell. We needed some explanation because reason wasn't cutting it. We didn't understand why life can just stop, and someone becomes dead. We needed some sort of explanation.

Generally, the answers to the above problems was that a god or gods did it. God made the tides go in and out. God cursed a person for their evil, or called him home for his good deeds. And without any evidence to contradict all that, that served us as good as any other explanation.

Now we understand the Moon's gravity with the Earth and how it affects the oceans. We understand infection, disease and the genetics of old age. Yet there still are those who attribute tides and death to divine action, despite all we have learned.

There are many who reject science as against religion, as a sort of sorcery or evil craft that lies to us. They claim evolution is no better a theory than, say, intelligent design, and when shown mountains of strong evidence supporting evolution they simply say it is faulty, it doesn't prove a thing.

Now, having provisional explanations for things we don't understand is fine and normal. Gestalt psychology is criticized,  but most agree that when we see something that is incomplete we fill in the blanks naturally. It's in our nature.

The problem is when we use these provisional explanations even when our reason shows us that there are other, more reasonable explanations. When we dispense with the science of radiometric dating and insist that this book says the Earth is only so many thousands of years old, we are letting provisionality overrule reason. When we insist that a pregnancy initiated through a violent sexual attack is "God's will" we are letting provisionality overrule reason.

Tim Minchin wrote, "Science adjusts its views based on what's observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved." In other words, reason means dispensing with an idea when it does not match observation, not dispensing with an observation when it does not match an idea.

If the god idea was innate, why would there be so many contradictory versions of it? If there was one true god or set of gods that we can just know, why aren't we all in agreement? Does this deity want us to kill each other over it?

It's like the old saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.When repeated observations and man's best ideas do not match up, we must throw away the idea, not the observations.

I have no problem if you want to personally fill in the cracks with God Spackle. I do have a problem when there already is an explanation for what you are spackling over, and you refuse to accept it because it doesn't fit your premise. My problem is that you then teach your children not to think critically. You encourage ignorance of reality over believing tradition. You celebrate the emotional security of a Father in Heaven over the need for stewardship of our Actual Reality.

If you must be religious, please never allow religion to become harmful to others. Take care to juggle a safe distance from me. Use words that are peaceful, not inflammatory.

And please, above all, don't let your children learn to love the flame of religion like a modern-day arsonist, but to respect it, just like our earliest prehistoric chemists did when they invented fire. Religion, like fire, can destroy if left unchecked, or if used without rational thought.

The Man Who Isn't There

Imagine you walk into a room and you see two people in the room with you. One person says to you, "There are three people in this room now." The other person says, "No, there are four. You cannot see or hear the fourth person, but he is here." Let's also assume both these people are being completely serious.

Who are you more likely to believe? Do you feel more likely to believe the first person or the second? Which person requires you to put some faith in them to believe their statement?

Most people would say they believe the first person. One person I asked this question answered that he would consider the second person to possibly be insane. Clearly the first person's statement agrees with your observations, not only in the room but in general. There simply are not invisible, inaudible people (unless they are hiding from you, or ninjas, of course). It requires no faith at all to accept the first person's claim. The second person, however, would seem to be incorrect, but you might take them at their word if you felt faith was warranted.

Some people say atheism requires as much faith as believing in a god. They claim that atheism is a faith no different than belief, that atheists believing in no god is as unknowable as a theist claiming there is one.

However, there is a bit of a mistake here. In the room with the two (or three) men, I really do not know which man is right. It may well be that there is a fourth man hiding behind the sofa. Seems unlikely, but it is possible. Once I make a thorough search of the room and find no hiding person, I would have more reason to say with assuredness that there is definitely no fourth man. But if there was always a place he could be hiding that I could not search, then not only do I not know if he is there, I cannot know he is there.

As such, I am agnostic about the fourth man.

Agnostic is often misused to define a middle ground between atheism and theism. In fact, both atheists and theists can claim to be either agnostic or gnostic. Theism means "belief in the existence of a god or gods" and gnosticism is "knowing something is true". Atheism is the absence of belief, and agnosticism is the absence of knowledge.

A gnostic atheist would assert there is no god or gods, while an agnostic atheist would believe there is not a god, but admit there is no way to disprove the existence. An agnostic theist would believe there is a god or gods but admit they cannot be certain they are right, and a gnostic theist knows without a doubt there is a god or gods.

Having or lacking knowledge does not necessarily change one's beliefs. I do not know for certain that my neighbor is sleeping in his bed at night, but it seems sensible to believe it is true. I do not know for certain whether I am being followed by clever spies, but it seems reasonable to dispense that thought as irrational.

I do not know if there is a fourth man in the room or not, but it makes sense in cases where I know all I can to go with what I see and observe and discount propositions that cannot be supported or proven.

In fact, atheism is the abandonment of faith that the stories we have heard of the invisible man have validity. It is no different than ignoring the lies people tell about us on the playground or dispensing with the childhood fantasies of the Tooth Fairy or the Monster in the Closet. Intelligent people eventually see that reality does not match the stories they are told, or they tell themselves, and as such they brush the nonsense away.

If a god exists, he is either hiding from us, or he is a ninja. But it seems far more plausible that in absence of any possible arguments for the existence of a god or a tooth fairy or a monster in the closet, they must instead be imaginary. And no matter how much a child begs you to check the closet one more time before he goes to sleep, no matter how hard he believes, you know you will find no monster, not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever.

When someone claims a man is invisible, it is as close to certain as we can get that the man simply isn't there.