Louisiana’s latest gambit to gain the news spotlight is to require the Ten Commandments to be posted in every public classroom. The State’s mandate inspired me to look at them and to write this article.
I prefer to examine the commandments’ meaning, not just the words. First, the commandments acknowledge one God. If you claim to be an atheist, at least be an honest one and don’t delude yourself by manufacturing little gods of your own design such as money, status, self-esteem, and possessions. The same goes for conjuring up various spirits that appeal to your imagination. Be an honest atheist. God appreciates atheistic honesty and honors its unending arguing with the God it doesn’t believe in.
Honor mother and father might mean mom and dad, but it has more to do with knowing history and honoring the hard work and wisdom of our ancestors. Flawed as they were, they nevertheless offered godly counsel that lead us into a deeper understanding of what it means to follow Jesus in the way of love.
Don’t murder sounds simple enough, but our gun happy culture gives license to kill on the flimsiest of rationalizations. Maybe we should just stop killing each other and remember there are other ways of committing murder. Physical and psychological abuse kills one’s soul a little at a time.
Adultery is the betrayal of a relationship. Of course it means cheating on one’s spouse, but it also means betraying the integrity of any relationship: friends, customers, employers, employees, every relationship that relies on mutual trust. To betray is to break trust. Oddly enough, it seems Jesus was more understanding of sexual adultery than other kinds of betrayal.
Same with stealing. It’s more than refraining from robbery or burglary. It means don’t acquire for yourself anything whatsoever that you do not have a moral right to, remembering that what is legal may still be immoral.
Do not bear false witness may be the most violated of them all. Every tidbit of juicy gossip, slanderous insult, unverified rumor and crackpot conspiracy story is a form of false witness. False witness kills and destroys. It’s part of what has corrupted our democracy.
What about all the thou shalt not covet commandments? To covet is a strong emotion, a passionate desire to have what someone else has. Not something like it, but the thing itself. It leads to murder, theft, and adultery. Passions exist but they’re not to control our lives.
Students learn their most important lessons from what they see their elders say and do. When you get right down to it, there are only two commandments. Love the Lord your God and be a person of integrity in everything you do and say. Make it a way of life.. Start with the church, then legislatures and courts, news organizations, corporate advertising, and the local gathering place. Then don’t worry about posters in classrooms. The kids will be OK..
Here, yet again, I think you get it exactly right, Steve, while also perhaps underestimating the way spiritual despair is at work in today’s America. So you write:
“Students learn their most important lessons from what they see their elders say and do. When you get right down to it, there are only two commandments. Love the Lord your God and be a person of integrity in everything you do and say. Make it a way of life.”
Yes.
But now imagine that the single most pervasive “way of life” presented to students is relentlessly transactional in a zero-sum game.
Then add that most if not all of the “elders” of elite college students in the Pacific Northwest directly deny the “first commandment” to “love the Lord your God” while simultaneously insisting that they are, indeed, people of integrity in everything they do and say.
But if you deny intrinsic authority of love, how can your way of life not devolve into a transactional zero-sum game?
Or to amplify the despair, what do you have to do to yourself to even imagine that you are a person of integrity in everything you do and say if the authority of love is absent from a life that has already devolved into a transactional zero-sum game that is all too apparent to the young?
I hope the children ask a lot of questions like, What is adultery? And what does it mean to bear false witness? The big takeaway will be hypocrisy.
Many years ago, when I was teaching 1st and 3rd graders in a suburban Philadelphia school, we were required to read from the Old Testament each morning. Now that is the craziest thing to read to 1st or 3rd graders. It was insanity. It didn’t last long before that program was dropped by someone with better sense. Ursula Curran
I’m wholly unqualified to offer a correction, but I’ll do it anyway.
“When you get right down to it, there are only two commandments. Love the Lord your God and …” Love your neighbor as yourself. The 10 Commandments are Moses’ Laws, obsoleted by the fulfillment of the Old Covenant. No?