Ten commandment alternatives

[_Panopticon]

A post on another board raised the following question: "If the church were true, what would it look like?"

This got me thinking, not just about Mormonism, but about Christianity in general. If Christianity were true, what kinds of things would/should Christ/Jehovah have revealed to his children?

A quarter of the ten commandments deal with useless things like not taking the name of the Lord in vain, keeping the Sabbath day holy, etc. Couldn't he have said anything more useful? Why did Christ not condemn slavery? How much useless suffering could have been avoided (unless you believe in a Christ that wants countless millions of people to suffer)?

I like these alternative formulations of the ten commandments, any of which would be more indicative of divine inspiration.

Please post any additions to the ten commandments that you think would have been helpful to humanity over the last 4000 years.


Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion:
1.Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you
2. In all things, strive to cause no harm
3. Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
4. Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
5. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder
6. Always seek to be learning something new
7. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
8. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
9. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
10. Question everything

Christopher Hitchens on the Ten Commandments
1. Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or their color.
2. Do not ever even think of using people as private property.
3. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations.
4. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.
5. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature. (“Why would God create so many homosexuals, only to torture and destroy them?”)
6. Be aware that you, too, are an animal, and dependent on the web of nature. Try to think and act accordingly.
7. Do not imagine you can avoid judgment if you rob people [by lying to them] rather than with a knife.
8. Turn off that f$$cking cell phone. (this could have been revealed by "modern day prophets")
9. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions and terrible sexual repression.
10. Reject any faith if their commandments contradict any of the above.

[_Buffalo]

XI) Thou shalt boil thy water before thou drinkest thereof in order to kill the tiny invisible biting demons that shall make thee sick.

[_just me]

* Take joy in the body you have: exercise, run, walk, leap, dance, touch

[_Morley]

I have twenty rules (or 'commandments') I live by. I'll list one.

Relationships. It's all about relationships: with friends, family, books, nature, thoughts, deity, music, emotions, art, language, society, our bodies, ideas, food, politics. It's vital that one is proactively engaged and nurturing in the management of these relationships.

[_Drifting]

Thou shalt flosseth thy teeth.

[_Dr. Shades]

• Thou shalt breathe through thy nose and never through thy mouth.
  
• Thy mouth shalt remain closed at all times that thou art neither eating nor speaking.

[_just me]

• Thy mouth shalt remain closed at all times that thou art neither eating nor speaking.

Damn, that makes kissing and stuff kinda boring.

[_Morley]

• Thy mouth shalt remain closed at all times that thou art neither eating nor speaking.

Damn, that makes kissing and stuff kinda boring.

Bold mine.

Ha! Agreed. I guess I'm not joining Shades' denomination.

[_EAllusion]

I like Dawkins' a lot actually. It's a big improvement. But Richard Dawkins also knows it is a good idea to wash his hands to prevent catching diseases. That's the benefit of having thousands of years of discovery and undersatnding to stand on. In fairness, the 10 commandments, whichever version you adopt, were never intended to be some ultimate list of simple rules to guide life. They just get rhetorically treated that way.

That said, while I like the sentiment behind "Question everything" - that no idea is so sacred that it cannot be challenged - that one should always wonder - I think this "question everything" attitude in practice can run people off the rails. It's also true that you should have humility about your knowledge and talents and understand that you are limited by them in such a way that not every objection to received wisdom that sounds clever to you actually is. You should also understand that your time and resources are limited, and it is wise for you to spend them on questions likely to bear fruit. The skeptic running around questioning everything is doing himself no favors. Yes, nothing should be held above questioning. You should approach ideas with a wondering attitude that looks for justification and possiblity. But don't let that turn you into a sucker for every contrarian, fringe idea you come across or make you think some complicated area of scholarship is only worth trusting if you can personally digest it by reading one pop-science book about it.