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Introduction.  A 2003 Gallop poll showed that 70% of Americans support locating Ten Commandments monuments in public places. Apparently most Americans believe that these ten short sentences constitute a set of moral principles not only central to Judeo-Christian teachings but also directly related to American values. Perhaps many of those polled knew that, according to the Old Testament, the commandments were written in stone and given to humans by God Himself. Written by God for humans, how could the Ten Commandments be anything other than the best possible guide to morality?

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But is that what they are or do they serve some other purpose? To qualify as one of the best of moral codes, each commandment should address a specific component of morality and, together, the set of ten commandments should add up to a complete outline of good behavior, i.e. it should provide guidance on all aspects of moral conduct.   And, of course, it should neither require nor prohibit conduct that is of no moral consequence. This essay will examine how well the commandments satisfy those objectives.

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The Ten Commandments divide into two equal groups. The first group of five speak to moral issues; the other five command behavior and, in two cases, thinking that are neither more nor less moral than behaving and thinking in the opposite way. The following discussion begins with the first group. (Note: At least eight numbering systems of the Commandments exist. The one used here derives from the Septuagint and is the version generally used by Orthodox Christians. The text of the commandments is from the King James Bible.)

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Number 8. Thou shalt not steal.  The eighth is a commandment completely acceptable as written. Stealing is the name of a major category of immoral behavior, taking the property of another without permission, and this commandment prohibits that entire category. If all of the commandments were written on this model, the set of ten would probably be quite good.

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Number 6. Thou shalt not kill.  The commandments speak about behavior directly harmful to others only once, only here in the sixth commandment. Although the writer neglects to mention it, there are many ways to harm others, only one of which is to kill them. Sam Harris writes (Letter to a Christian Nation):

 

...we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: ‘Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.'

 

A commandment intended to prohibit harmful behavior would include not only the most extreme instance, but all types and degrees of harm, even the least of them. In fact, in order to prohibit all immoral behavior within a category, the least violations may be most important because they establish the lower limit of the category.  Not the worst violations, but the least are those whose immorality is most often overlooked, excused, condoned, unrecorded, repeated.  Silent on the great array of horrors that humans constantly visit on other humans, the other creatures, and the planet, the writer seems not seriously interested in the subject at hand. Because it approves by omission all forms of oppression, violence and destruction, both physical and psychological (except murder), this commandment can only be understood as a profoundly immoral rule of conduct.

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And there is another problem. The writer has not specified the scope of the command. Does the commandment to not kill apply to everything living: humans, the other animals, plants? Because it was written by people (or by a God) who thought humans were superior to other animals and to plants (only humans have souls, live forever, resemble God), it probably isn’t intended to apply to either of the nonhuman groups. On the other hand, it must apply to humans because, once plants and nonhuman animals have been excluded from the commandment, there is nothing else to not kill. But are all humans to be protected by this commandment or only some of them? The Old Testament contains a lot of discussion about the correct way to interact with people who advocate for the wrong God. For example:

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If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son, or your daughter, or the wife of your bosom, or your friend who is as your own soul, entices you secretly, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,”. . .you shall kill him; your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. You shall stone him to death with stones, because he sought to draw you away from the Lord your God. . . . If you hear in one of your cities which the Lord your God gives you to dwell there, that certain base fellows have gone out among you and have drawn away the inhabitants of the city, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,”. . .you shall surely put the inhabitants of that city to the sword, destroying it utterly, all who are in it and its cattle, with the edge of the sword. (Deuteronomy 13:6-15)

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Based on this instruction, the commandment not to kill is evidently limited to humans who worship the God of the Old Testament and even they (and their cattle) are at risk if they live in the wrong city. Don’t kill, in this commandment, means don’t kill people who are part of the Church, according to whoever wrote Deuteronomy it means do kill people you perceive to be enemies of the Church, even if they are your family and your best friends. A guide to moral behavior? Hardly. It’s an absurd guide to brutal criminality, the antithesis of moral behavior. For anyone to kill another person for any reason other than self-defense is neither moral nor legal, except by the standards of the Bible.

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The sixth commandment fails in two ways. First, of the many kinds of cruel and destructive behavior, the commandment includes only murder. And, second, the writer has assembled a four word commandment hopelessly impossible to follow as written. To eat, to protect oneself, to live on earth requires killing living things.  The commandment offers no guidance on the limits of acceptable killing, either in terms of victims or circumstances, other than the utterly insane directives of the associated biblical text in Deuteronomy. 

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Number 7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.  To cheat is to act in violation of accepted rules and agreements to gain some advantage, and adulterers cheat by violating the vows of marriage. But there are lots of people one can cheat, not just one’s spouse, and marriage provides just one of many opportunities in life to violate rules. This commandment seems to condone all forms of cheating except adultery. So, according to this commandment, for married adults every kind of cheating except one is alright with God; for unmarried adults and children every kind of cheating availailable to them is alright. With respect to adultery, this commandment is adequate (though lacking an operative definition); but with respect to the real issue, the larger one that includes all forms of cheating, the writer apparently sees nothing immoral and has nothing to say.

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Number 9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. In addition to lies about other people, there are a lot of things one can lie about, many of them just as significant as lies about people (taxes, business transactions, qualifications for employment, authorship of writing, role in past events, reasons for personal behavior). But, following the pattern of these commandments, the writer chooses to limit the subject of this commandment to lies about other human beings, implying that lies about everything else are OK.

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Number 5. Honor your father and your mother.  It is, of course, a good thing to honor your parents, but should we not honor all people, all creatures, all things? Commandment 5—like 6, 7, and 9—confines itself to a very small piece of a very large issue. This commandment requires respect for only two people and, thereby, seems—again by omission—to condone an attitude of disrespect for everyone and everything else, a vastly larger part of the world than the part containing only one’s parents.

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Although it is difficult to understand why commandments 6, 7, and 9 include only a single instance of a large category, here in commandment 5 the reason may be more accessible. For most people, the beliefs instilled by parents at an early age are the beliefs carried through life, though probably much more so at the time of this commandment's creation. Since the Ten Commandments serve members of the Church, commanding respect for parents (and no one else) is a way to command respect for the beliefs of the parents (the teachings of the Church) and to discourage belief in other ideas and, more generally, to discourage critical thinking with regard to religious issues.

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Though four of five of the preceding commandments completely miss the larger category of the moral behavior they address, at least they all relate to some moral issue (theft, harm to others, cheating, lying, repecting others). The following commandments, the second group of five, fail to do even that.

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Number 2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Number 3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.  These two commandments prohibit expression that might undermine the authority of the Church or diminish the faith of believers. Despots and dictators limit access to free expression in order to discourage dissent and maintain control over their subjects. These two commandments, like the injunctions of dictators, address no moral subject whatever. They prohibit certain expression not becuase it is immoral but because the Church doesn’t like it.

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Number 4. Remember the Sabbath to keep it holy.  A central authority needs to establish ways to maintain loyalty and control. By requiring one day each week for worship, the Church can regularly reaffirm its authority and maintain an accounting of the faithful and the unfaithful. Not worshipping God on Sunday violates no moral principle, just as worshipping God on Sunday satisfies no moral principle. The Church is imposing an arbitrary rule on its members and, like commandments 2 and 3, this rule has nothing to do with moral behavior, everything to do with the interests of the dictator, the Church.

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Number 1. Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.

Number 10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, nor his wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.  Both of these commandments seek to establish control over thought. The first commandment requires that people maintain their belief in the God of Abraham; the tenth commandment requires that people be content with their place in the social order. One of them, the first, prohibits beliefs that the Church doesn’t like, and the other, the tenth, prohibits thinking that the Church doesn’t like. But morality is about behavior that affects others, not about beliefs and thinking; thoughts and beliefs cannot be immoral because they do not, in themselves, affect things outside the mind (and, also, because we do not cause our thoughts, they arise spontaneously through the processes of the brain).  Neither the first nor the tenth commandment are concerned with behavior and, therefore, neither commandment involves a moral issue.

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All of the commandments in this group of five attempt to strengthen the position of the Church rather than to clarify moral conduct. But in defining certain beliefs and thoughts as immoral, Commandments 1 and 10 are unlike the other eight in a way that leads inevitably to injustice. The accusation of prohibited thoughts and beliefs cannot be proven to be untrue and, in consequence, any innocent person can be prosecuted and found guilty (or can be extrajudicially declared guilty) of having prohibited thoughts. The prosecution, abuse, and killing of innocent people for alleged thoughts and beliefs was exactly what the Church did during the Crusades, during the Inquisition, and during the witch trials in Salem. These days, the United States (under Bush, Obama, and Trump, for example) derives some of its pretend authority from these commandments when it illegally imprisons, illegally tortures, and illegally murders people (mostly Moslems, that it thinks could perhaps be terrorists), not because of any actions they’ve taken but as a consequence of inferred thoughts and beliefs. These commandments also help to justify the arbitrary Israeli killing and persecution of completely innocent Palestinians—men, women, and children. Even more that the other eight, Commandments 1 and 10—bookends to this so-called moral code—construct a sinister and arbitrary basis for crimes of the powerful against the innocent.

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In Summary.  Are the ten commandments the best guide to moral living? Only one of them adequately addresses a whole category of moral/immoral behavior (8). The other nine either fail to speak to a moral issue at all (1,2,3,4,10) or they require a moral commitment so limited that the command itself is immoral in its silence about behavior that should be prohibited (6,7,9) or required (5). Seven of the nine flawed commandments (1,2,3,4,5,6,10) seem to be written primarily to maintain the authority and power of the Church, two of them (1,10) in a way that facilitates arbitrary persecution and eliminates any possible protection of the targeted innocent. More concerned with the welfare of the Church than with the behavior of individuals and generally oblivious to the major issues of morality, the Ten Commandments cannot, and therefore do not, guide the moral behavior of humans nor, apparently, were they written with that purpose in mind.

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Afterword.  A proposal for a moral system based on two principles:

1.  Act with compassion and respect toward all people, all creatures, all property, all of nature.

2.  Choose the path of least destruction, least deceit, and least suffering.

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JL