Religious or not?
Apparently the Supreme Court can't decide if the Ten Commandments are religious or not. Or perhaps they cannot reach consensus on how religious they are.
I am interested in your opinion: Are the Ten Commandments inherently and inextricably religious?
I am interested in your opinion: Are the Ten Commandments inherently and inextricably religious?
posted by Steve Heyduck at 9:30 AM
1 Comments:
Yes, the 10 commandments are fully and completely embedded within a covenant between YHWH and the people of Israel. Because of this, they are not "general moral principles" that are universal. To read them as such is to divorce them from the Story of God and his people. Not that some of the items are not taught as morals within other religions (like #'s 6-10, suggesting general hard-wiring of some sort possibly?) or that God wouldn't like all peoples to come under them. But this is not the case as we have them. The commandments are presuppose a community's life in relationship with the living God.
Americans live together in community (even though we buy into the myth of individualism--hmm, where except from the community did we get the idea of individualism?), among other things, under a rule of law designed to balance the will of the majority while protecting those in the minority from any tyranny of the majority. As such, we are a pluralistic society. There's no getting around this. Attempts to press the 10 Commandments into a general/universal mode instead of acknowledging their specific (scandal of particularity, anyone?) religious embeddedness simply serve as attempts (though not perceived as such) to secularize them and make them "American."
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