Ten Commandments... missed opportunity by god?
He's laying down the law and this is what he comes up with?
"When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted--anything!--the Ten have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women--or anyone--as chattel or inferior beings.
It's not as if God had nothing more to say. The minute he's through with the Decalogue, he gives Moses a long list of legal minutiae that are even less edifying: what happens if you buy a Hebrew slave and give him a wife who has children (he goes free after six years, but you keep the rest of the family); what should happen if a man sells his daughter as a "maidservant" and her master decides he doesn't fancy her after all (he can give her to his son). God enjoins us to kill witches, Sabbath violators, disrespectful children, and people who have sex with animals, but not masters who beat their slaves to death, especially if the death takes place a day or two after the beating, because the slave is the master's "money." No wonder the good white Christians of Alabama believed the Bible permitted slavery! It does! "
Funny stuff.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030922&s=pollitt
"When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted--anything!--the Ten have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women--or anyone--as chattel or inferior beings.
It's not as if God had nothing more to say. The minute he's through with the Decalogue, he gives Moses a long list of legal minutiae that are even less edifying: what happens if you buy a Hebrew slave and give him a wife who has children (he goes free after six years, but you keep the rest of the family); what should happen if a man sells his daughter as a "maidservant" and her master decides he doesn't fancy her after all (he can give her to his son). God enjoins us to kill witches, Sabbath violators, disrespectful children, and people who have sex with animals, but not masters who beat their slaves to death, especially if the death takes place a day or two after the beating, because the slave is the master's "money." No wonder the good white Christians of Alabama believed the Bible permitted slavery! It does! "
Funny stuff.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030922&s=pollitt
Comments
The original set that Moses took them from had 42.
God: "Well you broke the friggin things...carve me out some new ones and I'll jot down what I can remember."
Here's another thing I'm not gonna buy...
A virgin giving birth. hehe