Contra Commandments

The always stimulating Christopher Hitchens is at it again, this time aiming his well-sharpened witty pen against a rather big target: Roy Moore and his "fight" for the Ten Commandments. But Hitchens leaves aside the question of Moore's fight and instead dissects the Commandments themselves (or as he calls them, "vague pre-Christian desert morality"), and in true atheistic fashion finds them contradictory, nonsensical, and immoral. A few comments and replies to Hitchens' broadsides:

The first four of the commandments have little to do with either law or morality, and the first three suggest a terrific insecurity on the part of the person supposedly issuing them. I am the lord thy god and thou shalt have no other ... no graven images ... no taking of my name in vain: surely these could have been compressed into a more general injunction to show respect. The ensuing order to set aside a holy day is scarcely a moral or ethical one, unless you assume that other days are somehow profane.

Once we get past the first step of faith (something Hitchens clearly finds silly and inhuman, since it involves the dimunition of human reason), understand that Commandments 1-4 aim at the errors of the Hebrew world, namely polytheism, idolatry, deliberately destructive blasphemy (rather than just irreverence), and prideful forgetfulness of God True, combined they demand respect, but it is more than this, even today. Polytheism and idolotry worship gods of war, love, and the sea; modern polytheism and idolatry worship money, lust, and social esteem. Both place personal gods above God. And what destroys the respect for God (and the civic obedience and social stability that come with it) more than flippant name-calling, using God's name with the same laxity as your next door neighbor Bob? Finally, caught up in their own little worlds and pursuits, men begin to see the world as their own: they made it and make it. Weekly worship stops men, sends them to a place of introspection, and forces them to recover lost humility. Isn't a weekly holy day at its most basic level a warning to avoid hubris, there is more to the world than just you? So, yes, 1-4 are a call for respect, but they go deeper to warn against worship of the self: be careful when pursuing earthly things, watch your mouth, and remember your place. This isn't God suffering from self-esteem problems; all this makes civilization possible.

The next instruction is to honor one's parents: a harmless enough idea, but again unenforceable in law and inapplicable to the many orphans that nature or god sees fit to create. That there should be no itemized utterance enjoining the protection of children seems odd, given that the commandments are addressed in the first instance to adults. But then, the same god frequently urged his followers to exterminate various forgotten enemy tribes down to the last infant, sparing only the virgins, so this may be a case where hand-tying or absolute prohibitions were best avoided.

It is a peculiarly modern error to see children separate from parents and family, even the orphans, as if they were a category all to themselves. But the call to "honor your father and your mother" implies children, no? Who is to honor their parents other than children? And do not the other commandments imply the proper way to raise children, setting an example by being humble, honoring elders, refraining from murder, lying, adultery, and greed?

There has never yet been any society, Confucian or Buddhist or Islamic, where the legal codes did not frown upon murder and theft. These offenses were certainly crimes in the Pharaonic Egypt from which the children of Israel had, if the story is to be believed, just escaped. So the middle-ranking commandments, of which the chief one has long been confusingly rendered "thou shalt not kill," leave us none the wiser as to whether the almighty considers warfare to be murder, or taxation and confiscation to be theft. Tautology hovers over the whole enterprise.

Hitchens is correct; the sixth Commandment says "thou shall not murder," not kill. In fact, murder is the terrible end point of those errors which were mentioned earlier: you murder for honor, you murder for money. If you had only listened to the warning against hubris... And since a state implies the means to support a state (unless you see the Old and New Testaments as anti-state libertarian tracts, silly no?), taxation cannot be considered theft. There are such things as just and unjust taxation (another blog entirely), but taxation as such is rather obviously not prohibited.

In much the same way, few if any courts in any recorded society have approved the idea of perjury, so the idea that witnesses should tell the truth can scarcely have required a divine spark in order to take root. To how many of its original audience, I mean to say, can this have come with the force of revelation? Then it's a swift wrap-up with a condemnation of adultery (from which humans actually can refrain) and a prohibition upon covetousness (from which they cannot). To insist that people not annex their neighbor's cattle or wife "or anything that is his" might be reasonable, even if it does place the wife in the same category as the cattle, and presumably to that extent diminishes the offense of adultery. But to demand "don't even think about it" is absurd and totalitarian, and furthermore inhibiting to the Protestant spirit of entrepreneurship and competition.

Well, Hitchens is saying the perjury commandment was unnecessary, because everyone knows not to lie. Do they? Just how many people were prosecuted for perjury last year? The mere fact that the commandment was given is evidence it needed to be said. That is like saying, "why does the Declaration say we have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- everyone, particulary in Whiggish America, knew that already." Obviously not. If that commandment had been peripheral, wouldn't it have fallen by the wayside long ago? Isn't its continued presence evidence that it serves some need, that it reminds us of a common and recurring failure, that imperfect people need that injunction? The adultery commandment is straightforward, even though Hitchens postures a bit by noting women and cattle are mentioned in the same category, hence women are animals, and having an affair with a poodle is a lesser offense (ahem, really?) -- it also mentions "my neighbor's house"; does this mean my wife is a four-bedroom Colonial? It does show that in Hebrew times, men had things that were regarded as "their things," and women were among them. This is not longer true, but I fail to see how this weakens the commandment to avoid covetousness. Have we "progressed" into the "post-covetous era?"

One is presuming (is one not?) that this is the same god who actually created the audience he was addressing. This leaves us with the insoluble mystery of why he would have molded ("in his own image," yet) a covetous, murderous, disrespectful, lying, and adulterous species. Create them sick, and then command them to be well? What a mad despot this is, and how fortunate we are that he exists only in the minds of his worshippers.

Men are not God, although too many aspire to be and think they already are -- this is what makes the Ten Commandments necessary and relevant. Hitchens finds the existence of fallen man an "insoluble mystery," but is it? The only grace worth having is that which is freely chosen, and "covetous, murderous, disrespectful, lying, adulterous" men forsaking those things to accept God makes life livable and lovable. I want to live in a society with men who say "no" to those things. To say fallen man and a benevolent God are a contradiction is to deny free will. Thus, Hitchens appears caught in the "insoluble mystery" more than the Christians he opposes. If you deny the fallen men-benevolent God-free will scenario, aren't you forced into one of two other scenarios: God manipulating men completely (in which case God would be malevolent and men automatons) or no God at all and men following their own urges alone (in which case men are again determinisitic biological automatons).

In the end, Hitchens wishes to subtract the influence of organized religion from human civilization, thinking that if such had occured the history of men would be immeasurably better over the last several thousand years. With visions of holy wars and inquisitions dancing across his eyes, he appears to throw the baby out with the bathwater. What political order, economic standards, artistic and literary beauty would we have today without the traditions Hitchens hates? In the Hitchens' calculus, much like Ayn Rand's, the Empire State Building is more glorious than Chartres, after all the former was built with free labor in a secularist society, while the latter was built by silly theists and serfs. Yet, isn't the continued resilient presence of the Commandments and Christianity evidence that not only do they serve a human need but reflect something larger, something timeless, something (dare I say?) divine?

I'm not a betting man, but I'll put my chips with God and thousands of years of history, rather than Christopher Hitchens in last August 2003.