Liberal Christians would mention that two commandments are greater than these ten without noticing that these ten commandments spell out in detail how to love God and your fellow. The first five are more about loving God, because it is hard to know the consequences of breaking them. The next four are about loving your fellow human. The last one is about caring for yourself.

  1. Having other gods before the one and only.
  2. Making what passes for life, especially if it works out to something that other people worship, including if not especially the almighty dollar. And you should very well know better than to worship anything of the sort, because God means business with your descendants on the point of loving him. This commandment is also an injunction against undue influence from imagery, for it forbids any likeness of God's creatures in the air, on the Earth, or in the water.
  3. Claiming to know God's will, or openly expecting this greatest one of all to make you keep the will you claim, or using the name of God to support your vain cause when your own word isn't good enough.
  4. Working seven days a week, especially when lives are in your hands, and then making everybody else compete for the slim pickings on a holy day known as the Sabbath, technically Saturday, when you could be ensuring that your children hav better entertainment than those sick cartoons on the machine that is so well suited to breaking the second commandment.
  5. Giving those who bred you, suffered the pain you caused, suffered the pain you endured, and raised you a good reason to disclaim and disinherit you.
  6. Killing humans.
  7. You will be very lucky if your spouse takes you back after you stray into adultery, and sometimes, going back to your wife after adultery is murder.
  8. Taking what someone else worked for without giving them a say in what you do with it or how long you take it.
  9. Being a loose cannon with your mouth or your pen or your keyboard that is libel to damage the reputation and livelihood of your community or any member of it.
  10. Wanting any object or being that could come between you and your neighbour when you could find a neighbour more willing to part with what you really need.
You can validate this HTML here. It contains one intentional error. If your browser does not support <embed> tags, then you might find this 56kbit/s audio appropriate.
Reply