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The Ten Commandments Revised: Christopher Hitchens

Another brilliant article by Christopher Hitchens.  This one deals with the outdated and very useless 10 commandments of the Judeo Christian religions.  He brings up many fabulous observations about how the bible actually has four versions of the 10 commandments within the Old Testament and how the first 4 commandments have nothing to do with how to behave but rather demand that its followers grovel before their god. Here is an excerpt from his Vanity Fair Article:

“There is in fact a good biblical precedent for doing just that, since the giving of the divine Law by Moses appears in three or four wildly different scriptural versions. (When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time.) The first and most famous set comes in Exodus 20 but ends with Moses himself smashing the supposedly most sacred artifacts ever known to man: the original, God-dictated panels of Holy Writ. The second edition occurs in Exodus 34, where new but completely different tablets are presented after some heavenly re-write session and are for the first time called “the ten commandments.” In the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses once more calls his audience together and recites the original Sinai speech with one highly significant alteration (the Sabbath commandment’s justifications in each differ greatly). But plainly discontented with the effect of this, he musters the flock again 22 chapters further on, as the river Jordan is coming into view, and gives an additional set of orders—chiefly terse curses—which are also to be inscribed in stone. As with the gold plates on which Joseph Smith found the Book of Mormon in upstate New York, no trace of any of these original yet conflicting tablets survives.” – Christopher Hitchens

Continue Reading the Full Article “The New Commandments”