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Jon Austin's avatar

I am surely in the running for the least religious subscriber - I wasn't raised in a religious tradition and have never felt the pull - so I have a purely theoretical relationship to the content. In general, most of them seem pretty reasonable, a few of them seem self-interested (or brand-building perhaps) and I've broken several. Not any of the biggies but enough of them that if it turns out that I'm wrong and I'm called to account by an entity who wants to pass judgment on some of my stupidest moments (of which there are many), let's hope there's an unwritten 11th along the lines of "Thou shall have a sense of humor and not take this stuff too seriously."

As an aside, my (mostly) youthful transgressions also represent my strongest personal evidence that there's a higher power in the universe: nothing better explains how I made it through the ten years of my life between ages 15 and 25 than divine intervention.

Similarly, I don't have much to add to Tom's excellent analysis tying the Ten Commandments into our civic and legal traditions. Instead, I offer a modest proposal along the lines of Jonathan Swift. If we're going to post these ten pieties to help educate the youth of Louisiana, why stop there? Even someone with as tenuous a connection to Christianity and its user manual as me knows the book is chock full of instructions on how to live.

Why not, for example, post the Beatitudes? They seem worth passing along to students and are cast into a more positive perspective than the "Thou shall nots..." Isn't exalting the peacemakers and the merciful and the pure of heart worth calling out next to the reminder not to lie about your neighbor? Shouldn't we remember the poor and the meek and those fighting for righteousness even as we're reminding one another not to covet our neighbor's stuff?

Or, if you believe that the Ten Commandments are necessary because humanity is inherently sinful and needs to be told what not to do (not my experience but YMMV), why stop there? I mean, once you get down to not cussing, haven't we opened the door to a whole bunch of other "Thou-shall-notting" that the impressionable youth of the Sugar State ought to be made aware of?

Again, knowing next to nothing about the source material, I didn't go through it page-by-page but instead turned to two of the most trustworthy, accurate sources of information on the planet - the internet and ChatGPT - for answers. This level of scholarship (partially) explains why it took me three colleges and seven years to earn one undergraduate degree.

Not surprisingly, it turns out there are lots of other things you shouldn't do in the Bible.

A lot of them involve the kinds of sex you shouldn't be having. For example, (and I'm not saying the young folks of Louisiana need to know this uniquely among the nation's young) as long as we're reminding them not to commit adultery - which, let's be honest, isn't directly applicable to most of them - shouldn't we also remind that bestiality is a no-no as well? Or that marrying a mother and her daughter is frowned upon?

But there's also a bunch of other stuff lacking in the public school curriculum that could be addressed by posting more Biblical passages. I didn't do a comprehensive survey of what's out there - it looks like lots of other people have, though - but among the "don'ts" that jumped out to me:

- No clothing made from two kinds of cloth is worn.

- Not taking a shower before going to church is bad.

- Kidnapping a man seems like it's okay unless you sell him so that seems like an important line to draw.

- No tattoos, but also no cutting your hair on the side of your head, so let's call that a push.

- There's apparently a prohibition against living in a city that hasn't surrendered to the Israelites so I guess everyone's city council could issue a proclamation of some sort that might eliminate the need to move to Tel Aviv.

- And wouldn't students want to know that any sort of work is banned on Sundays? It seems like that could cut down on homework.

I could go on and on...and on (one site I looked at had a list of 59 prohibited acts) but I think you get my point. But as long as we're on a roll, why stop there? Maybe Louisiana's law should be amended so that each classroom's easternmost wall could be reserved solely for the posting of "Thou shall nots." Then, every morning, we could require the students to face the wall and contemplate the writings thereupon. Hell, why not do it a couple of times a day to really drive the messages home?

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Lois West Duffy's avatar

Excellent,thoughtful and very interesting. Tom makes important points without "casting stones." Also sort of explains why my Baptist ancestors thought Catholics "worshipped idols." ( My grandfather wouldn't even allow Sallman's picture of Christ to be hung on his walls).

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