edy420 » December 7th, 2018, 3:17 am wrote:The Ten Commandments (simplified)
1. You shall have no other Gods before me
2. You shall not make for yourselves an idol
3. You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God
4. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy
5. Honor your father and your mother
6. You shall not murder
7. You shall not commit adultery
8. You shall not steal
9. You shall not give false testimony
10. You shall not covet
Whether you like it or not, western society was built on this code of morality.
It actually wasn't. The Greek, Roman, Persian, Chinese, Egyptian and Assyrian civilizations all had far more sophisticated legal codes, long before Moses came down from that mountain.
The first four commandments refer only to Jehovah's jealousy. (Read Terry Pratchett's
Small Gods)
Honouring parents is hardly unique in human societies, though the interpretation may vary according to custom and economic situation. In Judeo-Christian interpretation, it usually translates as deference toward the patriarch and sentimentality over the mother (who has no actual rights).
#6 is usually considered problematic, since Jehovah himself almost immediately commanded those same Israelites to massacre the citizens of Jericho, and later went on to many more atrocities against their enemies - or just any old peoples whose land (and virgin daughters) they
coveted.
In fact, the legal term "murder" is
never applied to killing done by the state or its agents. It only means that private killing of one civilian by another is strictly regulated - that is, forbidden, with some exemptions.
Stealing, lying, cheating, coveting (that is, connivance to acquire) and breach of contract (including the marital vow) are illegal in all societies, and unevenly enforced in all societies.
Some societies care for none of them.
Name three.
200 years ago in my country, it was honourable to eat your enemies heart. Luckily the Christian code of morality has been implemented here. Lest I be honourable in an inhumane context.
Okay. So the christians don't eat their enemies. The hang, draw and quarter, burn at stakes, behead in public, take their weapons and leave the corpses to rot, mustard gas in their trenches and bulldoze the trenches......All honourable and humane.
The atheist set of moral codes varies from one individual to the next.
All moral codes vary by individual, both as to interpretation and implementation. If Christians all uniformly obeyed all their churches' tenets, they would still have almost 40,000 different denominations, each with its own code.
There is no collective standard of which is agreed upon. The law can, and is changed, but usually too late. And never fully reflects societies values.
That's the nature of secular democracy. If we didn't want secular, representative government that can respond to the reality experienced by people in any given time, e'd have stuck to kings by divine right. Oddly enough, they, too had various laws under God's law.
Atheists like to use reason as their code of conduct.
Yes. They think they're all smarter than sheep.
The problem is we all have different levels of reasoning skills and interpretation. Having a drug use history, I know a few drug abuse atheists with poor morals and reasoning skills.
And no Christians?
Modern society seems to be drifting further and further away from the Christian foundation of which it was built. Abortion, evolution, gay marriage, gender identity, are topics of controversy today, but not 50 years ago in a more Christian grounded society.
Yes, we've been whittling away - woefully slowly and with inordinate effort - at the persecutions built into religious dogma.
1. Is it time to remove Christianities morality as a base guideline once and for all?
Absolutely! It has never worked. Not for the 800 years it was in force before the Christian era (All the Jewish prophets kept yelling at the people for failing to keep the commandments) and not for the 1900 since it was recodified by the RCC (hence all those prisons and torture chambers).
2. If so, what do we replace it with?
Sanity would be nice. But the civil legal apparatus that's been operating for 300 hundred or so years just needs continued reform, refining, equalizing, negotiating.