The Trouble With The Ten Commandments

The State of Louisiana has mandated the posting of the Ten Commandments in its schools, which is deeply problematic as a constitutional matter and in substance. It is Dominionism which is something that the U.S. Bill of Rights specifically sought to prohibit.

Court cases have allowed the posting of "In God We Trust", and "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, under the rubric that it is "ceremonial deism". 

The Trouble With The Ten Commandments

The Ten Commandments are more problematic (indeed, even the numbering of the Ten Commandments is a matter of sectarian division that any posting of them with numbers takes sides in as an establishment of religion).

This is why the U.S. Supreme Court held 44 years ago that a Kentucky law almost identical to the law just passed by Louisiana was unconstitutional in Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980) despite the fact that it differed from the Louisiana law by mandating the the posting be funded without public money. The holding there is summarized at the link as follows:

In a 5-to-4 per curiam decision, the Court ruled that the Kentucky law violated the first part of the test established in Lemon v. Kurtzman, and thus violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. The Court found that the requirement that the Ten Commandments be posted "had no secular legislative purpose" and was "plainly religious in nature." The Court noted that the Commandments did not confine themselves to arguably secular matters (such as murder, stealing, etc.), but rather concerned matters such as the worship of God and the observance of the Sabbath Day.

What are the Ten Commandments? 

According to Exodus 20:2-17 (not the only place that they appear in the Hebrew Bible):

1. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.

The 1st Commandment is the establishment of a particular religion in its purest form and un-American.

2. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

The first sentence 2nd Commandment, with its ban on making images of real things, while it survives in Islam to some extent, isn't actually honored in its literal form by ether Jews or Christians. The remainder, again, is the pure establishment of religious and un-American. Promising divine punishment for the great-great grandchildren of pagans (including most South Asians and some leading GOP politicians in Louisiana) isn't a great thing for Louisiana to enshrine in its schools.

3. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

The 3rd Commandment is confusing to kids and adults. Is it a ban on false oaths, on false prophets, on saying YHWH outside of religious ceremonies, or on swearing? Do we want to put school teachers in the position of having to explain this fine point of theology to their students?

4. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

The 4th Commandment divides Jews, Christians (and denominations within them), and Muslims, each of whom have different holy days, again in an un-American establishment of religion.

5. Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.

The 5th Commandment isn't just about being nice to your parents. It also adopts Zionism, another un-American establishment of religion, which the children of Louisiana have no reason to be told is a divine mandate.

6. You shall not murder.

The 6th Commandment is often translated "thou shall not kill" which is a poor fit to Louisiana with its death penalty. Otherwise, the 6th and 8th Commandments just go to show that even a broken clock is right twice a day. And, of course, the Ten Commandments were literally broken in the Bible.

7. You shall not commit adultery.

The 7th Amendment isn't the law in Louisiana. Adultery is no longer a crime in 33 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and the several U.S. territories. States which have decriminalized adultery in recent years include West Virginia (2010), Colorado (2013), New Hampshire (2014), Massachusetts (2018), and Utah (2019). Adultery is rarely enforced criminally in the 17 states that still do have adultery laws on the books. In 13 of the states where adultery is still a crime (Arizona, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Virginia), it is a petty offense (the maximum punishment in Maryland is a $10 fine), or is a misdemeanor. It continues to be a felony in four states (Idaho, Oklahoma, Michigan, and Wisconsin) and is punishable most severely among those states in Michigan who someone convicted of adultery faces up to four years in prison. It is a crime that is actively enforced for active duty members of the U.S. military under the U.S. Code of Military Justice. It is, of course, also an act which the presumptive GOP nominee, and more than one other form President have admitted to, and which is one that few school children have any reason to care about.

8. You shall not steal.

See the 6th Commandment. 

9. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.

Does the 9th Commandment imply that it is O.K. to give false testimony against someone who is not your neighbor? If so, that is a problem and encourage clannish disregard for the law.

10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

The 10th Commandment translated above as "male or female servant" would have been more accurately translated "male or female slave" which is outright un-American. We fought a war over that. It also implicitly categories wives as property.

More generally

A more subtle point about the Ten Commandments is that Jesus in the Gospels said that the Old Testament Hebrew laws don't apply to Christians who aren't Jews. By presenting the Ten Commandment as authoritative, the State of Louisiana is defying the Christian Gospels to which most residents of the State of Louisiana nominally adhere.

And, let's also say that the Hebrews of the Hebrew Bible, as portrayed in their own sacred account of themselves (probably compiles while in Babylonian exile or under Roman rule as an official statement of what their religion said for use by the non-Jewish governments that ruled them), are by 21st century moral and ethical standards, horrible, awful people.

Jewish law isn't just the Ten Commandments. It is also a deeply morally flawed list of other laws, call for absurdities like the death penalty for wearing wool-cotton blend fabrics or being left handed. And, the Jewish people repeatedly engage in genocide that they themselves account (see, e.g., the Book of Numbers).

There is very, very little about the Hebrew people as described in the Hebrew Bible (a.k.a. the Old Testament) or their laws from that source that is good or honorable or provides a good moral model.

Fortunately, modern rabbinic Judaism has somehow managed to salvage decent messages from this horrible source material with doctrine and wordplay in the Talmud and other commentaries. Judaism at lived in the 21st century is quite decent and indeed better than most Christian denominations. But the Jews of the Hebrew Bible were closer to the worst strained of fundamentalist Muslims today than they are to modern rabbinic Jews.