hitch goes there

new commandments

Pretty sure Carlin's rules were simpler: "Try really really hard not to kill anyone and be honest and faithful to the provider of thy nookie." Basically what it comes down to is murder is no good, theft is risky, as is lying for personal gain or for personal attack on others, and honesty and an attempt at fidelity in our relationships with all other people is generally a pretty good idea. These are not really offensive concepts as binding moral behaviors, even in an anarchical environment.

Naturally it confuses me greatly when people try to tell me that it is these old religious canons that form the basis of American or even European jurisprudence. I'm sorry. I must have missed the part where we aren't supposed to make idols to the gods, or pray to the other gods period as a portion of our shared moral values, much less that we should visit the sins of our parents upon the succeeding generations. I guess we liked those rules about not murdering people (though the watered down "thou shalt not kill" is not what the original commandment said, nor is it what the origin of many of those commandments said). But it's not necessarily true that we needed to use Moses to tell people not to kill each other. If we do actually need such ancient stories to compel even modestly appropriate behavior out of the average person by moving toward "preventing" egregious acts of violence and hatred, I fear for the prospects of the human species.

It's also not even true that we use it for legal premises. Adultery for example is not punished by any formal legal penalties. It has not been since the foundation of the country. We have some common law elements that play into the possibility of divorce or marriage laws, but that's as close as it gets to actually using the force of law to penalize adulterers. Additionally since the American public has taken to interpretive portions of these commandments rather than the original formal ones, we are left with censorship declaring certain words to be out of bounds, when these words are witnessed nowhere within these commandments as sinful or immoral. It is, in this one case, an example of how fundamentalism would constitute an improvement over our moral governance or behavior by absolving us of the responsibility to police our public language, and presumably our private language as well.

By contrast, that whole "covet" commandment would be a major blow. Virtually all of society is built on coveting things, people, occupations, that we do not yet have and figuring out ways to acquire that status of ownership, marriage/friendship, or other social status through mutually accepted actions and transactions. It is odd to go through life not wanting anything at all. Much less it is odd to conceive of a society which would police this, since it is largely a thought crime rather than the actions themselves which are considered inappropriate. I suspect no one would object to the purchase of your neighbour's new car, but somehow we're supposed to object to it if you actually wanted it really badly? I guess we cannot escape the illogic of attempts to patrol our thoughts and intentions and to imbue this state with religious significance. But it's damned weird to assume we could create a state whose laws could apply such things and to tell each other that we have based that state on the formal laws of an ancient religious code when it's functionally impossible to police thought.