Quote:
Originally Posted by GreenLantern2814
Take the 10 Commandments for example. If you just did the opposite of all ten, does that sound like a recipe for success?
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...Partially?
Obviously nobody should commit crimes like murder, theft, or perjury which are explicitly forbidden by the 10 Commandments, but those same crimes are forbidden by the laws of
every nation on Earth, including those with no cultural link to Moses and the Abrahamic religions. Indeed, those crimes were forbidden in one of the very first formalized set of laws known to historians, the
Code of Hammurabi which
pre-dates the Book of Exodus by about a thousand years.
Now, let's look at some other specific commandments. Here are the first four:
Quote:
You shall have no other gods before Me.
You shall make no idols.
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
Keep the Sabbath day holy.
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Every single one of those commandments is in direct violation of the values we hold dear in free and democratic nations. As a citizen, I am free to worship any god(s) I choose or even have no god at all. I have the right to make idols. Unlike in Saudi Arabia, where I could be stoned to death for blasphemy, freedom of speech allows me to take the name of the Lord in vain without punishment from the state. Restrictions that prevented people from working on Sundays so as to keep the Sabbath holy (known as "blue laws") have been struct down by the courts as being a violation of Freedom of Religion. So yes, doing the exact opposite of those commandments is absolutely a recipe for success for a free society.
And then there's this one:
The entirety of our capitalist economic system would fail completely if people didn't covet.