THE TEN COMMANDMENTS VS. AMERICA

By refusing to hear an appeal in the Alabama Ten Commandments case, the U.S. Supreme
Court has dodged the constitutional questions surrounding this church-state issue. But
apart from the legal questions, there are deeper questions that no one seems willing to
raise. The fundamental question is: what are the Ten Commandments? What is their
philosophic meaning and what kind of society do they imply?

Religious conservatives claim that the Ten Commandments supplied the moral grounding for
the establishment of America. But is that even possible? Let's put aside the historical
question of what sources the Founding Fathers, mostly Deists, drew upon. The deeper
question is: can a nation of freedom, individualism and the pursuit of happiness be
based on the Ten Commandments?

Let's look at the commandments. The wording differs among the Catholic, Protestant and
Hebrew versions, but the content is the same.

The first commandment is: I am the Lord thy God.

As first, it is the fundamental. It's point is the assertion that the individual is not
an independent being with a right to live his own life but the vassal of an invisible
Lord. It says, in effect, I own you; you must obey me.

Could America be based on this? Is such a servile idea even consistent with what America
represents: the land of the free, independent, sovereign individual who exists for his
own sake? The question is rhetorical.

The second commandment is an elaboration of the above, with material about not serving
any other god and not worshipping graven images (idols). The Hebrew and Protestant
versions threaten heretics with reprisals against their descendants--inherited sin--
visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation . . .

This primitive conception of law and morality flatly contradicts American values.
Inherited guilt is an impossible and degrading concept. How can you be guilty for
something you didn't do? In philosophic terms, it represents the doctrine of
determinism, the idea that your choices count for nothing, that factors beyond your
control govern your destiny. This is the denial of free will and therefore of self-
responsibility.

The nation of the self-made man cannot be squared with the ugly notion that you are to
be punished for the sin of your great-grandfather.

The numbering differs among the various versions, but the next two or three commandments
proscribe taking the Lord's name in vain and spending a special day, the Sabbath, in
propitiating Him.

In sum, the first set of commandments order you to bow, fawn, grovel and obey. This is
impossible to reconcile with the American concept of a self-reliant, self-owning
individual.

The middle commandment, Honor thy father and mother, is manifestly unjust. Justice
demands that you honor those who deserve honor, who have earned it by their choices and
actions. Your particular father and mother may or may not deserve your honor--that is
for you to judge on the basis of how they have treated you and of a rational evaluation
of their moral character.

To demand that Stalin's daughter honor Stalin is not only obscene, but also demonstrates
the demand for mindlessness implicit in the first set of commandments. You are commanded
not to think or judge, but to jettison your reason and simply obey.

The second set of commandments are unobjectionable but are common to virtually every
organized society--the commandments against murder, theft, perjury and the like. But
what *is* objectionable is the notion that there is no rational, earthly basis for
refraining from criminal behavior, that it is only the not-to-be-questioned decree of a
supernatural Punisher that makes acts like theft and murder wrong.

The basic philosophy of the Ten Commandments is the polar opposite of the philosophy
underlying the American ideal of a free society. Freedom requires:

-- a metaphysics of the natural, not the supernatural; of free will, not determinism; of
the primary reality of the individual, not the tribe or the family;

-- an epistemology of individual thought, applying strict logic, based on individual
perception of reality, not obedience and dogma;

-- an ethics of rational self-interest, to achieve chosen values, for the purpose of
individual happiness on this earth, not fearful, dutiful appeasement of a jealous God
who issues commandments.

Rather than the Ten Commandments, the actual grounding for American values is that
captured by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged:

If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment
is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral
is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the
rational, and reason accepts no commandments.