No comment

Moment, an online Jewish magazine, solicited input on the contemporary relevance of the Ten Commandments. One reply of note:

It is odd that some people are so determined to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms, when these laws offer little guidance to student conduct, since few third graders are married and hence in a position to commit adultery. And do even the most recalcitrant kids need to be told not to lie, steal or murder? Seems obvious enough. The first four commandments—40 percent!—concern religious obligations, not general behavior, rather squandering an opportunity to tell us how to be good. Curiously for a monotheistic faith, the existence of other gods is okay, as long as ours gets top priority, which makes him seem a little jittery and insecure. And there really aren’t many graven images around these days, except perhaps for what we download from the Internet. Those four aside, all but one of the rest—honor our parents—are “nots,” a list of forbidden acts, not an encouragement to virtuous deeds. The tenth—no coveting—describes an attitude, a state of mind, not an action at all. Instead of the First, I would like to see a commandment to build an egalitarian society; for the Second, I would substitute the Golden Rule, and I would replace the Third with environmental ethics, the injunction not to destroy the earth but to create a green and healthy world.

Randy Cohen* writes “The Ethicist” column in The New York Times Magazine and is the author of The Good, the Bad & the Difference: How to Tell Right from Wrong in Everyday Situations.

*What is it with Jews? When they dump their ancestral religion, which the vast majority of them do, they almost always fall into some kind of groundless atheistic utopian universalism (unless they become Zionists) and then try to get the rest of us to dump our ancestral religions and buy into it.

OK, so I lied. A comment. Next time I have an ethical dilemma, guess who I'm not gonna consult.