WHY SCRIPTURAL MORALITY IS FAR FROM BEING THE BEST THING FOR THE KIDS OF TEXAS OR ANYWHERE ELSE
Pushing archaic Biblical mores on public school children is a bad idea for loads of reasons
Ever since modernity in the form of the secular counterculture of the 1900s, the Flapper Culture, Pin-Up Culture, Rock & Roll, Sexual Revolution, Feminism, radicalized American society, the religious right has seethed over the growing irreligiosity of the population. And in their inability to reverse matters via popular persuasion -- theoconservatives make up only about a quarter to a third of the population and going down. In view of that failure, there has been a decades long effort by conservative Protestants to leverage government power and influence to try to return America to traditional Christian mores. They believe that the instructions of the all-wise God of the Holy Bible are the only way to return to a sound moral society. It being imperative to combat the unholy alliance of liberal theism and secularism that is leading the nation to an earthly hell in a leftist handcart. The religious right is enjoying some success in red states in promoting scripture in public schools, most lately in Texas.
Is that a good idea? Does the Bible written in ancient times provide the reliable ethics critical to modern societies? Let’s take a serious look.
The last Commandment, as presented in the historical Jewish version, bans coveting your neighbor’s house, wife, servant of either sex, livestock, or anything else he owns.
Which is odd in a number of regards. Why the wife specifically? Why not the spouse? That’s because in traditional Abrahamic culture human females are, like the other cited items, property. Owned first by her father, then by her husband who enjoys complete domination over the woman -- or women in the plural marriages not banned in the Commandments and oft practiced by Biblical figures. Wife ownership was the rule until that cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s, especially via the feminist component that theoconservatives regularly denounce.
And other than the adultery matter, what exactly is wrong with coveting the neighbor’s stuff? Think about it. Say the house on the other side of the fence is fantastic. What is wrong with making a market priced offer? How about for their goats? Is that not the basis for the consumption driven free market economies that the right promotes as the Godly American Way of capital and consumerism?
We now come to a deep dark side of the 10th Commandment. It centers on the “servant” item. Which at face value simply does not make sense. If you think someone’s servant is fabulous, is it unethical much less unGodly to offer him or her a higher salary and better work conditions to come over to and keep your abode? Of course not, that’s economic freedom.
On the surface the 10th comes across as a warning against stealing. But how can one steal a servant? A lawnmower, or jewels, or a horse, yes. But an independent human worker?
The solution to the paradox is that the “servant” was actually the slave. That is why the person was – rather euphemistically -- listed along with other items of living property, including the wife and ox. There was nothing to stop the Jewish Testaments adhering men from owning chattel slaves. It is right there in the scriptures. Jews could only be held as indentured servants to pay off debts for a limited time. But according to the word of the creator of the universe, all others were fair game for the sheer brutal thievery that is full blown lifetime slavery, including harsh punishments, and their children remaining in bondage. Abraham had people in his servitude. So what is going on here? If the morality of the Biblical God is perfect, then why did it not outlaw slavery from the get-go in his divine how-to guide? Instead it is the Biblical opposite. When the Israelites under Moses attacked the Midianites for no good reason, the males and most women are killed off under the instructions of the Lord, but the virgin females were spared for the warriors to utilize however they wished. During his time on the planet the Son of God never objected to the slavery all around him (and is not a true proponent of peace, https://gspaulscienceofnonreligion.substack.com/p/the-biblical-jesus-was-not-the-prince). In the New Testament the enslaved are repeatedly instructed to obey, fear and respect their masters as they do their heavenly Lord. Thus mainstream Christianity was good with enslavement for millennia. Proslavery Southern Americans cheerfully quoted the Bible. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephen’s notorious Cornerstone Speech proclaimed that the Biblical God favored slavery, that being what the book indeed says. After secular events happened to coincide to end American slavery, the Holy See advised that Catholic Brazil was not violating church doctrine by continuing the institution (https://suchanek.name/texts/atheism/slavery.html); only in 1888 did the church issue a retraction. What killed mass slavery was not religious virtue, it was secular financial modernity. As Adam Smith explained in 1776, slaves cannot be among the mass consumer base that industrial-corporate-capitalism cannot run without. So mass enslavement suddenly ceased during the great economic revolution of the 1800s.
It is of note that the Protestant version of the 10th Commandment deployed in Texas schools does not include specifics, including wives and servants. Even today’s religious right has to bow to aspects of modernity, that leftist feminism included.
Also not forbidden in the Decalogue is rape. With wives being property they could not refuse their husbands, that being true into the latter half of the 1900s in Christian America. No whites would or could be prosecuted for assaulting an enslaved person because it was entirely legal to do so (raping a slave without the enslaver’s approval via sex work did result in the occasional suit by the owner for monetary compensation). It is a suppressed historical truth that Confederate soldiers were fighting for the right to sexually free-use human beings. Prosecution of whites who raped blacks in the south was not normalized until after the overthrow of Jim Crow.
If the Commandments are the wisdom of the Creator to humanity, then why does it not include the line “Thou shalt not rule by force, but by majority consent, and for every person one vote?” That’s because the men who concocted the scriptures had no concept of such. It was nonAbrahamic Greeks who happened to devise democracy for entirely secular reasons.
How about religious freedom? When Charlton Heston I mean Moses delivers the Decalogue that does not include freedom of thought to his people in the Cecil B. DeMille classic The 10 Commandments, he is not happy that many are having a good time reverting to paganism – the business about they preparing to murder a distressed brunette virgin in the flick is pure Hollywood invention. That’s religious freedom plain and simple. In the flick, God opens a flaming chasm to swallow the apostates. Cecil made that up too. In the Testaments Moses orders the militant Levites to murder the rebellious, and God then sends a plague among the Israelites for good measure.
At the end of The 10 Commandments Moses boldly instructs the Israelites “Go, proclaim liberty throughout all the lands, unto all the inhabitants thereof.” Yet another DeMille sleight of hand designed to sanitize awkward scriptures in favor of Cold Wat speak. In the Testaments Moses and Joshua are ordered by the Creator to wage a dreadful war of unprovoked genocidal conquest and total extermination, down to the infants. Whether that actually happened is very dubious according to archaeological research, but it is the Christian right that insists we take scripture literally. How this fits with the ban on killing people is not apparent.
My demographic calculations, published in the academic literature [invited chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide and War], found that wars with a religious component, often Christian have killed in the area of a quarter billion (up-dated at https://gspaulscienceofnonreligion.substack.com/p/the-total-toll-of-human-mass-violence). Atheist inspired wars – all Communist in the 1900s -- about a quarter of that. Over half a million have been lost in the Russo-Ukraine War has dispatched. The Russian Orthodox Church enthusiastically backs the war that the world’s Christian churches have proven unable to do anything about. Meanwhile, many American evangelicals are sympathetic with the revival of traditional Russian Christian values. Atheist forces are currently killing nearly no one even as that cohort is the world’s fastest growing. Creator worship is inherently flawed because if there is one, it is gravely dysfunctional and immoral (https://gspaulscienceofnonreligion.substack.com/p/the-great-god-worship-scandal-our). The most Christian of the developed democracies is the US. It suffers by far the highest rate of intentional homicide, the most atheistic nations the lowest (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/z93jm). Within this country more Christianity tends to correlate with more murder between states; the Bible Belt has always been a homicide zone. As this society has secularized of late rates of murder have -- outside the pandemic -- been falling since the ultra-high peak of the Reagan-Bush years. When it comes to overall socioeconomic conditions the atheistic democracies are outperforming the religious United States (https://gspaulscienceofnonreligion.substack.com/p/the-financially-free-wheeling-godly).
Abrahamic scriptures were devised by hardline patriarchal Bronze and Iron Age men who were OK with such long-held traditional values as misogyny, rape, slavery, political and religious oppression, mass genocidal war, extreme punishments for minor crimes and other problematic scruples. All that while objecting to key financial aspects of advanced, Industrial Age consumer based prosperity. These days most Americans do not think all that much of that cringe-worthy, old-fashioned world view. As is shown by the inability to the right to overturn the modern majority secular culture. To varying degrees the 21stcentury Christian nationalist minority is good with hardcore Biblical socioeconomic policies. If that is what the dwindling theoconservative minority wishes to teach their children in their homes, schools and churches that is one thing. Aside from being a brazen power grab that violates the Constitution, using state authority to promote archaic scripture in public schools is not likely to work out well for the people young and otherwise of these modern United States.