Ten Commandments questionable!

[Lenn Morton NdebeleKeymaster]

Within Reason; Probing questions concerning religion and beliefs. I believe that to doubt and question the popular versions of God and “Religion” is not the same to expressing doubt or criticism of God Almighty. I believe that it is possible to keep faith with God and at the same time totally reject any concept of God that does not conform to logic and reason. I believe that we should not be subject to accusations of heretical doctrine, hypocrisy, malicious intent, lack of faith, or atheism, simply because we seek understanding. The “Truth” stands by reason of its own truthfulness it needs no supplementary supports.

The Ten Commandments

1.) You shall have no other gods before me

This simply means that this God/god knew there are other Gods/gods but he directed this commandment only to those who believed in him as their God/god, his followers, his affiliates.

To the Christians, this means there will be no other God. Yet, in the bible, the phrase is plural. It does not state that you will not have another god, it says that you will have no other gods before the Christian God.

In the case of the later, it could be interpreted to mean that whereas other gods can be recognized, as a Christian, this person should place his Christian God/god ahead of all gods recognizing him/her as the supreme being of all. Now don’t you think that other people outside Christian belief recognize their own Gods/gods as Supreme Being of all?

Some bible passages states that God is jealousy, of course this command clearly indicates that god can fight or destroy for losing a believer to other gods. He puts this massage not as a request but as a commandment. I wonder if these gods are not afraid of invading this God’s territory and steal his believer since This Christian God is said to be this powerful. It sounds like a political party threatening its members who want to leave for other parties.

I personal don’t think God need this commandment, he must have powers to keep his believers by him, and through powers stop those who are going astray. It must be automatically not easy to follow or recognize other Gods.

2.) You shall not worship idols. What are these idols?

Actually, what it says in the New International Version is “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sins of their fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to thousands who love me and keep my commandments. This commandment does not give somebody a freedom to choose to worship or believe in, it threatens, it forces, now it opposes some parts of the bible that grant you a freedom of choice in worship and belief. He is jealous, am I right? if I will think that all this is about power and it is spiritual politics?

So now what is the use of going to church, following and believing in God because I do not know whether my forefathers hated him and I am the third and the fourth generation that is punished for their sins as the bible states in the second commandment.

Now, the Christians have changed this commandment and referred it to ancestor worship and many non Christian beliefs, especially most of the Indian and African beliefs.

This commandment was not directed to just anybody of that time, it could not work effectively because those outside the chosen, ‘the chosen notion of God’s people’ would not listen to it, would not take it serious, would not even believe in it.

 3.) You shall not take the name of the lord in vain

This one is pretty self explanatory. When a person is calling on the lord he/she is asking the lord for guidance or action. Thus, the phrase “God damn it!” can be translated into a person asking the lord to condemn whatever “it” is to hell. The phrase “To damn” means to condemn to hell. In modern society, several phrases such as the following are common usage: “Oh God!”, “God forbid!”, “God damn it!”, “God have mercy!” Each of these is asking God to perform some act upon or for the speaker with the exception of “Oh God!” which is asking for God’s attention, but God/god himself must have powers to stop that from coming out of people’s mouth.

Any leader, God/god would give this commandment to protect his name but sometime I find it useless and degrading if it comes from the mouth of somebody who is said to portray powers that can change anything at anytime for better or for worse. Somebody that render the powers to make things happen or not happen at all, by just the word command. Is he afraid of gossips? Are the gossips much of a great deal to him? I have read some verses when through Jesus in the New Testament he says, “When people gossip about you, you must not worry”, and he is worried. “If the world hates you, you must not worry”, but he is worried.

This commandment has no democracy, you cannot have a say about your Lord even if he treasures in destroying, even if he is controlled by his anger and solve things by brutality, even if he has become a dictator or a totalitarian.

4.) Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.

Depending on which religion you are looking at (i.e. Jewish, from which the 10 commandments come; or Christianity, which adapted them for their use as well.) the Sabbath is either Saturday or Sunday. You may also take a look at the various mythological pantheons to correlate which are the first and last days of the week… (i.e. Sun – Sunday.. Genesis 1:3 “And God said, “Let there be light,’ and there was light. Moon – Monday. Genesis 1:14 “And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made two great lights – the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.” Thus the Sun was created first. With the day of the Sun being the first in the week, then Saturday would be the 7th or Sabbath. Now, God/god created earth for seven days, it is a planet and in seconds he created other planets of which some are even bigger than earth with his voice only, it means earth was hard to make as compared to other planets. Did the bible writers know of the sun, moon, stars and others as planets when they wrote it, don’t they see the need of putting something right to match the modern understanding of things as compared to all ancient guess works.

5.) Honor thy mother and thy father.

This is another commandment that is fairly self explanatory. It is any parent’s right after spending the time to raise you to expect that you respect them. The behavior of your parents itself plays a big role in the person that you grow up to be.

6.) You shall not murder.

This commandment does not say “You shall not murder apart from my name.” It says YOU SHALL NOT MURDER. Out of the 10 commandments, I have found that over the course of history, this one has been the most overlooked. As we look at the spread of Christianity from its early ages forward, as politics moved into the church and those in charge of Christianity were given more control, this commandment YOU SHALL NOT KILL sort of did not work. YOU SHALL NOT MURDER BUT IN MY NAME YOU CAN. Who are you murdering in his name, whose people, is it those of the same God/god as we have read that all people regardless of race, background, creed/religion are the people of God? No one has murdered people like the so called chosen people of God life history, they would tell you God has given them a certain country or land to be theirs whereas there are people in that particular land. They had to fight and kill and drive the remaining people out of the land, making some of them slaves choosing beautiful women if they could so wish.

We see such things as the Crusades, the inquisition, and the dominating fear that was placed into the Christian “psyche” that one should destroy that which is not like him.

Even though we hear stories about the “witch trials”, and the “witch burnings” etc…There were actually very few “Witches” tried or burned. Most of these poor souls were that of Protestant beliefs (Against the Catholic Church) yet still maintained that they were Christians.

This commandment then YOU SHALL NOT MURDER should have been put as you shall not murder the chosen people of God or probably the Christians, for in some bible passages it is said that God himself gave his chosen the command and power to go and fight wars and kill some certain people, certainly the not chosen. YOU SHALL NOT MURDER EXCEPT IN MY NAME so says God. How many people did the Catholics murder during their ties with Constantine and after? You shall not kill unless in my name so says the lord. Kill all those who refuse to follow you, Kill those who refuse to surrender their wealth to you as long as it is in my name. Kill all those who know the history, all the wise man who know the old books so that they may not revive their old books and confuse our followers as long as you kill in my name.

We will have more of this later on this site.

7.) You shall not commit adultery.

You can look up the meaning in the dictionary, and this one becomes pretty self-evident. What it comes down to is that no person who has ever been divorced can marry again, and you don’t have sex with someone that you are not married to. Does this apply to both man and women, if that are the case why men had so many women in ancient belief times when believing is said to have been stronger than it is today. Was this protecting man, women or both, no I think leaders of those times were not straightforward people who would put a law as in coming from their own thought and decisions, they had to use God/gods because they knew people feared God/gods than they feared them and they would easily comply.

8.) You shall not steal.

Again, enough is said. However…don’t go looking at Constantine to be obeying this one! The Pagan temples were looted to make his coinage. You shall not steal, all this was aligned with a belief as it comes from God/god but the mere fact is that the managers and supervisors who managed these commandments stoning to death those who disobeyed them were thieves themselves, so did that mean they know this God/god better or this commandment was for others beside them or it came from them as if it is from that God/god or they were that God/god in disguise?

9.) You shall not give false witness against thy neighbor

Again, during the times of the inquisition, this also went out the window. Such tools as torture were used to pull confessions from these poor people who then signed statements that the inquisitors had written up saying that they freely signed this document. Of course…the inquisitors stated that this person was not tortured, but it was his cleverness that had extracted this confession.

It was also during this time those persons, refusing to take responsibility for their own actions or accept that nature does in fact create strange circumstances (i.e. drought, flood, etc.) and the resulting illness and bug infestations. Very often, as the Witch-craze developed stronger, the one neighbor would accuse another of Witchcraft and destroying the fields or making their children sick, or whatever. They only wanted to make sure they get the truth regarding what ever happened in their surroundings, the fear of nothing in people would give them all the truth they wanted, it is so clever of them. To control the world you need to create fear.

10.) You shall not covet your neighbor.

On the surface, this one is pretty self explanatory. Don’t crave your neighbor’s possessions. Yes…I can relate this back to the inquisitional times as well since most of the accused’s property reverted back to the Catholic church at this time…there were several accused and convicted of Witchcraft simply because they would not sell their property to the church. However…How does these influence persons of today? How far do we carry the “Thou shall not covet…”? This can be even so much as a want, however is it a sin to want a toy like your neighbor has? If so…we’re all in trouble. How many of us “want” those luxury vehicles that we see driving down the road? Or how about that beautiful house that we just drove past? Do we carry this commandment to this extreme? If so…I pity the person that can live by it for what that would say is “Thou shall not DREAM or WISH.” so with this commandment, they knew that if you don’t put this one as the commandment coming from the feared God/god, some people will lose their possessions to those more powerful than they are.

Secondly, man needed a moral compass. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t know what to do or how to act. But, just like when your parent tells you to do something as a child, you think it’s really important. This isn’t because you didn’t know already what to do, but it gets put on a higher level of importance because someone you hold in the highest regard said it. It’s the same with gods. We know, for instance, that the last 6 of the 10 Commandments from the bible are the same as Hammurabi’s code, which came long before the Moses story. So, man had these rules in place for some time. We knew that killing, stealing, and lying made for a bad society and a tough place for people to live together and trust one another. Yet, when the story is changed and the rules are carved into stone with fire from the hand of the “Almighty God”, these rules seem a lot more important. And, I think wise men knew this. They knew that giving god the credit as the author, and associated breaking those rules with eternal damnation, were a much stronger way to keep order in the communities around them. If only they could see the mess it created since then!

An ancient belief system dependent on claimed prophecy, a theology that utilizes confusing ancient texts that can be interpreted to support any social or political or moral position.  Only willful blindness (or intense family and social pressure) can allow an educated, intelligent young person today to voluntarily attach him or herself to such a belief system.

Nearly 5,000 “gods” that man has created since his existence. Some are very difficult to understand like if you are curious about other gods from around the world and throughout history. Every one of these gods and goddesses had stories associated with them. Many were written down; others were just passed on verbally. Most were both… told for generations then finally written down at some point in the distant past. Yeah, they all share a lot in common and several are direct rip-offs of other ones.

The three most obvious commonalities amongst the bigger gods is this: THEY ALL “CREATED” THE UNIVERSE, THEY ALL GAVE COMMANDS, and THEY ALL HAD A VERSION OF HEAVEN AND HELL, in some way. What does this tell us? Well, first of all, it tells us that man has always desired an explanation for existence and the natural world. They could look up in the sky and in the world around them and see all kinds of things they didn’t understand, so they made up gods to answer those questions. We know this about every religion. Yet, those they still follow a particular brand of god think the myth only applies to the other gods… not their own.

And, lastly, and most importantly, the “big” gods all have a version of the afterlife. Just like in Christianity, have a heaven and a hell – a bad place for bad people and a good place for good people. Why? It’s just part of the human condition. A conscious being is, in a word, flattering. We like to think ourselves special and unique. Therefore, the idea that we will die and cease to exist scares us. Funny, we don’t seem to worry about all the time before we were born when we equally “didn’t exist”… but I digress. We have an internal need to think that our “soul” and all the knowledge we have gained while we are here keeps going. So, we create an “afterlife” – a place where we go once we shed this mortal coil. And, since we don’t want to think that all those bad people around us get to spend eternity with us (since we are of course faultless) we create a bad place for them to spend their dead years.

The main difference between eastern and western concepts of heaven and hell is that in the west, the paradise and the purgatory are places that exist outside while for eastern philosophies, hell and heaven are inside one’s mind. For eastern religions, the only thing that judges a person is his own consciousness and not an external being.

Some people suggest that in ancient Christianity, which would derive from eastern education of thought, the differences between western and eastern thinking were even smaller. When Christianity was modified for political purposes during the councils, it was established that “God is outside” as a way to offer redemption through the Church. No matter the culture or nation, the heart of every religion is the same – all of them say that a person will face the consequences of actions, thoughts and intentions and that cultivating love and wisdom is the path for happiness, be in the physical world or in the afterlife.

The reason I think this is all important to understand first is because when you look at the truth claim for a god; all we really have is the stories told about that god to test it. Since no god has ever made an appearance in modern times, we have only ancient writings to determine which to believe in and which to set aside. As atheists, we set them all aside for the same shear lack of quantifiable evidence across the board. But, others don’t.

I’ve met several Christians lately that accept science, evolution, and the fact that the bible is very faulty and written by man. Yet, they still believe in god (for a host of reasons – mostly internal feelings). They can believe in god without believing the bible, or at least most of it. They think god still created the universe and will come back someday to end the world. They believe he resides over heaven and is waiting for us when we die. They believe he gave us rules by which to live life, even if they are hidden amongst loads of bad text in the current bible. Yet, they don’t believe many of the bullshit stories from the bible like Noah’s Flood and the miracle claims of Jesus. Some don’t even believe in Jesus… just a creator god who has done nothing since creation, but wait for us to join him when we die. Join him and do what? “Coming one day to end the world!” What nonsense is this, why will he have to end the world? What about people and things living in the world? Why always he talks about destructive things when he mentions his coming. Rather not to come at all.

What does this tell you? GOD IS A PERSONAL THING! If he was real, there would be a shared acceptance and common understanding around the world and through time. But, this isn’t the case. The details and stories, although they share traits, differ widely based on culture and time. There isn’t one set rule book for all of mankind or one explanation of creation, heaven, hell, etc. BECAUSE THERE ISN’T ONE! It’s easy for atheists to see this, but believers don’t. They keep on believing that their version of things is the right one. They fail to see that if they were born in a different country or a different time, they could easily be in a different religion.

They can pick and choose scripture and create their own dogma, to each his own. They can either rationalize or immunize themselves from many of the harms associated with religion. They can say they like certain parts of the bible but don’t believe in others. Shifting belief based on evidence is great. Doing based on what feels right for you… that’s not it.

So, the big question, can you believe in the bible without believing in god? NO. Can you believe in god without believing in the bible? Yes, but you shouldn’t, since the bible is the only real evidence anyone has for god. And, since the bible is clearly a faulty historical document, you can’t parse out what was divinely inspired (if any) and what was added, edited, and revised by faulty men over the last 20 centuries. Associate the bible and god if you want, but it makes it much easier for us atheists to simply say, “No, thanks, we are good without either of them!”

It is said that God orderd Moses to hide his face for no man shall see God and live but here on this picture Moses is shown receiving ten commandments direct from God and looking straight and direct to God above. It is not a crime to want to know the truth. People always create their own understanding about God and make him sound evil, unjust, fearsome, a monster, a bully, a murder and all sort of evil that he is not, only for the sake of controling, bulling and abusing others. (The ten commandments questionable)

How many people saw God according to the bible’s exodus; why Moses hides

This picture shows Moses hiding his face for if he was going to see God face to face he was surely going to die according to the bible; Exodus 33v11 Moses only saw God’s back. In exodus 24v9-11 of the bible, we read that Moses and other leaders at that time saw God with their own eyes and they ate and drank. Exodus 33v18; “Now show me your glory” so says Moses to god.

In verse exodus 33v19 god tells Moses that he (God) will cause all his goodnes to pass ifront of him (Moses) and he will proclaim his name in his presence. In verse 21 god tells Moses that there is a rock near him (God) where Moses could stand, when the glory passes by he (God) will put Moses in the cleft of the road and cover him with his hand until his glory has passed by. Verse 23 says “ I have passed then you will see my back but my face must not be seen. How does God really look like in his face? Is he ugly, has he got lightining burning eyes that would chock Moses to death or what.

Was the glory of God so dangerous that it could harm Moses if he would see it passing. If so then why christians of today are praying receive glory, has it become no dangerous now. Something that made Moses hide between rocks in fear of death people want to receive it directly from God in the churches of today. No wonder, Moses did not have a church, he was leading people with their own cultures and traditions, political understanding and beliefs and from his experience of the glory I personal don’t think he would shout “Receive glory” like the churches of today.

Is God ugly or handsome; What is wrong with his face

Exodus 33v20 reads; You can not see my face for no man can see my face and live. Moses and others saw God with others in Exodus 24v9-11 but this time arround it has become dangerous to see God. (It is not a crime to seek for the truth and the truth does not need witness, now that we are matured enough to seek for the truth around religion, we want the truth that stands by itself and the bible needs to be readdited so that it make sense in its all passages. Is god ugly or handsome? Is he afraid to be seen his face by the humans whom he created in his image? Or is he dangerous by his face? Are we; since we are his image?

How many times did Moses see God and receive the Ten Commandments

Firstly when Moses came to the Israelites’ camp from seeing God at Mount Sinai, he found that they had built a golden calf which they were worshiping as the replacement of the God of Israel and the God of Moses. It is said in the bible that he got angry and broke all the slates of Ten Commandments, so did he go and get another ones from God, how come we have all Ten commandments if they were retrieved from broken pieces there must be some modifications, missing words or changes.

I am writing this article in response to those who want to use the word God to run the people’s lives to benefit themselves, making laws as if they are from God making God to sound unreasoning, evil, ugly, cruel, and crooked, a murder, a witch, a con man etc, of which he is not and this nonsense started a long-long time ago. We need to defend God’s name from the evil of today which is packed even in most of today’s churches

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