Sometimes the aphoristic compression of Twitter can be useful.
Noel McGivern @Good_Beard
The Ten Commandments are a useless code of morality they ignore rape and child abuse and put the vanity of an imaginary deity before murder.
Harper @Irishbloke
@Good_Beard Would you mind giving me your 10 commandments since you consider yourself greater than God?
Harper’s reply sums up a lot of what’s so wrong and terrible about religious thinking, in just those few words.
One part is the circularity that enables the firmly closed mind. He assumes that there is god and that god is moral and “great,” and thus that it’s an outrage to think about “The Ten Commandments” at all.
Given this firmly closed mind and this focus on the wholly irrelevant (imagine derailing a discussion of the First Amendment into a discussion of the character of, say, James Madison), Harper simply ignores the substance and goes for a plain old “shut up, that’s why” instead.
But the substance is the point; it’s the point of what Noel McGivern said and it’s much of the point of atheism. The Ten Commandments suck. Harper makes himself unable even to perceive that by means of his dogmatic assumptions.
Mine? Sure, why not.
- Don’t be cruel.
- Love justice.
- Embrace equality.
- Practice compassion.
- Be generous.
- Do what you can to make the world better.
- Aim for truth.
- Think carefully.
- Share what you learn with others.
- Amuse.