This funny film short about a man who “breaks all ten commandments before breakfast” would nicely complement what these guys do. It would serve as a good illustration that we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
Oh yeah, here are the commandments for reference.
(Coudal link via webzen)
The following summary of a December 2002 article “A Moral Suggestion” from disenchanted.com hints at the misconceptions the author has about Judeo-Christian thought and belief:
Think morals come from The Ten Commandments? Human behavior may be complex, but it’s been following the same set of hard-wired moral instincts since way before Moses came down from the mountain.
Indeed, further down the article, the writer states: “God said Thou shalt not kill, and so it was recognized by law, and while it was certainly good, it has also come to instill the sense that morals originated with the Bible, and from that a horrible misconception: without the Bible, there would be no morals.” This reveals the author’s ignorance of what Paul says in Romans 2:15, where he wrote that Gentiles who know nothing of Moses or Jesus nonetheless show by their deeds “that the requirements of the Law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.”¹
To the writer’s credit, he also criticizes the post-modernist view that morality varies across different societal groups but are still equally valid. But he makes the mistake of lumping post-modernism and religion together by asserting that both are wrong to assume that people are blank slates who receive their morality from external forces (post-modernism:society; religion:Ten Commandments). Again, clearly from Paul’s passage cited above, Judeo-Christian thought holds that “natural law” is written on people’s hearts without prior exposure to any dogmatic presentation.
The author then extends the concept of culture as not an exclusively external factor but manifests itself internally as well. As hard-wired beings, our behavior, he suggests, is determined by codified culture in our genes. Interestingly, by citing a list of common behaviors found across human tribes both civilized and isolated, he actually concedes “that every one of the Ten Commandments are represented” in one form of another. He then questions why if we’re genetically hard-wired “does murder, rape, theft and cheating happen anyway?” What follows next are evolutionistic rationalizations that ultimately say that “our hard-wired moral directives are weak because sometimes you have to cheat, steal and kill in order to avoid being cheated, burgled and murdered.” I think he may be alluding to what we call our fallen state, don’t you think?
I wished the author had thoroughly researched the tenets of Christianity and what the Bible says on matters of moral law and the fallen state of man. By resorting to using misconceptions about Christianity as fodder for criticism, he missed an opportunity to see that the Bible addresses the very questions he asks.
[via rebeccablood.com]