Thank you, Christopher Hitchens, for your brilliant deconstruction of the Ten Commandments. For all his intellectual gibberish, Hitchens should really take a moment and do a bit of research into theology before saying something like this:

One is presuming (is one not?) that this is the same god who actually created the audience he was addressing. This leaves us with the insoluble mystery of why he would have molded (“in his own image,” yet) a covetous, murderous, disrespectful, lying, and adulterous species. Create them sick, and then command them to be well? What a mad despot this is, and how fortunate we are that he exists only in the minds of his worshippers.

Even the most untheological Christian could probably explain the concept of “original sin” and it’s effect on humanity. But since Hitchens wraps his ignorance in $5 words, he is clearly the more intellectual person. And satire does not forgive ignorance.

A related side-note: I really don’t care what the Supreme Court decides about the Ten Commandments issue, and I’ve said this before. And I will agree with Hitchens in his critique of Judge Moore. And Dahlia Lithwick points out that should the Supreme Court decide that the display of the Ten Commandments is, in fact, unconstitutional, they will have to do a bit of house cleaning themselves.

Update

My father-in-law just sent me this email message, which I think adds a bit of theological weight to insignificance of the presence of a chunk of stone in a courthouse:

I just read your blog for today. I’m surprised at how little thought Judge Roy Moore and other defenders of the faith have given to the faith they seek to defend. When the 10 were first given, the people who heard that dread voice of God begged that He not speak to them again, so awful was the sound (cf Ex 20:18-19; Deut 5:23-25; Heb 12:19). Moore, etc., have lost the perspective of the original story. Even in the Old Covenant when the 10 were central in God’s relationship with his people they were never on public display. When God gave Moses the 10 written in stone, he also gave him the blue print for the Tabernacle in which the stone-etched Law was to be hidden in the Ark of the Covenant under the Mercy Seat, never to be seen by human eye (cf. Ex chs 25-31 and 31:18). Then later, when the Philistines returned the confiscated Ark of the Covenant to Beth-shemesh in Israel, a great many people were slaughtered by God because they looked into the Ark where the stone-carved 10 were (1 Sam 6:19). George Lucas understood the stone tablets better than Roy Moore.

Posted on 14 October 2004