[Destro]

Posted for discussion now that so many have their blood boiling over the Alabama courthouse 10 commandments controversy.

[Russell Scott]

It won't matter much longer.

Hebrews 8
10 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people:
11 And they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest.
12 For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more. 13 In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.

[Southack]

"Solon was born, we believe, around 638 B.C.E...."

The new, Godless Left refuses to use BC and AD for their dates. Instead, they use B.C.E (Before Current Era or Before Common Era) and C.E. or CE (Current Era or Common Era), rather than the religious abreviations of our legal calendar (BC and AD).

The appearance of such non-legal abbreviations betrays the bias of the author.

[skr]

1. Trust good character more than promises.--Good advice, but subjective. Nothing to base a legal system on.

2. Do not speak falsely = Thou shalt not bear false witness.

3. Do good things.--Subjective. Nothing to base a legal system on. Better to note what is bad, so that the denser oones know what the boundaries are.

4. Do not be hasty in making friends, but do not abandon them once made.--Good advice, but subjective. Nothing to base a legal system on.

5. Learn to obey before you command.--Subjective. Nothing to base a legal system on.

6. When giving advice, do not recommend what is most pleasing, but what is most useful.--Subjective. Nothing to base a legal system on.

7. Make reason your supreme commander.--Subjective. Nothing to base a legal system on.

8. Do not associate with people who do bad things.--Subjective. Nothing to base a legal system on.

9. Honor the gods. = Thou shalt have no other gods before me and Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain...

10. Have regard for your parents = Honour thy father and thy mother...

The other Commandments given to Moses, including not killing, not stealing, not lying and not coveting are actual foundations for law.

[WOSG]

"Is it an accident that when Solon's ideals reigned, there grew democracies and civil rights, and ideals we now consider fundamental to modern Western society, yet when the ideals of Moses replaced them, we had a thousand years of oppression, darkness, and tyranny?"

That is a total and utter myth.

The 'glory of Athens' lasted only long enough for Athens to get consumed in a series of hellish wars. Wars in whcih towns were slaughtered, slaves taken, etc., then Sparta defeated Athens, then came Alexander the Great. Democracy and Athens barely lasted a century of glory.

The dark ages were not that 'dark'. It was the enlightening rather of the whole of Europe to Christianity. eg the heathen Vikings were Christianized in this period.

Everything that the Greeks like Solon gave us came through monastic Christian scribes who faithfully recorded them, considered them, and built upon them. Our modern age owes much, for example, to Thomas Aquinas, who used Aristotle and the rediscovery of his philosophy, to guide us futher on the past of just lives and just societies. from 1200 on, Europe grew to advance beyond the other civilizations.

In truth our heritage is *both* Greece and Rome - Christian Rome, derived from Christian and Jewish faith. Greek philosophy and Christian faith are the two causal ideals behind the rise of Western civilization.

[jwh_Denver]

Bump later for rant.

[Junior]

Bookmark.

[Rightwing Conspiratr1]

I keep hearing this chant, variously phrased: "The Ten Commandments are the foundation of Western morality and the American Constitution and government." In saying this, people are essentially crediting Moses with the invention of ethics, democracy and civil rights, a claim that is of course absurd.

Didn't need to read any further. God created the ten commandments. That's what the chant is you keep hearing. Sheesh.

[Imal]

The Moses this guy is talking about is nothing like the Moses I've read about.

Must be a different Moses, and a different set of commandments.

[Imal]

The Athenian's Commandments are far more noble and profound, and far more appropriate to a free society. Who would have guessed this of a pagan? Maybe everyone of sense.

More precisely, everyone willing to embrace nihilism as their religion, as the author clearly does.

His ludicrous assumption that the moral foundation of western society is hedonism invalidates his entire thesis, and therefore his article. It also deftly eliminates any doubts that he is incapable of any form of objective, reasoned analysis of this topic.

[R. Scott]

It could also be said that our laws are based on those of Hammurabi (reigned 1795-1750 BC).
His published Code of Law not only covered criminal but tort law as well. While our founders might not have directed accessed it, other societies in the long ago past did – and the tenets have been passed down.

[WOSG]

" Now, we can see at once that our society is entirely opposed to the first four, and indeed the last of these ten. "

On further reflection, he is utterly wrong on this point. I know he is trying to tear down the 10 Commandments to build up solon but he overreaches.

First, go with the real text, not his summary.

http://www.prayerlist.com/tencommandments.html

1 is about believing and obeying only the one ("true") God.
3 is having piety towards God, not shaking your fist at him. 2 is about not worshipping false idols and representations. 4 is to "keep the Sabbath holy" (he said "do no work on the seventh day", but that is not the text of Exodus).

A devout orthodox Christian and Orthodox Jew would really do all those things. This does not impose it in any way on rest of society, this is not a command to theocracy just a command to personal belief. So in saying that 'our society' rejects these he is rejecting Jewish and Christian faith as valid for our society. Clearly this is not true most as close to half of American obey #4 and show up at Church on Sunday and most Americans consider themselves believing Christian or Jewish.

As for #10 ('do not cover thy neighbors house, wife, property, servants, etc.'), he is sucked up into modernist thought that no thought is evil. In fact, #10 enjoins the 'mortal sin' of greed/avarice, wanting/desiring what does not belong to you. Again, different ethical view, but I dont think he would reject a rule that said "Dont be greedy for what is not yours". It seems clearer than solon's #8.

[P.O.E.]

Lest we forget the Skipper as Polonius:

"Neither a borrower, nor a lender be
Do not forget, stay out of debt"

A Harold Hecuba Production

[Verginius Rufus]

A lot of this is hype. Solon didn't invent democracy, which didn't develop at Athens until a couple of generations after his death.

We don't have adequate information about what Solon actually did to substantiate most of the assertions the author makes. We have some of Solon's poems, which are vague about what he actually did, and we have some of the laws he wrote for the Athenians, but the Athenians would sometimes refer to a much later law as a "law of Solon," so it's hard to know which ones are genuinely his. The main ancient sources for Solon's work are Aristotle (Constitution of Athens) and Plutarch (Life of Solon), both of whom were writing centuries after his death.

Even in Aristotle's time, 250 years later, poor citizens were still legally barred from holding certain offices (although it isn't certain the prohibition was always enforced).

[M Kehoe]

This is an essential moral principle, lacking from the commands of Moses,...

True. Imho, that's why God sent Jesus. To clarify things. Because we are an obstinate people. < /sermon>

5.56mm

[Ohioan]

The actual ten rules of conduct laid down by Solon are reasonable, and indeed in some respects overlap the Ten Commandments. But your essayist's opening comment relates neither to Solon, America or the Ten Commandments. Consider:

I keep hearing this chant, variously phrased: "The Ten Commandments are the foundation of Western morality and the American Constitution and government." In saying this, people are essentially crediting Moses with the invention of ethics, democracy and civil rights, a claim that is of course absurd.

While certainly embracing ethical concepts, neither Western morality nor the American Constitutional system are founded on "democracy and civil rights." As Madison explained in Federalist Paper #10, preventing Democracy was one of the motivations for the Federal Union. The Founders gave us a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy--the rule of Law, not a counting of noses.

"Civil rights," on the other hand, are rights created by the Civil Authority, i.e. legislated "rights." American liberty was premised, from the first, on a Creational--not a secular, not a civil authority--basis. What are today labelled "civil rights," are a Socialistic departure from the basic premises of the traditional American free society. Claiming antiquity for the package that Lyndon Johnson rammed through a docile Congress in 1964 & 1965, is absurd.

The Ten Commandments are more directed towards the foundations of law and an ongoing Social order. In this they reflect the same concept of a Divine Foundation, as that set forth in our Declaration of Independence. The rules of Solon appear to relate more--where there is a divergence--to the problems of immediate civility. There is no conflict between the rules quoted from Solon, merely a somewhat different immediate focus; so I am not attacking the latter, merely the preconceptions of the essayist, which are 180 degrees divergent from the historic truth.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

[montag813]

6. When giving advice, do not recommend what is most pleasing, but what is most useful.

That one is completely lost on the Democrat Party.

[montag813]

And our very goal in life is to desire--desiring is what drives us toward success and prosperity.

This is not what was meant in Commandment 10. The word is to "covet", not "desire". And it relates to adultery or specific possessions that you would wish to steal. It does NOT refer to "keeping up with the Joneses.". This analysis is very simplistic.

[A.J.Armitage]

Now, we can see at once that our society is entirely opposed to the first four, and indeed the last of these ten. As a capitalist society, we scoff at the idea of closing our shops on a choice market day. And our very goal in life is to desire--desiring is what drives us toward success and prosperity. The phrase "seeking the American Dream," which lies at the heart of our social world, has at its heart the very idea of coveting the success of our peers, goading us to match it with our own industry, and we owe all our monumental national success to this. Finally, our ideals of religious liberty and free speech, essential to any truly civil society, compel us to abhor the first three commandments. Thus, already half of Moses' doctrines cannot be the foundation of our modern society--to the contrary, they are anathema to modern ideals.

If he were right about our society being entirely opposed to the first four and last commandment, the Roy Mooore affair would never have happened, and in fact Carrier wouldn't have seen a need for this article. Or perhaps "our society" means something other than America.

Also, he seems to lack reading comprehension. The last Commandment prohibits not desire in general (these are not Buddhist commandments), but desiring what your neighbor has, which precedes theft, or adultery in the case of your neighbor's wife. Surely theft and adultery aren't the basis of capitalism. And "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me" doesn't imply "and kill those who do." Unless he thinks you can't hold a position about religious matters without wishing to persecute those with other positions, in which case he has no business claiming free speech as "our" ideal.

And Solon's "ten commandments" read like the first ten entries in an ancient Life's Little Instruction Book.

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

The man I am talking about is Solon the Athenian.

Sorry I've never heard of this guy before neither do i want to and moses is not the lawmaker God himself laid down the laws Moses carried them down to the people in Gods name not In his own!

To follow this solon would be simple IDOLETRY.

[spunkets]

"Solon's Ten Commandments have far more right to hang in those places than those of Moses."

No, they don't. Moses brought the tablets down from Sinai at least 600 years before this guy. There aren't many that knew this guy and the founders were not much aware of him either.

"The Athenian's Commandments are far more noble and profound, and far more appropriate to a free society.

The commonality is mostly that they are a list of ten.

2. Do not speak falsely. (Thou shalt lie)
10. Have regard for your parents. (Honor your father and mother.)
9. Honor the gods. ( The greek gods were made up out of thin air as these "commandments" are)

3. Do good things. (The 10 commandments and what is written in the Bible ID and define what is good, these don't. These leave it open.)

The rest are contained in the Book of Wisdom. That book contains much more and predates this.

1. Trust good character more than promises.
4. Do not be hasty in making friends, but do not abandon them once made.
5. Learn to obey before you command.
6. When giving advice, do not recommend what is most pleasing, but what is most useful.
7. Make reason your supreme commander.
8. Do not associate with people who do bad things.

These have no prohibition on theft, murder, covetousness, adultery. They are worthless and so are the folks pushing them as worth something more than the 10 commandments.