The Seventh Commandment

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You shall not commit adultery

First of all we need to be clear about what adultery is. You might think that is easy, but the commandments were written about three thousand years ago and things didn’t mean the same then.

People today tend define it as any act of sexual intercourse outside of marriage or, perhaps a bit more narrowly, any act of sexual intercourse between a married person and someone who is not their spouse.

The ancient Hebrews had a different understanding and limited it to just sexual intercourse between a man and a woman who was married or betrothed. The marital status of the man was irrelevant. A married man was not guilty of “adultery” for having sex with an unmarried woman.

This is because at that time women were little more than property — a slightly higher status than slaves but not full citizens like men. Because women were like property, having sex with a married or betrothed woman was regarded as misuse of someone else’s property. A married man having sex with an unmarried woman was not guilty of such a crime and thus was not committing adultery. If she also wasn’t a virgin, then the man wasn’t guilty of any crime. A man could have sex with slaves any time he liked.

Because adultery was about married or betrothed women, gay sex didn’t count. It was against other laws of Moses, but not the commandments.

Christians now tend to define adultery much more broadly, and as a consequence almost all extramarital sex acts are treated as violations of the Seventh Commandment. Many claim that adultery should include lustful thoughts, lustful words, polygamy, etc. This is justified by the words of Jesus: “You have heard that it was said by them of old time, You shall not commit adultery: But I say to you, That whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.“ (Matthew 5:27-28). That makes life tough for a bloke and makes it fairly certain that nearly half the human race breaks the rules most days of their life.

Some Abrahamic religions still accept polygamy, so many Moslem men can have up to four wives. Much less need to commit adultery in that situation. Some parts of Shia Islam have the even more convenient concept of mutah or temporary marriage.  The temporary marriage contract is as follows: The woman says: ” I marry myself to you for the specified dowry (mention the amount) and for the specified time period (mention the time period)”. Then the man says: “I accept”.” That’ll be fifty bucks for your half hour luv. OK thanks.

Rise in UK teenager pregnancies

Teenage preganancies in the UK have risen for the first time in five years. Britain has the worst record in Europe although it is not as bad as the USA where Bush’s capitulation to the Christian lobby has placed emphasis on abstention from sex before marriage while removing support from anybody helping with contraception or abortion.

Here, the government is asking whether there needs to be an improvement in sex education in schools or classes for girls to show the burdens of motherhood.

I am not sure whether the idiots who suggest this stuff believe any of it or not, but either way it doesn’t matter. They are still going to throw away vast amounts of taxpayers money doing it and building their empires while the misery caused by immature, inadequates becoming parents will continue.

One thing that these children and their families do understand is the benefit and welfare system. Some of them have been living on it for generations and they share their experiences with all their mates. Kids who do not get on at school, have miserable experiences at home and do not see any prospect of doing well in the working world just don’t care about exams or putting effort into anything which is not pleasurable in their eyes.

When a young girl gets pregnant, the state rewards her with loads of attention, a support network, financial benefits and the prospect of a home for her and her baby. Even if she does not get pregnant deliberately to escape her own disfunctional parents or to create another living thing that loves her, she might be happy if it happens for completely rational economic reasons.

These kids are perfectly well aware of the facts of sex and no amount of education is going to make any difference. Still less will there be any point in telling them to save themselves for marriage.

It is really fairly simple. Stop rewarding children for producing more children. The welfare system needs to be dismantled, but a very good start would be to say that there will be no child benefit, no housing provision, in fact no benefits of any kind whatever for parents below the age of eighteen.

That will not stop under eighteens from having sex and it will certainly not stop all of them from becoming pregnant, but it will definitely make them much more interested in using contraception and for many girls, for whom motherhood would be a very bad thing, they will choose a termination rather than going on to face the full reality of what they have done.

I know this will be repugnant to many people. So be it. Let us discuss the issue and consider the consequences of our respective opinions.

The Fourth Commandment

 

You shall remember and keep the Sabbath day holy

 

So we have got to number four of the ten and here is god still obsessed with himself. There are an infinite number of things that this commandment could mean so what I have to say will only be a small look at it, but whatever way you look at it for god to be saying ‘keep it holy’ means set it aside for him.

 

To start off, what is the sabbath day? He claimed to have made the universe in six days and this seventh one is it. This explanation of creation in Genesis is complete nonsense that has been shown scientifically to be wrong, but for the sake of talking about the commandment I won’t deal with that here.

 

When he started there were no days of the week so we can’t say that he started on a Sunday or a Monday or whatever. That leaves a bit of leeway for when the sabbath falls. For some it is Saturday, others Sunday and yet others within the Abrahamic group it is Friday. Does it start at midnight or at sunset or when? No agreement there either I’m afraid. We are left, as with so much else of religious requirements, with a wide variety of different decisions about what and when the sabbath is. Each of the religions considers its own view to be the correct one.

 

The next issue is what you are actually commanded to do to keep the sabbath holy? Again there is no agreement at all between all the different branches and sects of the followers of Abraham and Moses.

 

At one end we have people like the ultra orthodox jews who will tear off pieces of toilet paper before the beginning of the sabbath so that they do not violate it by doing the ‘work’ of tearing the paper on the sabbath! Apparently it is OK to do the work of picking up the torn pieces of paper and wiping their backside, but not doing the tearing. Imagine the horror of incurring god’s wrath because you tore off a piece of bog roll when you should have been keeping his day holy! I wonder what the penalty for that might be? They do all kinds of other crazy things like setting lots of timers so that their lights switch on and off automatically or their curtains open and close with electric motors. You see they are not allowed to use electric switches on the sabbath, but it is OK for the electricity to be working and for devices to do the switching. Surely they are right. Their god is a complex and wonderful thing.

 

At the other end of the scale, many people who regard themselves as religious will simply say that the sabbath has some special significance for them, but they carry on most of their normal activities of life.

 

The consequence of the commandment is that the very observant are parasites and deeply hypocritical. They use hospitals and ambulances where people have to work on the sabbath. They live in a society that needs police, soldiers, firefighters and masses of other health, safety and security workers working on the sabbath but won’t take part in that work themselves. Wealthy ultra observant people will frequently employ staff to do work for them on the sabbath in order to preserve their own good standing with god while having no regard for the afterlife consequences for their employees.

 

It is surely a good thing for people to rest for some part of each week. Not to please a vain, petty and jealous god, but just because it is a good thing for themselves and their families to take a break and relax.

The Third Commandment

 

You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God.

 

Right, so on his third commandment god is still rambling on about himself and trying to demand what he sees as the proper respect he considers he deserves.

 

The first question to be asked is what is this name that he doesn’t want misused? God, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah? Well most of that comes down to what language you are speaking doesn’t it? It does go wider than that though. Many ancient people thought that the more names a deity had, the more important it was. This is partly why Moslems still recite the many names of god.

 

So he has lots of names, but we generally know when we are referring to god. What does it mean to misuse his name. If I called a pet goldfish god would that be breaking the commandment? God claims to be the creator of the goldfish and if I really loved it wouldn’t that be quite nice? If I were to say ‘Oh God!’ when I was shocked by something, would that be misuse? When I say that god doesn’t exist perhaps the believer might think that was misuse although it is actually a statement that does not include any value judgement at all.

 

The truth of course is that the commandment doesn’t have any meaning at all. It is just the third in the series of Moses’ insistence on his monotheistic religion and reinforcing that there was prohibition on any word being said against it.

 

For an all powerful, all present, all good god being worried that his name might be used in a way that he didn’t like is to diminish that god to an absurd level.

 

This commandment is very clearly a human invention and the invention of a not very sophisticated human at that.

The First Commandment

You shall have no other gods but me.

So this god, who was supposedly talking to Moses and giving him a set of rules, is worried about competition. Followers of the Abrahamic faiths claim that there is only one god and that god is all powerful. This first commandment actually acknowledges that there are other gods, but the god of Moses’ first instruction to humans is that they must accept him as their god. It seems like a very insecure position for an all powerful god to take doesn’t it?

Some might argue that this is an inadequacy of language or translation and that god is unique and just giving the instruction for people to acknowledge that. That does raise the amusing question of what language does god speak. Is it Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic? In which language were the stone tablets inscribed? A pre-hebrew desert semitic dialect?

Anyway, let’s get back to the heart of it. If there is only one god there is no possibility that anybody shall have another one so the commandment is pointless. If it is an insistence, as it is taken to be, that people should not worship false gods why doesn’t it say that? If the Abrahamic god is all powerful and the only god anyway, why does it matter if people have mistaken beliefs in non existence gods. Why doesn’t an all powerful god make his human creation undertand that there is only one god. There are a host of more realistic options for this god than to give an instruction that people shall have no other god but him.

The truth, of course, is that Moses did not talk to god. There were no tablets of stone handed down from the deity. There was no god giving such silly instructions. The commandments are human made. They are products of their time and of no relevance to twenty first century humans other than as subjects for academic study.

The People’s Temple and the Jonestown Massacre

 

Jim Jones led the People’s Temple which was a Christian cult that also had socialist political objectives. Jones led a small group that started out as anti-communist, but then became left wing when it sensed that ability to tap into a leftist groundswell in California. It grew much larger when it managed to affiliate with a protestant group called The Disciples of Christ.

 

In the late 1970′s, Jones moved his followers to Guyana where he set up an agricultural commune called Jonestown. The People’s Temple members believed that they were going to create a paradise on earth, but the reality was poor food, hard work, sickness and torture in the form of Jones’ vicious system of discipline.

 

Congressman Ryan flew to Jonestown from the USA in 1978 to investigate complaints of abuse. After an unsatisfactory visit, Jones sent gunmen who shot Ryan and members of his party. Immediately after this, Jones initiated a mass murder and suicide event in which more than 900 People’s Temple members were killed.

 

In this group we see the typical ego centred, charismatic leader exerting absolute authority and the promises of paradise. In this there was to be a paradise on earth before the heavenly one and the religious imagery was merged with an extreme political ideology. There are similarities with the Heaven’s Gate cult which joined its religious mysticism with Ufology in order to tap into the popularity, at the time, of interest in extra terrestrial phenomena. Jones saw a popularity of communist ideology in California in the sixties and seventies and successfully tapped into that.

 

This was one of the worst examples of the dangers of following a persuasive, but deluded man to promises of paradise that end in misery.

Gilbert Deya Miracle Babies Fraud

 

Deya leads a Christian evangelical group called Gilbert Deya Ministries. Just another crank cult preying on the spiritually needy and bleeding them of their money and devotion except for the ‘miracle babies’.

 

In a cruel twist on all the other religious frauds running their own ego pumping organisations, Deya claims to be able to make infertile women pregnant through prayer. Deya is a Kenyan and all the women who are helped into pregnancy by him have to travel to Kenya where they are presented with their baby.

 

The problem, of course, is that the babies are not theirs. They are shown by DNA analysis to have no connection with the alleged mothers and Deya’s organisation is really stealing Kenyan babies in a cynical crime to convince his followers of his miraculous powers.

 

This is one of the worse examples of how far cult leaders will go to mislead and exploit their followers. The continued claims of miracles by mainstream religions (such as those in the Catholic church who are continuing to make saints on the basis of supposed miracles) allows the continuation of an environment in which the ludicrous, cruel and criminal actions of people like Deya can continue to attract gullible supporters.

Christian Brothers and Child Abuse

 

The Christian Brothers are a teaching order of the Catholic church which has run schools and orphanages since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

 

Many cases of sexual abuse of children in their care have been established against Christian Brothers in Britain, Ireland Canada and Australia. The requirement of celibacy and the repressive attitude to sex by the church will have undoubtedly contributed to the sexual misconduct by these priests.

 

What is less easy to explain and generally less well known is the extent of sadistic physical punishments of children in the care of these people. Before corporal punishment of children in schools became generally unacceptable, and illegal in many developed countries, the harshness of the Brothers was not the subject of too much focus and apologists for the order will say that they have to be judged by the norms of the times.

 

The truth is that the savagery of beatings by men of small children were sadism, sometimes with sexual content, and no amount of justification will alter that. There were also cases where children were taken from Britain to Australia to suffer at the hands of this order in their institutions. Some children alleged to be orphans did have parents and they were lied to about their parents. Apologies have been given for their failures by the Christian Brothers and the Australian Government. Little consolation for a ruined life.

 

What we should be asking is what is to stop members of this secretive organisation with such a horrific history from finding new ways to exploit and damage children out of sight of the scrutiny that we now hope to be in place?

 

There should be no place in education or child care for any organisation with such a background. Celibate priests and nuns still have the sexual drives that are generated by their hormones. If these drives do not come out in sexual abuse of children in their care, the frustrations caused by sexual repression may well manifest themselves in cruelty to those same children.

 

The church creates an unnatural environment in which misconduct is inevitable. It is the responsibility of society to ensure the educational and care establishments provide loving, supportive conditions in which children have the possibility of growing into balanced adults with an understanding of normal human relationships.

 

The stark truth is that those people who choose life in a celibate religious order are highly unlikely to be fit persons to have the care of children and allowing the Christian Brotherhood to run their own institutions is an invitation for abuse to continue.

David Koresh–Branch Davidians-76 Dead-Another False Prophet

 David Koresh was originally Vernon Wayne Howell and like Wayne Bent (Michael Travesser) he led a Seventh Day Adventist breakaway sect. Like many others he claimed to be the last prophet of God.

Also like Travesser, and many other cult leaders, Koresh was a sexual predator and child sex abuser. Koresh claimed that he could have any of the females in his compound as his own and he also claimed to have been anointed by God. All of these things echo claims by Travesser. The behaviour of Travesser in ‘dissolving’ the marriages of his followers, not only gave him the self justification to have sex with his daughter-in-law (contrary to Mosaic law in Leviticus), but also, like Koresh, undermined the traditional parent-child relationship and replaced it with a dependence upon a central figure, himself.

Koresh, like Travesser, progressively revealed what he claimed to be God’s plan. In both cases the plan provides for women followers to become wives of the leader and for female children to be socialised to desire to be chosen as a bride of the leader.

Just like the residents of Travesser’s Strong City, children and adults in the Waco compound explained clearly and repeatedly why they chose to remain of their own free will in the sect. The psychological domination by these cult leaders is complete.

In the case of Koresh at Waco 76 people lost their lives in a final confrontation with the FBI. Whoever caused that final loss of life, the deaths and the sex abuse were all the result of the manipulation by David Koresh and the neediness of those who fell into his control.

Islamist No Go Areas – Bishop Michael Ali

Bishop Michael Nazir Ali says that there are no go areas where Muslim extremists have created places to which anybody other then them is unable to freely go. He is right that Islamist political activists have created this situation in some places and they want to do it more. Nazir Ali is completely wrong in his assertion that the answer to this problem is for re-affirmation of Britain’s ‘Christian culture’.

First of all we need to identify what the problem is about. It has nothing to do with Islam. Belief in and practice of the Muslim religion is a private matter. It is something for people to choose in the same way as any other religion. It is no threat to anybody and is not a problem of any kind.

Islamism, which is the political ideology of Wahhabis, Salafists, Jamaat e Islami and a myriad of other crazy groups who have the creation of a worldwide caliphate as their aim. Some of these groups are more supportive of violence than others, including support for Bin Laden and Al Quaeda. Whatever methods they advocate, all of the Islamist groups are engaged in political action rather than the practice of religion and opposing them is not opposition to the Muslim religion at all.

As an atheist who believes in religious tolerance, I am very strongly opposed to Islamism, but I am not part of any Christian culture and I will have nothain at all to do with advocating any religion over another. Nazir Ali says that secularism is an approach that treats all religions as having equal merit. That is not the case at all. Secularism is about having a state that is entirley separate from religion. It is one in which laws are made for all citizens irrespective of whether they have religious belief or not. OUrs is a largely secular state, although an imperfect one insofar as our head of state is the supreme governor of the Church of England, we have Bishops in the legislature (the House of Lords) and we have an ‘established’ church. Any assertion of a ‘Christian culture’ is a backward step away from secularism that I find unacceptable.

Opposing Islamists and their attempts to dominate everything they can, is a cause in which Christians, Muslims, Atheists and followers of all religions should join.