The New Ten Commandments, Cont.

Relating back to my previous post about Christopher Hitchens’ criticism and revision of the Ten Commandments, I also stumbled upon another attempt by Adam Lee, to improve the traditional list.

The new ten commandments are divided into two equally important major categories, the “moral five” and the “intellectual five”. To use an ancient metaphor, the first five deal with the heart, and the second five with the brain. The former category, and the list itself, begins with the single greatest, simplest, and most important moral axiom humanity has ever invented, one which reappears in the writings of almost every culture and religion throughout history, the one we know as the Golden Rule.

1. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.
2. In all things, strive to cause no harm.
3. Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
4. Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
5. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
6. Always seek to be learning something new.
7. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
8. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
9. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
10. Question everything.

Despite what feels like a bit of redundancy towards the end, this is also a vast improvement over the egotism and capriciousness of the traditional list, though I doubt either author would truly consider these “commandments,” as much as helpful guidelines for living a positive and intellectually honest life.

Endless Numbered Mixtape #75: Fortune “Saddle The Wind”

Endless Numbered Mixtape #74: Cube “Performance”

The New Commandments

Christopher Hitchens takes an editorial chisel to the Ten Commandments, and then posits his own, greatly improved version, for Vanity Fair.

It’s difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words “Thou shalt not.” But who cannot summon the confidence to say:

1. Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color.
2. Do not ever use people as private property.
3. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations.
4. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.
5. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature (Why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them?).
6. Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly.
7. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.
8. Turn off that fucking cell phone (you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us).
9. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions.
10. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above.

In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.