The benefits of illegal proposals

[James Smith]

--- "James E. Clapp" <jeclapp at WANS.NET> wrote:
>
> You assume that they were paying attention to them
> at all. ...

If there had not been the 10 Commandments, the moral
values would have been formulated anyway.  But in
Western society, the 10 Commandments have been one of
the primary, at times the primary, means of expressing
and transmitting those values.  I guess I'm stating a
variation of 'the medium is the message'.


...which I ***could infer*** from his statement are
totally unrelated to the evils covered by the 10 C's!

> He didn't say "totally unrelated"; he said "They do
> not answer the real
> moral problems affecting modern society."  Take
> murder:  Is there a real
> moral question today about whether murder, as a
> general proposition, is
> a good thing or a bad thing?  My sense is that
> pretty much everyone
> agrees it is a bad thing. The real moral questions
> today are:  When is
> killing murder, and when is it justifiable homicide
> or excusable on
> other grounds?  Whom can you kill in wartime, and
> under what
> circumstances?  Killing in self-defense is okay, but
> what about killing
> in defense of property?  Killing in the heat of
> passion?  What moral and
> legal culpability should we attribute to a
> six-year-old who kills?  What
> about someone with an extremely low IQ?  What about
> a schizophrenic who
> heard God telling him to kill?  What about a very
> religious person who
> heard God telling him to kill abortionists?  Are
> abortionists
> murderers?  Is suicide ever justified?  What about
> assisted suicide?
> Does suicide require justification at all, or is it
> the ultimate human
> right?  Is capital punishment morally justified?  In
> what kinds of
> cases?  What about marketing of cigarettes?  Is it
> moral for the nation
> to discourage smoking at home but market American
> tobacco products
> vigorously in the third world?
>
> [If you say it is important or helpful just to know
> that the Ten
> Commandments proscribe murder, even if they don't
> actually say anything
> else on the subject, I say pooh.  I'd like to know
> about one person who
> ever said "I didn't know murder was wrong, but now
> that you show me the
> Ten Commandments I see that I (shouldn't
> do/shouldn't have done) it.]
>
> One could go through the same exercise with all the
> rest of the
> commandments.  They are all, at the very best, too
> simplistic to be of
> the slightest relevance to modern moral issues;

Everything you mention falls under the admitedly broad
injunctions of the 10 Commandments.  Their lack of
specificity does not render them irrelevant, rather it
has and does make them one anchor point for discussion
and debate of numerous issues in our society.

> and
> many of them are
> simply immoral:  Don't covet your neighbor's slave:
> be happy for your
> neighbor's good fortune.  Don't make your own slaves
> work on Sunday: the
> work will still be there for them on Monday.  Don't
> take mammograms to
> detect breast cancer: God wants you to wait until
> the tumor is big
> enough to feel.  Do punish the children for the sins
> of the father--and
> grandfather, and the great grandfather.  Boy, the
> more I look at the Ten
> Commandments the more I think children should be
> shielded from them at
> all costs!

Again, how has society reconciled these conflicts?  I
don't think it has been by meerly casting the 10
Commandments aside, but has evolved through thoughtful
and careful processes.  Shouldn't children at some
time in their education come to know not only that
slavery existed, but that moral people condoned it as
a normal human condition?



=====
James D. SMITH                 |If history teaches anything
SLC, UT                        |it is that we will be sued
jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com     |whether we act quickly and decisively
                               |or slowly and cautiously.
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