Even though I am not Christian and was not raised in a Christian household, I do live in a Christian culture, and as such I have been exposed to the Ten Commandments since I was a child. They were not a guide that I and my family lived by, but I knew that many others did, and as I grew older, it became evident that this supposedly Godly list greatly informed the normal behaviors of the society I lived in.
Unfortunately, it was also very clear to me it was a moral list that was largely given lip service and mostly used as a cudgel, much like the Bible. While on the surface it seemed to offer a moral and ethical guide to leading a good life, in practice it merely became a tool to judge people with, often hypocritically. I grew to view people who openly displayed the Ten Commandments with suspicion, just as I did with people who openly displayed crucifixes and images of white Jesus.
With the rise of fundamentalism and Evangelical Christianity in America, the Ten Commandments are at the front and center of many public controversies as they get put on display everywhere from courthouses to school classrooms. Right wing fundamentalist America is determined to shove its particular brand of Christianity down the throat of every man, woman, and child in this country at any cost, justice be damned.
I find myself alarmed and disgusted at this trend, if for no other reason than I do not myself adhere to these ethical principles and so I disagree with them being publicly brandished in my face like a weapon. I also happen to think the Ten Commandments are grotesquely obsolete and in need of updating. This is supposedly a list of Divine commandments handed down to a particular group of people over two thousand years ago. Times have changed, so should the ethical guidelines, especially if they’re going to rule everyone.
The Commandments as written largely govern interpersonal and spiritual relations and ignore more global issues, which makes sense given when they were written. The ‘world’ was much smaller to the people who wrote the books of the Bible and did not have considerations for things like climate change. A set of ‘commandments’ today would necessarily need to address larger concerns that affect much larger groups of people, even the entire planet.
I thought for a while about what a new Ten Commandments would look like if it were written from an Earth-based humanist perspective. What philosophical changes could be made that would have the broadest effect and strongest movement towards positive progress for everyone? It didn’t take long for me to come up with a new list of ten ‘commandments’ that lacked the punitive judgment of the current Ten Commandments while fostering more compassion.
Thou shalt love thy neighbors as thyself
Thou shalt walk through life with kindness and compassion
Thou shalt not needlessly waste
Thou shalt not violate Mother Earth or Her creations
Thou shalt not poison Father Air
Thou shalt not poison Sister Water
Thou shalt not provoke Brother Fire
Thou shalt not profit from suffering
Thou shalt not profit from destruction
Thou shalt not enslave thy brothers and sisters
Rather than there being a whole list of how to treat one another, there are only three that paint with a broad brush. “Love thy neighbors as thyself” is an ancient edict that, when properly applied, can assuage most personal conflicts. So can “walk through life with kindness and compassion”, something many people seem to have a great deal of difficulty with. Imagine what the world would be like if people adhered to these two simple principles.
Most of the commandments governing things like killing and coveting your neighbor’s wife can fall under the new commandments of loving your neighbors and walking with kindness and compassion. There is also a complete absence of dictating who God is or how He/She/They/It should be worshipped. Instead, these are instructions for how to basically treat one another with kindness and how to live in harmony with the Earth, which supports and sustains us.
This is reflected in the specific commandments that mention the four classical elements: Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. The commandment barring violation of Mother Earth or her creations covers things like agriculture, mining, and timbering, all extremely destructive activities. It would be impossible to ban them outright, but more responsible exercise of these activities would be a better, cleaner way to interact with the Earth that would result in less death and pollution.
Similarly, the commandments against poisoning Sister Water and Father Air are about keeping life-giving resources clean for everyone, including Mother Earth’s creations. It is the height of irrationality for us to collectively poison the two most important resources that our bodies rely on to survive. A human being will die after about 7 days without water, and after about 7 minutes without air. Who knows how many months or even years get shaved off of our lives by constantly living exposed to toxins in our air and water.
The final elemental commandment pertains to Brother Fire, a familiar companion where I live in the Western United States. Each summer, the eyes of Northwesterners turn to the forests and its seasonal conflagrations. Many of these fires are started by lightning, but others are started by carelessness and even malice. Stronger social lessons beginning when our children are young will help ensure that fewer forest and brush fires are carelessly or even deliberately set, saving people, animals, and potentially millions of acres of forest land.
An additional environmental commandment pertains to waste. It is not a total ban on waste, which would be impossible, but a call to be more mindful about waste. Most of us engage in needless waste on at least some level, mostly out of social habit. We all think there’s an “away” where things go when they become waste, and unfortunately that’s a myth. There is no magical “away” that our garbage disappears to when it’s picked up each week, it goes to ever-increasing landfills that leach all kinds of poisons into the groundwater. Most of the garbage in these landfills is not biodegradable, meaning it just sits there festering and stinking.
This is an area where government needs to work with the citizenry to address waste. As individuals, we need to exercise “reduce, reuse, recycle” as often as possible, and our governments need to provide us with opportunities to exercise those options by offering drop off and pickup services that keep more trash out of the waste stream. Instead of battery recycling being a service driven by capitalism, it needs to be a subsidized service that everyone can access for free in the name of environmental health.
The elemental commandments all relate to the commandments governing profiting from suffering and destruction. Many corporations, if not all of them arguably, gain their profits from the suffering of billions of human beings and the wanton destruction of the planet. Any corporation raking in profits from the pollution of any aspect of the Earth or from the enforced suffering of any group of people is in violation of human ethics and morality.
This includes for-profit healthcare. It is a conflict of interest to profit from people’s health problems. It removes incentive to look for cures for their health problems and instead incentivizes keeping them sick to provide more profit. A prime example is mental healthcare. In 1980, the DSM-III was issued as a guide to mental disorders and as a coding system for health insurance companies. Ever since then, the DSM has served as nothing more than a guide to what pill to prescribe to someone with an ever-increasing list of mental disorders while research on how to actually cure mental disorders has come to a screeching halt. Psychiatric medication has made Big Pharma tens of billions upon billions of dollars since the 1980s. One has to wonder what constitutes ‘normal’ behavior with this huge book describing ‘abnormal’ behavior that requires medication.
The last commandment is “thou shalt not enslave thy brothers and sisters”, and this goes far beyond what most of us think of as “slavery”. Most of us think of slavery as being an institution of the past, but the sad truth is that it is still deeply embedded in our society in the form of prisons which are largely filled with Black people. Once a person is imprisoned and stripped of their civil rights, our governments, both federal and state, feel free to use their prisoners for whatever purpose they wish. Most prisoners are used as forced, unpaid labor throughout their prison terms to do everything from cleaning up roadsides to harvesting crops. As a society and as individuals, we benefit every day from slavery without even knowing it. This is wrong.
A truly compassionate society would not throw away its criminals the way we do. Just because a person has made a mistake once does not mean they are destined to make mistakes for the rest of their lives. Most people make life-altering mistakes because they themselves were brought up in less-than-nurturing environments. As a society, are we more interested in mere punishment, or in actual corrections? Our prison system as it exists does not correct people’s behavior, it only punishes them, virtually ensuring recidivism when they complete their sentence.
I would love to see America become a place that is filled not with prisons, but with mental health treatment centers. I would love for there to be only a handful of prisons that are reserved for the most grievously ill individuals for whom there is no treatment that would render them publicly acceptable, and even these people are treated with kindness and respect. I would love for our legal system to change to understand that most so-called criminals exhibit unwanted behavior for psychological reasons, not ethical or moral ones. I would love for our society to change to one that is less judgmental and punitive and more understanding and compassionate.
There are forces at work in America and the rest of the world that think that progress actually means rolling back many of the social breakthroughs that have been made over the last hundred years. They view these breakthroughs as destructive spiritual forces that are destroying a way of life they seek to impose upon everyone, one that is punitive, judgmental, and oppressive to anyone not a rich, white, Christian male. These forces see kindness and compassion as wrong and antithetical to their goal of domination.
Unfortunately, these forces aren’t just social, cultural, and political in nature, but also religious, which means that the people that make them up are incredibly egotistical and psychologically bound by their beliefs to the extent that it is impossible for them to consider alternative viewpoints. They literally believe that they are saving humanity from itself by imposing their version of morality upon everyone, and so they will continue doing things like posting the Christian Ten Commandments in courthouses and schoolrooms.
I would not want my version of the Ten Commandments to be posted anywhere publicly, though I can see it being distributed as a part of a greater philosophical treatise that more explicitly spells out the ethics and morals behind them. Nor would I call them ‘commandments’ as they are not Divine commands: they are ethical and moral guidelines supported by philosophical analysis for living in harmony with each other and the Earth we call home.
The key is that word “harmony”. In music, one obtains harmony when the instruments are in key with one another such that the combination of their sounds creates even more pleasant sounds by working together to create new sounds. The individual instruments build on one another to generate an entirely new creation in the form of a song. Contrast this to when the instruments aren’t in key with one another, generating dissonance and chaos that is displeasing to the ear and that does not generate new, harmonious creations.
The Ten Commandments as they exist today create dissonance and chaos, not harmony. They create a judgmental environment in which people are constantly condemning each other for an apparent lacking of morality and ethics in matters that are really none of society’s business while simultaneously ignoring matters that everyone should care about. I couldn’t care less if someone isn’t honoring their parents (which they probably aren’t doing because their parents were abusive), but I care deeply about the paper mill down the road that is constantly dumping pollution into the nearby river and the air.
America needs a new set of guidelines to point the way out of judgment and oppression towards a new society based in kindness, compassion, and understanding. We do not need the Archetypal White Man standing over all of us telling us how to behave in ways that only serve the needs of that Archetypal White Man. We need better, more inclusive rules of societal behavior that leave fewer people out and that are more respectful of the Earthly environment in which we live and that we depend on to survive.