<---back to Words of Wisdom index
\
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me" does little or no harm. We all outgrew that admonition, didn’t we?
The unenforceable mind control, keeping magic days holy and refraining from úcoveting wives or asses, are just plain silly, though they may not be completely benign when exposed to impressionable young minds.
I will go on record as agreeing with the religious right that school children should not commit adultery, but I suspect it’s as irrelevant to them as the one about graven images. (Personally, I would love to work in a school where no one in authority wore icons.) As a teacher, I know that high school kids are less likely to take the name of their lord in vain than they are to use extremely unpleasant Anglo-Saxon terms for bodily functions. Maybe forbidding the god words would bring them back into popularity as expressions of anger.
Then we come to the ones which are, in fact, generally good laws: Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness. These have been incorporated into our legal system without any freethinker complaints. They certainly are not the invention of religion.
So, finally, we come to the one which is most objectionable, arguably the only really harmful commandment in the set: "Honor thy father and thy mother." This is a stellar example of how a good idea can make a terrible law.
Honoring our parents, if we take the word honor somewhat loosely to mean respect and appreciate their efforts, is a very good idea, even for those of us who did not have very good parents. Respecting our parents and appreciating their efforts, however inadequate or misguided they may have been, is a part of coming to terms with ourselves. Even children of unconscionable abuse must, if they are to lead normal lives, come to understand their parents’ behavior as human failings and an expression of human painà not as a powerful evil force.
I don’t like the religious term forgiveness, which suggests that victims must decide that it is somehow unimportant that they were victimized. But recovery from any wrong must include letting go of anger, and putting the crimes against us in some larger perspective. This is especially true when half of our DNA came from our abuser.
Many victims of child abuse never go through this process, even in adulthood, and I believe religion is largely to blame for this. No one is more isolated than the abused child, who has usually been told that the abuse is the child’s fault. This guilt is intensified by the fact that virtually all religions set up a family hierarchy, with a god as the final enforcer of childhood behavior. A child might, in fantasy or in reality, escape an abusive parent, but the child will never escape a god.
And now they want to put a sign on the school room wall to state just that, thus making life more difficult for our most pathetic citizens. In any classroom, in any state, there is likely to be one or more abused children. In such a society, is it any wonder that so many abused children grow up to be abusers and other criminals, unable to control their rage?
Is it any wonder that the United States, the industrialized world’s most religious country, is its most crime ridden?
Freethinkers must lead the way to help our society find a noncoercive way to honor our parents.