Louisiana's new "Ten Commandments" law actually contains eleven commandments

NightOwl@lemmy.ca to Not The Onion@lemmy.world – 477 points –
Louisiana's new "Ten Commandments" law actually contains eleven commandments
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Moses : The Lord, the Lord Jehovah has given unto you these fifteen...

[drops one of the tablets]

Moses : Oy! Ten! Ten commandments for all to obey

What's funny is that (according to the old testament) when Moses came down off the mountain with the tablets and found everyone worshipping the golden calf, he had a big hissy fit and smashed them. So then after doing quite a bit of murdering he had to go back up the mountain to get a second set. Exodus 32-34

I asked a religious relative how it was ok for Moses to murder people when he had only just be told by God himself "thou shalt not kill", and she said it was because the don't kill thing came further down the list than having only the one god.

As a note, the Israelites would in later generations go on to kill a shitload of people. It's one of those things where it seems like the Bible only really considers it murder if God doesn't sanction it. It's honestly one of the many sticking points that makes Abrahamic religions a hard sell for modern individuals. That said, if you look at it from a historical perspective, it really comes across more like a religious version of the Code of Hammurabi. It's less "don't kill" as a philosophical or religious position and more about sanctions against killing in a practical legal sense. A functioning society has laws that formally govern behavior and the Israelites were essentially an ecclesiarchy, with Moses being both head of state and high priest. The same laws that governed social life were always going to intersect with laws that governed spiritual life.

The bible seems to consider it murder only if it's another christian.

[if someone] has gone and served other gods and worshiped them, [...] you shall stone that man or woman to death with stones.

-Deuteronomy 17:2-5

If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter or the wife you embrace or your friend who is as your own soul entices you secretly, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ [...] you shall kill him. Your hand shall be first against him to put him to death.

-Deuteronomy 13:6-10

you shall stone that man or woman to death with stones

Pretty specific - I guess that closes the "get them high" loophole.

Hmb while I go kill someone for not keeping the holy sabbath day and honoring their father and mother cuz god recommended it.

I love this because what if actually? What if there's literally a buzzfeed tier list of five things to do we're missing for a utopian society? And mankind fucked it like we always do.

You want the Council of Nicea where a pagan edited the Bible by decapitating people expressing ideas he didn't want in it.

God gave plenty more laws in the next few books of the Bible. The famous commandments about not mixing fabrics or cutting your hair? Yeah Moses of the Ten Commandments is behind that book too.

Thats assuming you're saying religion would have brought us utopia.

For the sake of this wild fantasy, yeah. I'm not gonna be too picky

Who's to say commandment #11 wasn't "lmao jk ok but for real just these four things:"

Louisiana: basic literacy is not their strong suit.

suit but agreed. Edumacation was never one of the original thirteen commandiments.

basic literacy is not their strong suite.

Oof.

Woops. At least I didn't confuse Iraq with Ukraine....this time.

.........that you George?

On the internet, nobody knows you're the 43rd president, just trying to put food on your family.

*numeracy is the word you're looking for.

you're not wrong though, literacy is also not their strong suit :)

In Louisiana, they think numeracy is what gets you run outta town or burned alive, and they're not entirely wrong there either, historically speaking.

No, numeracy is when you draw cards to see the future.

No, numeracy is when you goin' around in public and ain't got no clothes on.

That comma could have been anything else and it would been a valid sentence.

Well, that's what I get for punching down on our gumbo-eating friends.

I mean originally there were 15.

My favorite joke from that movie.

I can't remember if it's the same movie, but the scene where Moses gets mugged is also a highlight for me.

I very quickly checked wikipedia, because I couldn't easily identify the extra one. It lists all 16 of the 10 commandments... The table looks like different branches of christianity bundle some of them together (mostly various coveting) or don't even consider the first and last a commandment, so they always only count to ten. So it's an easy mistake to make.

But the fact that they couldn't even count the paragraphs is riddiculous.

Seems like the sort of thing people should know about a central tenet of a pillar of their identity...

But then they'd have to stop eating shrimp, so...

The Lord giveth and taketh away Red Lobster.

More importantly, they'd have to stop the most sacred of Christian traditions: throwing a pigskin around while assaulting each other.

No no. That's from the old testament. Those rules don't count anymore now that there is the new testament.

realizes ten commandments are from the old testament

This was done by the jews. I always knew they controlled everything.

Not a good look when something as solid as the ten commandments doesn't line up between groups with similar beliefs.

Might make some folks want to look under the hood. That certainly won't increase church attendance.

I read that as commandlets and now I'm worried Powershell has given me brain damage...

  1. if ((Get-God).Count -gt 1){Set-God -Identity "YHWH"}
  2. Get-Idol | Remove-Idol
  3. foreach($godsname in ((Get-God).Name){ if (($speech -like "$godsname") -and ($speech.vain)) {$speech = ""}}
  4. Set-Reminder -Start (Get-Date "06/29/2024") -Reoccurance 7 -Subject "Holy"
  5. Set-Person -Relation "Mother" -Honor $true; Set-Person -Relation "Father" -Honor $true;
  6. $murder = $false
  7. $adultry = $false
  8. $stealing = $false
  9. if ((Get-Truth $speech) -eq $false){$speech = ""}
  10. $NoCovet=(Get-Property -SearchDepth 2) + (Get-Person -Relation "Neighbor")

The text of the Ten Commandments ... shall be printed in a large, easily readable font.

Comic Sans it is.

No ... Wingdings.

How is Wingdings "easily readable"?

How about Arabic? Or Chinese, simplified Chinese is read by like a billion people, so clearly easily readable, it even has simplified in the name!

Wouldn't work. The law clearly specifies the exact text, and it's in English.

Can you write English with Chinese characters?

People certainly try with Cyrillic. And kanji?

Cyrillic seems really difficult with all the vowel shifts, English doesn't even make sense in its own alphabet. Something like "Ай эм де лорд, дай год." then?

It is easily readable wingdings. It doesn't say it has to be easily understood or interpreted.

How the fuck is this not illegal?

It's illegal, but good luck with the current supreme court!

Would be cool if leftists had jobs other than minimum wage non authoritative ones then we could have lawyers and judges that figured out ways to culture jam this stuff and make Republicans eat shit instead of the other way around.

Clearly it's not religious since they added another commandment.

5 more...

They broke the 10th commandment into two commandments. There should have been a semicolon after 10a, not a new line.

(10a) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house.

(10b) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor's."

10(Revised): Don't covet thy neighbors' shit.

10.0.2 fixed coveting of cattle to match other items in coveting domain

10.0.2.1 fixed coveting to close loophole inv. neighbors' wives, daughters, and all other livestock

(for clarity: "holy" books are largely penned by bigoted pedos. full stop.)

but its okay to covet shit if they're not a neighbor, right?

My understanding is "neighbor" is mostly a mistranslation. It's really referring to people within your tribe. Don't fuck with people who are in your group basically, in order to keep the peace. Outsiders are fair game.

nor his manservant, nor his maidservant

"Slaves" in the original, but of course we can't allow any hint of three thousand year old shit not being strictly relevant any more.

Oh don't worry, that revision is just waiting for SCOTUS to give them enough cover.

There are a ton of translation differences, and it can also change depending on if you look at Exodus or Deuteronomy.

AFAIK, Louisiana also picked a version that aligns to the KJV, which is a shit translation advocated by the dumbest dullards of Christian Fundamentalism.

  1. Thou shalt not math.

PS: this is what happens when the commitee watches Spinal Tap too many times.

If George Lucas had directed Spinal Tap, he would have already gone back and made Stonehenge orange.

I mean aren't numbers invented by Arabics anyway? What's the point at ending with 9 and 10 when they could go full 9 and 11? /s

Invented by Hindus in India, spread by Arabs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu-Arabic_numeral_system

there's a base n joke somewhere in there

If you say base "10", what does that mean? You'd have to know the base that "10" was meant to be in. It could be binary, octal, decimal, hexadecimal, any number. It does not even need to be a natural number, you can use negative numbers, fractional numbers, negative fractional numbers, irrational numbers, even complex numbers as a base.

Base 10 does mean nothing and everything.

Home many of these commandments their lord messiah Trump violates on hourly basis?

I wonder if the poster they have to put up will show a picture of Jesus. Evangelicals sure do love those graven images.

They're the type to use a picture of Ewan McGregor as Obi Wan

You joke but if you want to troll Bible nuts at protests, absolutely carry a picture of Obi Wan as Jesus. Aragorn works too.

Or go wild and have Black Jesus.

I go even further. Jesus was a direct decendant of David, and so is this guy, so Middle Eastern Jesus it is.

What do you mean "Thall shalt not horn in on thy husband's racket" isn't a commandment?

Also: "Thou shalt not take... moochers into thy... hut."

I believe the last two listed ('Thou shalt not covet...') are considered to be the same commandment, although they appear as two separate verses in the Bible.

For those who do not know, in Exodus, Moses gets pissed off, smashes the tablets people today call the Ten Commandments, goes back up the mountain and Yaweh has him carve new ones with different laws on them. Those laws are the only laws called "Ten Commandments" in the Bible.

They include:

Three times a year all your men are to appear before the Sovereign Lord, the God of Israel. [Good luck with that]

Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice to me along with anything containing yeast

“Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.

As the end of the chapter says:

Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2034&version=NIV

The Bible cannot be more clear on this point, but it's always ignored.

“The first offspring of every womb belongs to me, including all the firstborn males of your livestock, whether from herd or flock. 20 Redeem the firstborn donkey with a lamb, but if you do not redeem it, break its neck. Redeem all your firstborn sons.

A bunch of religious nuts "find" a country and make up new rules. Now, people that can't count to 10 use those documents to make crazy religious rules. Am I understanding this correctly?

The Old Testament is a founding document for the kingdoms of Israel and Judah that establishes their lineage from the original humans to legendary Kings. Plus a bunch of laws, instructions for worship and whatnot.

People just took it too seriously and now we murder eachother over our imaginary friends.

Come on year of Jubilee! At least do the law against charging interest on loans!

Anyways, ya, the 11 are group the first two or the last two. If you group the first two, you sort of lessen the impact of "I am your god" with stuff about idols - but if you group the last two "don't covet your neighbors property, such as: wife, house, horses, etc..." you basically are saying wives are property.