The Commandments

And now for something a little different. I'm starting a book on the Ten Commandments, entitled Losing Moses on the Freeway by Chris Hedges, a former NYT war correspondent who has turned writer and lecturer. I read his first book some years ago, entitled War is Force That Gives Us Meaning, and was blown away by its insight into war, society, and human nature. I have now run across his book on the Commandments, which he has written because of his belief that our innate human sinfulness and corruptibility requires the discipline of rules and commandments. In the prologue I've found the following two wonderful paragraphs giving his essential insight into the place and role of the Commnandments.

The commandments guide us toward relationships built on trust rather than
fear. Only through trust can there be love. Those who ignore the
commandments diminish the possibility of love, the single force that keeps us
connected, whole and saved from physical and pyschological torment. A life
where the commandments are routinely dishonored becomes a life of solitude,
guilt, anger, and remorse. The wars I covered from Central America to
Yugoslavia were places where the sanctity and respect for human life, that which
the commandments protect, were ignored. Bosnia, with its rape camps,
genocide, looting, razing of villages, its heady intoxication with violence,
power, and death, illustrated, like all wars, what happens when societies thrust
the commandments aside.

The commandments do not protect us from evil. They protect us from
committing evil. The commandments are designed to check our darker
impulses, warning us that pandering to impulses can have terrible
consequences. "If you would enter life," the Gospel of Matthew reads,
"keep the commandments" (Matthew 19:17). The commandments hold community
together. It is community that gives our lives, even in pain and grief a
healing solidarity. It is fealty to community that frees us from the
dictates of our idols, idols that promise us fulfillment through the destructive
impulses of constant self-gratification. The commandments call us to
reject and defy powerful forces that can rule our lives and to live instead for
others, even if this costs us status and prestige and wealth. The
commandments show us how to avoid being enslaved, how to save us from
ourselves. They lead us to love, the essence of life.

The 10 Commandments

You shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything

that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water

under the earth: you shall not bow down to them, or serve them.

You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Honor your father and your mother.

You shall not kill.

You shall not commit adultery.

You shall not steal.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

You shall not covet your neighbor's house.