How I understand the Ten Commandments as a Gentile, or Non Jew

[jennifer_bloom]

How I understand the 10 Commandments as a Gentile

1 - No other Gods

To worship justice and not sensation. Spending money on shelter and food and not wine and vacations and disco jams.

2 - No idols

To delight in spiritual gifts and not in physical beauty and to respect people who lack confidence and intelligence.

3 - Do not take the name in vain

To express your faith in a way that attracts and helps and encourages and heals others and not in a way that establishes your superiority and competitive advantage over others.

4 - Keep the sabbath holy

To use your privilege and superior position to help and bless others and do good for those equal to you or lower to you in status, instead of mocking and humiliating those with less status than yourself.

5 - Honour your father and mother

To repay your parents for the service the provide you with and take care of those that were abused by their families instead of mocking them for their suffering or making their lives more difficult after their parents abuse them.

6 - Do not murder

To refuse to destroy another emotionally through forced social isolation, or morally through false teachings, or spiritually through offensive and alienating statements about God, or professionally, by giving them humiliating reviews at work or a bad reputation at social networking events.

7 - Do not commit adultery

To show and have no interest in beautiful or wealthy women until moral and social and spiritual compatibility is confirmed and agreed on.

8 - Do not steal

To refuse to exclude or refuse a good person access to your church or job due to ethnic or cultural or social biases.

9 - Do not bear false witness

To refuse to hate a person without cause, due to the shape of their nose, their poor taste in clothes, or their foreign accent or lack of familiarity with your religion.

10 - Do not covet

To desire and seek for yourself only what you need, or no more than 15% of what you need for survival, and not having an endless longing for grand gestures and remarkable benefits in life.

[alance99]

Totally agree with it

[alance99]

Thanks for MHO

[USLegionary]

Im sorry but as a Christian you can not reinterpret the word of God and his 10 commandments to suit your own meaning as that is blasphemy, hyrasy and sacrilege.

These are God's sacred commandments, one of the cornerstones of the Christian Faith.

The Ten Commandments are a description of the basic freedom from sin that is necessary to live as a Christian.

They are a minimum level of living, below which we must not go.

The Ten Commandments and Catholicism have been bound together since the time of Christ. In fact, Jesus refers to the Ten Commandments and assures their validity in his dialog with the rich young man in Matthew's Gospel (Mt 19:16-21). The Catechism refers to this in item.

It's important to note that each Commandment is simply a summary of a whole category of actions. Don't be legalistic, searching for a way around them because their wording doesn't fit you perfectly!

For example, "bearing false witness against your neighbor" covers any kind of falsehood: perjury, lying, slander, detraction, rash judgment, etc.

The Ten Commandments are linked together to form a coherent whole. If you break one of them, you're guilty of breaking all of them.

The Commandments express man's fundamental duties to God and neighbor. As such, they represent grave obligations. To violate them knowingly & willingly in a significant way is to commit mortal sin.

[purplepoppy]

As an atheist, I think you have to take the commandments to simply mean what they say without interruption. These were written in a different time for simple minded people to follow not for academics to philosophies over. For example "Do not kill" means exactly that, don't kill each other.
Once you start interpreting them you start to look for little clauses to get around them eg it's ok to kill in the name of God.

[USLegionary]

Do not commit murder. Big difference

[purplepoppy]

It's thou shalt not kill. But Americans decided that stopped them shooting each other over minor things so they changed it. A perfect example of what I'm on about.

[USLegionary]

The actual hebrew meaning is thou shalt not commit murder otherwise how would the soldiers of Israel fight their enemies

[purplepoppy]

Because they saw it as an order from God and not their own decision.

[DJB72]

Sorry Poppy. The original languages literally refers to murder. War is not forbidden, and God Himself commands the Israelites to slaughter everyone and everything in Jericho as they enter the Promised Land. Execution of convicts was ok as well.

[strateguy632]

worship justice? if you "worship" that is adding beyond god. if you accept ten commandments then must not worship beyong god