The Ten Commandments

Catholics often justify their faith with reference to the Ten Commandments. They believe that the instructions Moses dragged down from Mount Sinai are words directly from the mouth of God and that they provide the moral framework required to ensure that one lives a ‘good’ life. For me, this list of imperatives does anything but.

Instead, the Ten Commandments absolve people of individual responsibility and remove the application of sound judgment in ambiguous situations. Rather than assuming that individuals can arrive at their own decisions regarding right and wrong, these dogmatic instructions prescribe black and white solutions to problems which are rarely so clear cut.

The Commandments also hint at a God so insecure in his position that he needs to provide a self-justifying self-defence mechanism to ensure that his subscribers’ heads are not turned by more attractive moral codes, other gods or the following of their own free will. It’s a stance which stinks of paranoia rather than love and heavily suggests that the Commandments were devised by a ruling elite keen to preserve the status quo via propaganda and fear.

Tackling the Commandments in order, it’s very easy to dismiss/destroy/denigrate the majority of them. ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me?’ What a load of self-serving nonsense. It’s an order which screams of nothing more than self-preservation – and removes the possibility of free-will, exploring alternatives or having doubt.

The second Commandment is perhaps even more absurd. 'You shall not make for yourself a carved image- 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.' No carved images of heaven or earth? No artistic commemoration or celebration of the beauty and diversity of the natural world? God created the world and didn’t want us to produce joyous reproductions of it? Bullshit. We should all revel in the wonder which surrounds us – and a benevolent God would surely encourage us to do so. This Commandment has no place in a world where art, in its many forms, is celebrated.

'You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.' Why not? Is a deity who allows war, famine, disease and death one who is above criticism? He ought not to be. Of all the Commandments this is almost certainly the easiest to pick apart. If God did exist it would be self-evident that even such a great designer ought to be subject to criticism and ridicule for his many mistakes, acts of cruelty and mismanagement of his great world.

'Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.' It’s easy to see the logic behind this order. Sadly, it’s far too dogmatic to be useful. We all need a rest. Everyone should strike a useful balance between work and leisure. But surely we ourselves are in the best position to decide when we need to kick back and relax. And if our love for God was pure, would we really need to set aside a day to worship him? Is the omnipotent, omniscient one really that insecure?

The fifth Commandment is entirely admirable: 'Honour your father and your mother.' What it fails to recognise, however, is that honour and respect must be earned. Not all parents have earned that privilege. Our ancestors might have given us life but that does not automatically make them good, worthy people. Our elders are not necessarily our betters. Respect must be earned, not given.

'You shall not kill’ is difficult to refute. Murder is rightly frowned upon. But euthanasia? At best this is a grey area. And a hugely hypocritical one given the amount of smiting, massacring and murdering God himself got up to in the Bible. Not to mention the religious crusading which has taken place in the last 2000 years.

'You shall not commit adultery.' Fair enough.


'You shall not steal.' Agreed.

‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.' Essentially, you shouldn’t tell lies. Again, this is difficult to dispute. But it’s very similar to the previous two Commandments: they all prohibit dishonest behaviour. Is this something that needs legislating against? And if it is, can we not just be more general and produce one catch-all Commandment: Thou shalt be honest.

'You shall not covet your neighbour’s house you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbour’s.' So you should just accept your lot in life? You shouldn’t strive to improve? You shouldn’t try to better yourself? What nonsense. It’s certainly true that society can sometimes be alarmingly materialistic, but coveting goods, services – even people – is what keeps most societies functioning. It’s also pretty damning that in Biblical times slavery seemed to be de rigeur. We wouldn’t accept it now – a sure-fire indicator that the world has moved on.

Perhaps the Ten Commandments were more applicable when they were initially devised. Even so, the arguments I’ve made above suggest that they were always too dogmatic and inflexible. Certainly they seem to be the product of a defensive, jealous mindset. There are no orders to behave positively – just commands not to do certain things. It’s a prescription of prohibitions rather than any form of proactive or positive advice. It’s a joyless list.

It’s also an unnecessary list. Apologists for Christianity defend the Ten Commandments on the basis that it provides a moral platform or framework for the human race. But that’s simply untrue. Other religions (and the non-religious) have also arrived at their own moral frameworks which are pretty similar to ours in the western world. Diverse religions and unrelated societies have all decided that murder is wrong and that honesty is desirable. That they arrived at those conclusions independently indicates that such behaviour does not need to be legislated: humans are inherently humane.

If it is really necessary to have ten commandments, maybe it’s time they were updated to provide a more relevant guide to life in the modern world. These should reflect a more permissive, accepting and understanding society which preaches enlightenment and understanding rather than prohibition and intolerance. My (very simple) ten are below...

• Think for yourself and make informed decisions.
• Respect the world around you.
• Be honest.
• Treat people as you’d like to be treated: harm no one.
• Do your best.
• Avoid violence.
• Take responsibility for yourself and your actions.
• Enjoy life – you only get one.
• Never stop learning – and learn from your mistakes.
• Do not judge on the basis of ethnicity, gender or sexuality.

We can't always obey them all. But it makes more sense to try and follow these than to have every Sunday off work to worship a jealous God who has banned art and doesn't want you to use swear words.

The Burden of Proof

Despite being an avowed atheist, this week I’ll be attending a Catholic Mass. I don’t really have a say in this – I work in a Catholic school and I’m obligated accordingly. I won’t cross myself, I won’t pray and, even if I’m asked, I won’t sing religious hymns. Should I really be working in a school which espouses values and beliefs I find so hard to swallow? Am I the worst kind of hypocrite?

I don’t think so, no. Firstly, I’m supremely confident that the majority of children in the school are not practising Catholics either. For whatever reason, these kids have been enrolled in a religious school by their parents. I suspect that the mothers and fathers in question hold Roman Catholic beliefs themselves and have decided to bring their children into their faith. But like Richard Dawkins has famously said, there are no such there thing as religious children – just children of religious parents.

Secondly, I’m open about my atheism. I’ve discussed it with other members of staff and even some of the pupils. Other opinions should always be available – and there are adherents of other religions working and studying within the school. My lack of religion should be no less tolerated than their faith in different deities.

One question that the pupils have often asked when made aware of my lack of religion is ‘why don’t you believe in God?’ It’s an easy question to answer normally, but when dealing with children it’s important to make my reasons as clear as humanly possible. And what it boils down to is this: there is no proof.

For people who believe in a God, their faith is enough. They simply believe. And so they burden of proof should lie with them. They believe in something which defies the known laws of science, which runs counter to the evidence and which is utterly extraordinary. So they ought to prove the existence of their God.

Proving that something doesn’t exist is practically impossible: phenomena like the Loch Ness Monster and Abominable Snowman are testament to this. But until someone provides irrefutable evidence of their existence they remain a rumour, a possibility. And so people bring forward fuzzy photographs, dubious casts of enormous footprints and the like. These items are rightly dismissed and the majority of people reject their existence thanks to the lack of evidence. And so it should be with God.

The testimonies of unreliable witnesses are the only proof we are provided with for the existence of the Christian God. That and the faith of his followers. But surely they ought to be providing some verification for their claims. After all, believers in Scientology have been mocked mercilessly for years thanks to their ‘out there’ beliefs. But if Scientology had been founded 2000 years ago it would not be seen to be the preserve of crackpots like Tom Cruise: it would be part of a collection of contradictory and incompatible religions followed in different countries and cultures across the planet.

To believe in one God is to dismiss the rest. Surely that’s an arrogantly absurd position? Why believe in one and not the others? Surely that in itself is a form of atheism? To believe in one deity is to deny hundreds of others, to cast doubt on others’ beliefs, to claim the moral or intellectual high ground – a charge consistently levelled at atheists. My lack of belief in any god makes me only one god worse off than the religious.

Derren Brown Explained!

Have a read of this. Read without prejudice and try not to second guess where the words have come from or why they have been presented to you...

You are a person prone to bouts of real self-examination. This is in sharp contrast to a striking ability you have developed to appear socially very engaged, even the life and soul of the party; but in a way that only convinces others. You are all too aware of it being a facade.

You will often be at a gathering and find yourself playing a part. While on the one hand you'll be talkative and funny, you'll be detaching yourself to the point where you will find yourself watching everything going on around you and feeling utterly unable to engage. You'll play conversations back to yourself in your head and wonder what that person really meant when he said such-and-such - conversations that other people wouldn't give a second thought to.

How have you learned to deal with this conflict? Through exercising control. You like to show a calm, self-assured, fluid kind of stability (but because this is self-consciously created, it will create bouts of frustrated silliness and a delight in extremes, or at least a delight in being seen to be extreme). You most easily recognize this control in how you are with people around you. You have learned to protect yourself by keeping people at bay. Because in the past you have learned to be disappointed by people, you instinctively keep people at arms' length, until you decide they are to be allowed over that magic line into your group of close friends. However, once across that line, the problem is that an emotional dependency kicks in which leaves you feeling very hurt or rejected if it appears that they have betrayed that status.

Because you are prone to self-examination, you will be aware of these traits. However, you are unusually able to examine even that self-examination, which means that you have become concerned about what the real you is. You have become all too aware of facades, of sides of yourself which you present to the world, and you wonder if you have lost touch with the real and spontaneous you.

You are very creative, and have tried different avenues to utilize that ability. It may not be that you specifically, say, paint; it may be that your creativity shows itself in more subtle ways, but you will certainly find yourself having vivid and well-formed ideas which others will find hard to grasp. You set high standards for yourself, though, and in many ways are a bit of a perfectionist. The problem is, though, that it means you often don't get stuff done, because you are frustrated by the idea of mediocrity and are wearied by the idea of starting something afresh. However, once your brain is engaged you'll find yourself sailing. Very likely this will lead to you having considered writing a novel or some such, but a fear that you won't be able to achieve quite what you want stops you from getting on with it. But you have a real vision for things, which others fall short of. Particularly in your work situation, you are currently fighting against restraints upon your desire to express yourself freely.

Partly this is because there are ways in which you have been made to feel isolated from certain groups in the past - something of an outsider. Now what is happening is that you are taking that outsider role and defending it to the point of consciously avoiding to be part of a group or who exhibit any cliquey behaviour, and you always feel a pang of disappointment when you see your 'close' friends seeming to follow that route. Deep down it feels like rejection.

For all that introspection, you have developed a sensational, dry sense of humour that makes connections quickly and wittily and will leave you making jokes that go right over the heads of others. You delight in it so much that you'll often rehearse jokes or amusing voices to understand yourself in order to 'spontaneously' impress others with them. But this is a healthy desire to impress, and although you hate catching yourself at it, it's nothing to be so worried about.

You're naturally a little disorganized. A look around your living space would likely show a box of photos, unorganized into albums, out-of-date medicines, broken items not thrown out, and notes to yourself significantly out of date. Something related to this is that you tend to lack motivation. Because you're resourceful and talented enough to be pretty successful when you put your mind to things, this encourages you to procrastinate and put them off. Equally, you've given up dreams a little easily when your mind flitted elsewhere. There are signs of an excursion into playing a musical instrument, which you have since abandoned, or are finding yourself less interested in. You have a real capacity for deciding that such-and-such a thing (or so-and-so a person) will be the be all and end all of everything and be with you for ever. But you'd rather try and fail, and swing from one extreme to the other, than settle for the little that you see others content with.

Conclusion: You present something of a conundrum, which won't surprise you. You are certainly bright, but unusually open to life's possibilities - something not normally found among achieving people. You would do well to be less self-absorbed, as it tends to distance you a little, and to relinquish some of the control you exercise when you present that stylized version of yourself to others. You could let people in a little more, but i am aware that there is a darkness you feel you should hide (much of this in the personal/relationship/sexual area, and is related to a neediness you don’t like). You have an appealing personality – genuinely.

How accurately did it describe you? Did certain phrases ring true? Did it bring a wry smile to your face? Could you see yourself in those passages? You probably could – and you wouldn’t be alone.

The words themselves were written by Derren Brown. During his Tricks of the Mind series for Channel Four (i have referred to this ‘trick’ in past blogs), Brown invited a mixture of students in three different countries to participate in an experiment. Deliberately choosing a mish-mash of believers and sceptics, Brown asked them to anonymously provide him with their dates of birth, a personal object and to draw around their own hand. Using this information he would produce a reading for them in an attempt to accurately predict their personality. In an additional twist, the participants were from three different countries: England, Spain and USA.

Having been presented with their readings, each subject then gave an interview for camera, describing the accuracy of their evaluation and awarding it a mark out of 100. Of the fifteen participants, one in each country were less than impressed and awarded half the available marks or less. The remaining twelve were effusive in their praise, awarding the readings extremely high marks for accuracy. One girl awarded 99%. Another suggested that Brown might have accessed her private diary before reading her.

Having established the accuracy (or otherwise) of the readings, Brown then invited the students to swap their results with each other so they could work out whose reading belonged to whom. It was at this point that they realised they’d been had – the readings were all identical (and identical to the one you read earlier). They’d also been written weeks in advance of meeting any of the participants.

So how does it work? Firstly, it was written with people between the ages of twenty and thirty in mind. If you’re reading my blog, you will largely fall into that age bracket (and if you don’t it will remain our secret). Chances are you’re also fairly intelligent – why would your enquiring mind be directing you to a blog about how the mind works if it were not at least curious!?

So the first thing the fake reading does is to prey on the insecurities of the audience it was designed for. It assumes that people from its target demographic will be pretty self-involved, searching to ‘find’ themselves, prone to introspection and, quite probably, aware of the contradictory aspects of their personalities. The way these insecurities are preyed upon is devious indeed – it prevents them as statements which are almost impossible to refute. In order to achieve this it takes two opposite traits (such as ‘introverted’ and ‘extroverted’) and suggests that the reader is likely to fluctuate between the two. Which, of course, almost everyone does at one time or another. But to say, “Sometimes you’re introverted, sometimes you’re extroverted,” would convince nobody. The strength here lies in burying those messages among many others, deliberately building an elaborate profile which uses an awful lot of words to say very little. The many meanings hidden to greater or lesser degrees within the text also ensure that the subject can pick and choose which aspects they remember and apply to themselves and which they can sweep under the carpet.

A specific example of this can be seen in the statement, “you’ve given up dreams a little easily when your mind has flitted elsewhere”. Of course it bloody has. One day you wanted to own a sweetshop, the next day you wanted to be a fireman: your dream died and was replaced by another as your youthful mind wandered. Equally inane is the statement, “You instinctively keep people at arms’ lengthuntil you decide they are allowed over that magic line into your close group of friends”. Seems obvious to me – most folks only open up to people once they’ve befriended them. People who spill their guts to strangers seem slightly unhinged to most of us.

Newspaper horoscopes use a similar technique, although they’re even less specific. Interestingly, a number of the students admitted that they were expecting to get something vague and general from Brown, only to be astonished by the accuracy of his reading.

Of course, Derren Brown is not the first person to conduct this experiment. Originally described by Bertram R Forer (http://www.skepdic.com/forer.html) as part of a genuine psychological study, it has also famously been performed by uber-sceptic James Randi, Penn & Teller and many others.

Sadly, Channel 4 have blocked YouTube footage of Brown’s version, so instead, here’s a clip of him discussing it with another legendary sceptic, Richard Dawkins...



Oh, and here's a footnote courtesy of my wonderful researcher, Shirley Farkles:

In 1979 the French astrologer Michel Gauquelin placed an advertisement in Ici-Paris offering free personal horoscopes. Of those who received the horoscope, 94% subsequently rated it as accurate. Unfortunately, they had each been sent the same one, that of Dr. Petiot, France's most notorious mass murderer.