What's Wrong With The Ten Commandments?

[Music] welcome to ask an atheist I'm Annie Laurie Gaylor co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and this is the debut of our new interactive program ask an atheist where you can participate whether you're a believer or whether you're a non-believer of whatever you call yourself an unabashed atheist maybe or an indifferent agnostic I'm Dan Barker I'm co-president of FFRF I'm a former evangelical minister who just lost faith in faith in other words I saw the light and now I am a born-again a theist and I'm Andrew Seidel also an atheist and the constitutional attorney with the Freedom From Religion Foundation and in every weekly program and you can look for us at the same time same place staff from the Freedom From Religion Foundation will tackle a controversial thought-provoking or topical subject usually having to do with free thought and non belief the rejection of religion on future shows we'll talk with other issues like how can you be good without God or maybe you how can you have purpose in life without God or happiness or the Bible or some of the apologetic arguments like evidence and so on maybe the problem of evil and ask an atheist we'll also deal with the common myths about America being a Christian nation or about some of the controversies surrounding the separation of state and church something that we know an awful lot about here at FFRF after we make our case then we're going to open it up to you you can send us some comments or short questions and have a little dialog you can just do it right there on your Facebook right now and for the debut topic we have chosen a perennial favorite what's wrong with the Ten Commandments and the answer is of course there's a lot wrong with the 10 commandments people think of them as being wise edicts for living in fact they epitomize the childishness need vindictiveness the sexism the inflexibility and the moral inadequacies of the God of the Bible before parsing these ten edicts one at a time we want to point out that only six of the Ten Commandments even deal with individual moral conduct and this comes with surprise as a surprise to most Christians the first four Commandments deal only with the uneasy vanity of the biblical deity and how he may get you and even your children and your great great grandchildren if you fail to Stroke that vanity and we should also point out that there are four versions of the Ten Commandments there's Exodus 20 Exodus 34 Deuteronomy 5 and Deuteronomy 27 now the first set is the set that everybody thinks of as the Ten Commandments and this is what Moses got after wandering for three months in the desert with no food and no water and climbing a mountain he heard a voice and attributed it to God the second set begins with a promise to commit genocide and wipe everybody off the land for the Israelites and that set ends with a with a stricture to not boil a kid in its mother's milk the third set is pretty similar to the first set there are some differences and the fourth set is just a list of people who are cursed for this series we are going to focus on the first set which is actually not even called the Ten Commandments that phrase applied doesn't apply until the second set later on we're at the one that ends with not boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk and so we want to begin and with a little help from the so called voice of God as depicted in Cecil B DeMille 1950s epic the Ten Commandments [Music] [Music] that big deep voice of God is a big macho male boy now the can command the first commandment alone is reason enough why it should never be up on governmental property or on public property the first commandment is all about the governor telling you which God to worship and the government has no business telling you whether to worship a god or how many were gods to worship or whether to worship any God at all clearly it's the antithesis of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States it's not religious liberty it's religious tyranny now we have the second commandment coming up so this is why it's actually really important to go and read the Bible even if you're an atheist because if you continue reading this commandment it actually says that God will punish people who worship those idols to the third and fourth generation it says that I will punish children for the iniquity of their parents to the third and fourth generation so in this commandment God manages to ban all art he manages to ban the freedom of religion and he manages to punish innocent children grandchildren great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren so it would be difficult to come up with a more immoral law than this one well that's the epitome of injustice and things to no honeys children from what their parents exactly so let's go on to the third [Music] so for an omniscient being this God is remarkably imprecise now most people interpret this as a a ban on one of my favorite pastimes blasphemy now Bertrand Russell said that every great idea starts out as blasphemy and while that is certainly true it's important to note that criminalizing blasphemy laws against blasphemy kind of give the game away they make it so that an all-powerful God can't withstand criticism essentially the very idea of God is so weak and fragile that it crumbles under any criticism and you know what I say about this commandment Jesus Christ not this one day you have a good line about this one blasphemy is it's a moral impulse to blaspheme the power because the power doesn't want to be criticized so basically since there is no power there's no God blasphemy is a victimless crime and inside no we've actually had some success lately at FFRF getting some blasphemy statutes taken off the books I just got one taken off the books in Edmond Oklahoma and and the Danish Parliament actually just removed their blasphemy laws so we're making progress it's a huge problem globally it is and I think Canada and even New Zealand are considering removing it now as well so number four so remembering the Sabbath day that's not a law in the United States it's not against a lot of sleep in on Sunday mornings in fact those first four Commandments have nothing to do with morality or modern American law but read on what it says about the SAP the Sabbath is really just to honor the God so that he could be worshipped but you know what is the penalty if someone was caught breaking the Sabbath we have an example in the fifteenth chapter of the Book of Numbers one of the Israelites was discovered outside the camp on the Sabbath day picking up sticks of all things and so the user like says well look it's the Sabbath he's working he's not honoring though what should we do so they went to Moses and they said what should we do we found the guy picking up sticks on the Sabbath horrible and so Moses said well he talked with God and Moses said he's got to die so they took that man outside the camp and they stoned him to death that he died the Bible says that always a funny way they stoned him with stones that he died so according to the Bible if you don't go to church on Sunday morning or whatever your Sabbath day is you should be put to death or you do any kind of quote-unquote work which could even just be according to some Orthodox Jews just unrolling the toilet paper yeah or lighting a light switch or like in Los Angeles they actually have the walk and don't walk things out across the street automated on the Sabbath so the Jews don't actually have to push the button can you believe that because they don't want to be stoned to death right on the streets of LA all right well let's look at number five I think we've lost the voice over for I am the Lord thy God there we go [Music] that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth you is the rest of the fifth commandment in this version of the Ten Commandments and this sounds like a good verse it's a little bit more positive than the rest of the Ten Commandments but I think there is an inadequacy in it honor your parents but let's hope that they deserve it should a child who is beaten or raped by a father honor her father it's couched in absolutes but there would have been a more important commandment when you only have taught the top ten that you're highlighting and that would be parents honor your children children are helpless they brought into the world by adults and we as the adults have a responsibility to take care of them so we should be honoring our children correct and that should come first and hopefully we will earn the respect of our children and they will honor us now number six so finally we get to a moral law here six Commandments deep so thou shalt not kill is actually lay only some of the religions and Bible's interpreted other religions and Bible's interpret this as thou shalt not murder and the difference is actually pretty significant because if you can't kill somebody breaks into your house in the middle of the night you can't even kill them in self-defense verses thou shalt not murder which might allow for that and whichever interpretation is used we have to remember that the Israelites in the Bible didn't really pay much attention to this one because immediately after they get these Commandments they go on a killing spree they commit some 70 genocides in the next few books of the Bible especially in Joshua so thou shalt not kill doesn't apply so much to them and also the biblical deity orders many of these killings and mass murders and so any may began you can talk to this if some of these Commandments are just geared at its fellow Hebrews and they don't apply to the people who are not in your tribe well and actually as Andrew points out that would kill and he would rat sac which is ambiguous word those words are used all over the Bible for even for manslaughter and how can you command somebody not to manslaughter a which is an accidental death right so you can't put much talk in anybody's particular interpretation but the word kill is the actual word there and the God of the Bible in fact commanded in fact you right away he said kill everyone his neighbor and his son and his three thousand of your sons brother yeah kill all of them so kill kill kill kill it's a bloodthirsty book and that's right after they get the Ten Commandments it's when they're worshiping the golden calf right I think I have to kill 3,000 of them for doing that so it's immediately obvious you know what's really funny about this he puts in this dollar shalt not kill as if the human race is so stupid it never would have dawned on us oh I need some Talbots to tell me that there's something wrong with killing cultures have had prohibitions against killing long before the Israelites claim they had the copyright to this right there's nothing original and that's when you acquire a supernatural authority here for us to have laws against murder and we do we have civil laws that we enforce against murder so there's one that kind of matches with modern law what's that but it doesn't derive from the family at the universal human principle so let's go on to the next one so here again you have ten commandments that you are highlighting and you make adultery one of them and you don't mention - alt not commit sexual assault that that to me and of course the rest of the Mosaic law is full of teachings there are about 600 or 700 mosaic laws not just the Ten Commandments but these are the ones that are highlighted and many of these Commandments do endorse rape so there's something very wrong with this but of course because this was in the Ten Commandments and the Bible was being imposed on us through law there was a great deal of suffering because of this commandment where people were not allowed to divorce there are still some antiquated laws on the books people used to be arrested it could interfere with your custody rights so there's a lot of mischief in this this is a personal decision can we really interfere with some of these decision maybe their love is outgrown their marriage it shouldn't rate the top 10 and sexual assault should in any event it's not against the law it should not be it used to be but it's not it shouldn't be a better command it would be thou priests thou shalt not rape altar boys right with Mathias I've had a bigger impact one would think now we on to the next thou shalt not steal of course that is another one that does have some relevance with modern American law because stealing is is basically taking somebody else's property although who defines what property is in the Bible females were property and human and slaves were property so and there are prohibitions against stealing someone else's slave you know you have to you know pay back so stealing is general although this is couched in really absolute terms I mean there are there are situations should have should a family with starving children until the kids don't go into that rich person's backyard and take those apples because they belong to the rich person and these laws are in place I think you know with squatter's rights in that modern law understands that there are sometimes modifications to an absolute rule like stealing we don't want to go back to Dickensian times when you could be put to death or jail for years and years as a child because you stole across the threat so there's the problem again is that this is in absolutist terms and it's in black and white and it MIT's admits no nuance so on to the next one number nine so false witness against thy neighbor against thy neighbor is an important modifier there because that that to that phrase neighbor in the Old Testament really means your co-religionist your fellow believers so this rule says you can't lie to your fellow believer it's perfectly okay to lie to other people and there's good reason to think that the your neighbor language actually applies to those previous Commandments against theft and against adultery and especially murder and if again we look at the rest of the Bible we see that it's okay to kill God says it's okay to kill he orders the Israelites to kill people that are not following his rules that don't believe in him again they commit some 70 genocide so we think that it's probably the better interpretation of this rule is don't lie to people who are your fellow believers which is a fairly corrupt rule if you can lie to other people as well and again you're an attorney we have laws against line on the stand absolutely perjury perjury is thank you and sometimes unfortunately people have to take are being presented with a Bible to take an oath but they have a right to affirmation everybody if you're if you're if you're asked to take an oath on the Bible you do not have to do it you have the right to opt out okay ask to a friend if you not need the Bible to tell us that it's wrong to lie and again its absolutist many people tell white lies to say feelings for example I mean it works Oh so again just morally inadequate and we have laws about false advertising and contractual misrepresentation or those kinds of things but it's generally not against the law to tell a lie in the United States of America here depends on the context yep yeah absolutely so now we're almost done number 10 well we shall not you want to read that thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house or they neighbor's property or uh hey it's an active a neighbor's wife or thy neighbor here is or thy neighbor's ass slave or that is really so about soul-g thou shalt not covet there we go neighbor's wife manservant maidservant day the words are actually slayed male slave female slaves and there was auctions ask anything that is thy neighbor so you know it's a good thing there's not a law against coveting in this country or our whole system of free enterprise would collapse coveting is something that wanting something wanting something and somebody's got something it's what's wrong with coveting it what's wrong with me saying boy you got you know a really nice house there and I wish I had that I really like your shirt you like me I give you the shirt off my back but that's the whole problem though with this thing is that coveting views human beings as property and from the patriarchal mindset in the people who wrote these books were patriarchs who thought their women were property Aventa so it's really about preserving the ANU residents and the property of these male Israelites is what that verse is all about and supremely sexist and one of the things that I love most about this room and this is actually might be my least favorite Commandments I think it's hard to pick but this could be my least favorite commandment is that it criminalizes thought and that is the one absolute right that we have protected under our Constitution but this creates a thought crime and that is just untenable in our Cisco so while this critique of the Ten Commandments is useful just in critiquing religion in general at the Freedom From Religion Foundation we also want to point out that this is another reason why we do not want the Ten Commandments on in our public property in our parks our capitols even in some of our public schools and I think that we have some pictures coming up on that in a minute yeah and the Supreme Court has actually handed down a decision from on high a decision called stone versus Graham and they say specifically that posting these religious laws in a public school is unconstitutional because they are religious law vide and I am THE LORD thy God and so we've actually gotten Ten Commandments monuments removed from a number of public schools including despite that long-standing decision we had to file two lawsuits in Pennsylvania to get two monuments removed from the grounds of a public school in Pennsylvania there are several public schools and that's in big part thanks to our brave local plaintiff we have shown I'm not sure if we have those photos already we have photos of those Ten Commandments there we go there's one and then we should have theirs it's gone goodbye and then music yes and you can see in Pennsylvania and hopefully we have a picture of a rishabh our great plaintiff it's a Santa bastion you're standing right where the commandments used to be is that right no nimesh de théâtre was treated very badly in her community champion of the first immense oh that movie the ten commandments that we were showing clips of Dan you want to talk about the impetus for that well because the sesame DeMille movie in the 1950s it's really an entertaining movie by the way for not for the reasons that they saw it I mean this high-tech voice of God and the lightning in grating the words there that movie prompted the granite industry to go in conjunction with accessibility Miller they put up these equals paternal Order of Eagles but there was a judge based in Minnesota who wanted to promote Minnesota granite yeah so it was kind of just a big sales pitch both for the movie and so the most unconstitutional sales to each other and for granite and so you know usually when you put up a movie poster you take it down when the movie is out of the theaters right well these posters have been up for decades and decades all over the country and they've got this phony phoenician riding on them and in fact the actors Yul Brynner came to Wisconsin to dedicate the ten commandments that used to be at the Milwaukee courthouse before we got it taken down and so Dan we're proud you went and documented that we removed the first such token I took pictures there Waukee Wisconsin we should have a pictures of that coming up do you want to talk a little bit about that well we complained and it was at the City County Building wasn't there a missable Hall and not there it is and there's pictures of it being up and that's one of those Ten Commandments movies phony movie posters that was in front of a public building it was the first one put up in 1955 in yul brenner who's got a role in the movie came to the dedication and now what are they doing they're taking it down and now then then we've got to be there when they actually removed the Ten Commandments and they moved it to private religious property and now let's see that unary are they after clear we go so a proud moment for FFRF and now we're going to move to your questions or your short comments after leaving you with this thought and that the Ten Commandments are couched almost exclusively as thou shalt nots negative scolds and let's contrast them with the first ten amendments of the Constitution which are known as the Bill of Rights and largely describe positive rights civil rights that are left to the people the right to free speech peaceable assembly privacy to be free of cruel and unusual punishment and I guess we don't have a visual going up of that of that Bill of Rights but there is one specific prohibition they they'll shalt not that we endorse very heavily here at FFRF it's in the bill of rights and that is the prescription against the government establishing a religion Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof we hope we have a bumper sticker that says honor die First Amendment absolutely far better than honoring those kind commandments so if you want to learn a little bit more about what's wrong with the Ten Commandments we have an on tract on that you can see at our website how you can order it and we also have some books we have Dan's book losing faith and faith you have how many several chapters about the ten commands ten commands and what's wrong with in Graham FFRF M my book loader the women the Bible tells me so which examines what's wrong with almost every one of those mosaic laws 600 of them about women and also Ruth Greene's for and against skeptics guide to the Bible which is a very erudite and entertaining way to study the Bible well it has 10 complete pages just lifting the killing that the God of the Bible commanded his own people to do so should we take some questions and take some questions so I'm gonna have the iPad go in here but I think we have a video question that we are going to submit and later on for future ask an atheist if you guys would like to submit a video question please do that and you may get to be on the air with us so let's go ahead and do that first what would you say are the biggest misconceptions about the Ten Commandments as they relate to the claim by Christians and others that they are the foundations of American jurisprudence and the judeo-christian values on which America is supposedly founded thanks sure so this is a hugely common misconception the idea that the principles stilled in the Ten Commandments are actually somehow influenced the founding of America and I'm actually writing a book about this there's absolutely no evidence to suggest this is the case in fact it really didn't happen even though judges say throughout court cases that the 10 commandments influenced the founding of this nation it is simply not true and if you look at those commandments and look at how unfair they are and how they venerate this this biblical monster I think we know that that's not true so can I ask you a question a drawer during the Constitutional Convention how many times were the Ten Commandments mentioned and during that whole thing no not all once enough the Bible was barely mentioned there were a few illusions you know some some phrases pulled from the Bible but almost not at all and certainly not to support any of the principles that they adopted and rolled into our Constitution well I have a question for you again how many times did they pray at that four-month Constitutional Convention well you hear the story about Benjamin Franklin asking for prayer that motion was ignored they did not have formal prayer at the Constitutional Convention and that shows intent and here we have all these darns prayer proclamations in a National Day of Prayer and a prayer breakfast and we have a godless and secular Constitution whose only references to religion are exclusionary such as that there should be no religious test for public office if it was a judeo-christian nation the framers of our Constitution failed and we actually have a question from Facebook by Edward Ani which goes into this as well he said doesn't the first commandment violate the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution and absolutely absolutely and in fact most of the first commandments violate the First Amendment and if we actually agree that the don't kill don't steal don't don't why only applies to your fellow believers then those commandments also violate the Constitution the Bill of Rights so you could you can make a fair argument that every one of the Ten Commandments violates the Constitution so if if our laws are not based on the Ten Commandments what are they based on what is the source of American law Enlightenment values and I think that's pretty clear that is something that you see all the time in the Constitutional Convention you see the founders talking frequently about Greece and Athens and all these Enlightenment think Montesquieu is a big one so it's not from religion or the Bible which was explicitly kept out and rejected and also it's explicitly We the People and the PM of the Constitution our nation was the first not to give sovereignty to a deity but to the people so that's where the power is invested it's not invested in a God it's not a divinity that we have a godless Constitution and you know that's the thing that we ought to be proud of instead of constantly deriding as a religious right done we were the first nation to separate state and tract and we should be proud of that legacy and not shunning it no Ten Commandments in our Constitution instead of bowing down to some big alpha male authority figure we are a proudly rebellious country we fought a Revolutionary War kicking out the king the Lord the master the sovereign and instead of having some top-down Authority our Constitution begins we the people instead of top-down and bottom-up and we should take pride in our rebellious but I'm saying no to the big daddy absolutely and we actually have another question from Suzanne Myers she says wouldn't people who use their Christianity for social or political gain be considered to be using God's name in vain so I guess all those politicians who are up there preaching for political gain cute comment and yes and it's all the time pandering politicians using religions for electoral purposes absolutely and this is actually one of the reasons that the founders also separated state and church they James Madison wrote that government and religion will both exist in greater purity the less they're mixed together so they're not using God's name in vain they're using God's name for vain politicians there you go let's see if we got another question here hang on summer session right thing so we have Cain rockier he says why is that why is it that most people only know the one set of Commandments and not all three of them because people do read their Bible I think of the Internet and actually here's a fun little tidbit when the Supreme Court was deciding to ten commandments cases in 2005 it came up that when the government takes a stance on which Ten Commandments that it's taking a religious stance and we put that in our amicus briefs by the way exactly and Justice Scalia the big religious Catholic on the court at the time said he wasn't even aware of the four different sets of nine commandment and and this is a problem with the Eagles monuments that were planted all over the country because most of them are Protestant but once the while you'll see Catholic one and you'll know it's Catholic because it's minus the reference to graven images the second commandment and the reason they do that is because the prohibition against having a graven image would be engraved on a graven image you're not supposed to do that as a former preacher you might want to answer this question too that was asked you know what why do people only know one said well did you only preach one set well we always preached Exodus 20 because that's nice and concise and even and of course as you pointed out they edit it way down they just you know if you read the whole thing you'd see the ugliness of it but Exodus 20 by the way the Bible does not say we're engraved on stones it just says Moses went up the mountain and he came down and he spoke these Commandments and they're not even called the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 it's only later in Exodus 34 that we actually have a mention of stone tablets and those are the ones that Moses broke remember when he got angry because he got really really mad because God is angry and so God said okay you broke those so go back up the mountain and I will write again to you the words that were in the first tablets right maybe a finger yeah with his finger he wrote on the stone and so and he says then Moses carried them down the Mount so they couldn't have been big like those tablets we saw in your appendix and they had to be like little stones that he could carry all the way down a mountain and in that Exodus 34 is where we find the words that were supposedly engraved on the first which ends with as you point out you should not boil a goat in the milk of its mother thou shall not see the kid in your mother's milk and what does that mean engine was actually a it means exactly that it's a dietary restriction it's a it's a cooking commandment it was ultra-orthodox follow that you separate the dietary from the meat you don't eat them at the same time those are called the can command that's a really important rule right I know because I've been tempted to take a goat boy I'm glad that's in the Bible let's see let's see if we have any more questions here Oh Suzanne Myers asks didn't Jesus say that during the Sermon on the Mount not to follow man's law and didn't he give only two directives that you should believe in God and to love thy neighbor if so why do Christians follow the Ten Commandments well most modern Christians think the new testament fulfills the old and that the Old Testament some Christians are dispensationalist they say those rules applied back then during wartime and you had a wartime mentality and so we had to be strict but now Jesus came and he said warm fuzzy God and now we can just sort of summarize you have to memorize all those 632 Commandments that's what a lot of Christians say depending on what denomination you belong to and so jesus said there's only to love the Lord your God and love your neighbor but jesus said I am the father are one if you've seen me you've seen the father and so he identified with that Old Testament God and when he quoted those verses you should love the Lord their God that verse was actually from this wartime jennife Idol covenant they got the view when you get into the Canaanites Promised Land you should love the Lord your God and if you look at any other gods I will destroy you so really Jesus was endorsing genocide by even quoting a verse about love well and he said when he was asked about did he support the Mosaic law he said that every jot and tiddle he can't go out into all of the Old Testament yesso can't really whitewash Jesus and Christianity and say there's nothing to do with these more brutal mosaic laws but you have to because most Christians today are kinder and smarter than the God of the Bible they would never think of running this country most Christians and we know there's some wackos over there that would like to so most of them are smarter and nice have been all of that and so they have to sugar-coated and water it down so that it's just a general humanistic principles of loving each other well and this is one of the things that always strikes me about the Ten Commandments monuments that we see around public property and on government property and on the capitol grounds of Texas is that they are edited they're edited to leave out the punishing children to the third and fourth generation more even a tenth and one of the first and that just goes to prove that we don't get our morality from the Bible or God the Bible is not very palatable and ministers and clergy tend to only preach from the more palatable passages or they exert well and that's to their credit that they are actually ignoring those ugly verses but why don't they join us and denouncing those ugly verses yeah they need to free themselves from religion and superstition yeah rather than whitewash abandon it can we have another question or we can also talk about the legal status let me G gallantly I don't have another question at this moment okay we can take another one but I thought that we should talk about the legal status which is murky stone versus Graham can't put it anywhere in a school or outside a school but we had a rather random decisions in that was it 2005 2005 is a very bizarre set of decisions the Supreme Court decided two cases on the same day both cases were a 5-4 decision Justice Breyer was the swing vote he was the one who changed his mind and that wasn't very just me it was so you had one case involved Ten Commandments displays and Kentucky county courthouses and these displays were clearly meant to promote religion they got struck down the display on the Texas Capitol grounds also clearly meant to promote religion was upheld and the reason that Justice Breyer upheld it was because he said that nobody interpreted this as an endorsement of religion because nobody complained about it for 40 or 50 years and you have tried very valiantly to clear that record because of course the Freedom From Religion Foundation had complained about it many times our members have complained of malim Arial hair and American Atheists which was based in Austin had complained she actually asked the Attorney General to issue an opinion on whether or not that that monument was we and they refuse to even issue the opinion so here's here's a very bad decision based on bad information and Andrew you've taken some pains on behalf of FFRF to try to clear the record it's a little awkward but what have you done we actually included a lot of this information in several briefs that we've written to the Supreme Court including in the courts most recent decision in the town of Greece versus Galloway and that was the decision that allowed government prayer which was based on another decision Marsh versus chambers allowing government prayer because we've been doing it for so long but the Brier had voted correctly on those so here Adam we've sent our message to Breyer gosh have we ever complained but that tells us something that's why it is so important to Louise to complain because look at how it can be used against you if there is a documentation that you have complained every violation we don't complain about is justified is used to justify a worse violation absolutely and that actually built into the structure of our common law system so we if you don't complain now you're almost giving up the right to win that case later on you have to complain but there were four justices who disagreed with this principle that you have to have enough complaint over a constitutional violation to make it Italy is that even a valid principle that was Breyers argument the real argument of what was saying in this case in a nor Van Orden was that the Capitol grounds were like a museum because there were other things well fine if they're secular and that was a real stretch and so unfortunately we were able to start taking down these Ten Commandments that the Fraternal Order of Eagles with Cecil B DeMille had put up we got one taken down in Monroe Wisconsin you documented the one in Milwaukee we were going after it and then the event or the ruling came down so it's mushy if it's a new violation and depending on what else is around it we are able to stop it ACLU in Arkansas has one get got rid of a Ten Commandments in front of their capital so it's still worth complaining about always but it depends on the circumstances now they think that there's a tinker mammoth monument oh well let's just put up the Bill of Rights next to it in war law this is now killer right it's now a museum with all points of view and they did try to do that in the Kentucky case that was paired with Van Orden McCreary County but that was shot down because it was so clear that they were doing it as a sham the religious monument up so in it remain something that we're litigating over but we never thought Andrew that we would ever have to litigate over these monuments in front of a public school I had no idea they were there and we did win with took a bunch of years and a bunch of work but we got them taken down and we had two more climate screen two more questions so I think well we have Keith Stevenson who says is there any evidence that posting the Ten Commandments in public spaces has had any effect whatsoever on changing people's behavior and none that I know of and again if people actually follow the ten commandments that that are written in the Bible we'd have bigge violating the Constitution they'd be violating the law so I mean if they want to have if they want to make the putter around to make a graven image go ahead in the United States America you are free to do so but we've also we've also we do know that following the Bible literally does inspire some awful actions and I mean maybe we tell the story you want to tell the story behind this Bible sticker in that Pennsylvania gentoo who cut off his oh can we see this I don't know if we can close up and we have a sticker that warning little belief in this Bible is dangerous tear your health and life and of course Jesus talks about amputating certain body parts gouging out eyes dodging out eyes and if your right hand offend thee cut it off castration and we have tragedies happening very frequently where a jealous person maybe with some mental problems follows this teaching because there it is it's a behavioral grab well the polite way that it is said in the New Testament is it there are some who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom and if you're able to receive it then you can't receive what can I get one of those stickers went from FFF dad workshop and we had a terrible case here in Madison Wisconsin where a student who felt that he was had sexual thoughts that he could not control I mean I think they're just normal um it was Ellis student in one of the dorms actually cut himself open to take out two of his adrenal glands they I mean he he lived but he obviously it was it was the teachings in this book that he thought he was impure the tragedies that this creates so literal belief in this book may endanger your life and now you have another we have one more question Ferdinand Ramos ask isn't stoning someone to death considered work even if they do so on the Sabbath I like the way they keep rehearsing well the numbers 15 doesn't actually say what day they did the actual stoning so maybe they did it on a Monday or Tuesday which in which case it was perfectly illegal to kill somebody I always I always think of that scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian when it kind of Wendy's when you hear the stoning about taking the Lord's name Joe he said Jehovah and it's a great thing go look like that would be a very good thing to say someone's about to stone you on a Sunday try it yeah and unfortunately we do see this going on I mean because these are the Abrahamic religions which are held in common by the Muslim religion Jewish and Christianity and we do see in some Islamist nations of course you still see stonings under under the Mosaic law absolutely so I think that wraps it up for our questions today so again if you want to learn more about what's wrong with the Ten Commandments please check out ffrs non track check out Dan Barker's book losing faith and faith and Annie Laurie Gaylor book woe to the women for the Bible tells me so and tune in next week same time same place for a new ask an atheist and we'll be very glad to take any of your questions and be on the lookout for ways to submit those questions via video so that we can you can join us at least spiritually in the studio thanks for tuning in right [Music]

Channel: FFRF

Views: 95,055

Rating: 4.6354728 out of 5

Keywords: atheism, atheist, ten commandments, Bible, christianity, freedom from religion foundation, ffrf, jealous god, Dan Barker, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Andrew Seidel, Theology, 10 commandments, what's wrong with the ten commandments, Refuting theology, learn about the 10 commandments

Id: 0gGakCLbUoc

Length: 42min 59sec (2579 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2017