Ten Commandments Reflections

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS JUDGE BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS "I will never deny the God upon whom our laws and country depend," declared Alabama's chief justice Roy Moore in the year 2003 of the Common Era, and his supporters cheered, fell to their knees and prayed outside of the state courthouse. Judge Moore, the 'Ten Commandments Judge', was an Etoway County circuit judge. While serving in that lower capacity, he posted a plaque of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom, and fought opponents over the display, wherefore the purportedly sovereign people of democratic Alabama were greatly pleased and elected him to lead the superior court, apparently not as an equal among equals. In 2002 Judge Moore set up another scene by placing a shrine to the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building. The fetish is a 5,300 pound granite block upon which a truncated and revised version of the Hebrew tribal commandments appear in the form of Moses' tablets. A wate...

THE GREAT ALABAMA FETISH BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS The granite shrine of the Decalogue inserted by Judge Roy Moore into the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building is obviously a fetish in the sense that it is for many people an artificial object evoking unquestioned veneration. Portuguese explorers applied the word fetico ("that which is made") to magical objects such as carved figurines used by Africans, especially sorcerers and witches, in their magico-religious cults. The festishes were supposedly bewitched or charmed; that is, presumed to house spirits or spiritual forces, or be endowed with anima (soul) or mana, spiritual energy. Social scientists have proposed that fetishism is one of the most primitive forms of religious worship. As for the objects in themselves, they often were of little material or aesthetic value. It may seem to be quite a stretch to apply the term 'fetich' or 'fetish' to the Alabama shrine. One might argue that it is encoded with st...