Ten Commandments Reflections

  MOVING THE TEN COMMANDMENTS BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS The scene outside the Alabama Judicial Building on August 27, 2003, as the two and one-half ton Ten Commandments shrine inside was moved to a back room pursuant to federal and state judicial decrees, was certainly moving, and any witness to it, no matter how calloused, could not help feeling some sympathy for the protestors. Judge Roy Moore, without approval of the state authorities, had, in the middle of one night in 2001 of the Common Era, secretly inserted his mammoth shrine into the courthouse rotunda, and now the obtrusion had been almost miraculously whisked away on a hydraulic machine. Profound was the rage and grief of those who bore witness. One outraged man bawled through his cupped hands that the government was not going to take his Ten Commandments away from him; a woman sobbed and moaned hysterically as if she had just lost her best friend; several prayed silently on their knees; others laid on their bellies as flat...

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...

  Josiah Smashing Idols TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR BIGOTS BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS December 16, 2017 I recently republished three essays I penned in 2013 about Judge Roy Moore’s purported worship of a stone fetish in Alabama, a huge granite block upon which the Decalogue is inscribed.  My criticism was about his deeds before the whole world,  not something he was accused of doing secretly. He raised himself above man’s law in that case, citing God, and that is what we call “bigotry,” after the practice of pious people of yore given to saying “By God.”  I argued that it is the ethical rules metaphorically engraved on the heart, remembered and thought upon that should be sacred, not a block of stone upon which words are inscribed.  Moses himself, mindful of how people worshiped a golden calf, would take a sledgehammer to that stone fetish in Alabama, for it was not the principle they held dear, but some perishable thing of this world, just as primitive people worshiped s...