Ten Commandments Reflections

  ON CASUISTRY OR STRETCHING THE LAW by DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS by David Arthur Walters Few people can remember even five of the Ten Commandments in right order What sort of person would write down rules then proceed forthwith to break them? Fanatic literalists do their very best to keep their commandments exactly as written, but almost everyone else stretches their own rules as a matter of habit, some beyond the breaking point. Take, for instance, the New Year's resolutions seemingly made by almost everyone to be broken in a matter of days if not hours. Despite all good intentions, such violations are natural to those who legislate against themselves, especially when the habits of the selfish self are stronger than the will of the socialized self split off and divided back against it. A "person" is a working synthesis of individual and society - the distinction between psychology and sociology is formally made for the sake of explanatory convenience. The individual factor o...

  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...

  MEDITATION ON JEREMIAH BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS Jerusalem was certainly not the utopian ark of Zion the prophet Jeremiah wanted it to be nor was it the cradle of radical reform so that Judah’s wickedness might be extirpated at its root. King Josiah of Judah instituted some legal reforms. They were all right as far as they went, and included the death penalty for violators, but Jeremiah did not think much of them, for he was convinced that formal observances simply would not change the hardened hearts of the people: those hearts would have to be circumcised of their foreskins to enjoy the Lord. Judah was bound to be crushed for her sins; then and only then, when the full weight of his doom was on her, could she be intimate with the Lord. “Then the Lord said to me in the days of Josiah the king, ‘have you seen what faithless Israel did? She went up on every high hill under every green tree, and she was a harlot there.’” Israel must be duly chastised for her harlotry. True prophets m...