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There’s no plot against
biblical laws

Will everyone who believes that "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" is what always unfolds in the courtroom please stand up?

Guilty people claim innocence and witnesses tell their stories from biased or time-blurred viewpoints. Lawyers choose which facts to skip or spin, and there are man-made laws about why and when truth cannot be told because of how it has filtered through human hands or minds. That's not only in the criminal cases; worse even in civil suits and divorce court where greed and vengeance, sometimes just survival, will trump truth. Plea bargaining, deferred acceptance of guilty pleas, and "no-fault" in traffic and divorce cases are part of the courthouse vocabulary not devoted to truth.

So, keep standing if you really believe hanging the Ten Commandments on the courtroom wall will somehow shine down grace and truth and justice -- or even fear of God -- on the humans in the room. You think so? You've got a lot of company; there's a whole herd of people who seem to think that's true, and each is standing on a soapbox or a pulpit this week. They've flooded the airways, Internet and fax machines with their sputtering and screeching.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday about the display of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky courthouses -- that's a no-no -- and on the Texas state capitol lawn with other statues -- that's OK -- and it set off an avalanche of reactions from religious organizations, mostly Christian.

What's the fuss all about, anyway? Nobody is flushing the Ten Commandments down the toilet, and anyway, a belief is bigger than the paper it's printed on. Hurray for us that our Founding Fathers had a grounding in Jewish and Christian tenets when they created a country, and hurray for them for constructing the First Amendment to harness government. Americans pretty much recognize we live in a society of laws even though we bend them for our selfish reasons.

For goodness' sake, there's no "special-interests plot to banish God from the public square" as claimed in the effusive rhetoric of one reaction. It is not government's role to disseminate law as a matter of divine will or religious belief.

Whether they believe the Big Ten list is from God as elementary rules for living in harmony with a divine Creator and the rest of creation, or a historical code reflecting the core of humanity's awareness of self and society, people recognize it as an important document.

If they're Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist, they see it contains basic precepts from their own faiths that aren't laid out in quite the same succinct format.

Jews revere "the law," which was, after all, theirs first. The outline of Jehovah's covenant with the Hebrew people is expanded upon at great length in the Torah, the five first books of Scripture. The law is read from front to finish every year in every synagogue, assimilated into the Jewish consciousness. But it's not God's chosen people who choose to display the law in your face, in the public arena. You won't find it hanging on their walls.

Christians believe it's God's law and the covenant covers them, too. If they're Protestant, they can cite the chapter and verse where the Decalogue is to be found in the Bible: Exodus 20:2-17, Deuteronomy 5:6-21, the Gospel of Mark 10:19. If they're Catholic, they memorized it, too, and their catechism extended it to the man-made laws that are derived from it.

To digress, the divisions of Christianity count the Ten differently. Most Protestant and Orthodox Christians enumerate them as:

1. Prohibition of having any other gods but God.
2. Prohibition of idolatry.
3. Prohibition of the use of the name of God for vain purposes.
4. Observance of the Sabbath.
5. Honoring of one's father and mother.
6. Prohibition of murder.
7. Prohibition of adultery.
8. Prohibition of stealing.
9. Prohibition of giving false testimony.
10. Prohibition of coveting the property or wife of one's neighbor.

Roman Catholics and Lutherans combine the first two and separate coveting another's property or another's wife, based on the thinking of fourth-century theologian St. Augustine of Hippo. The Ten are not numbered in the book of Exodus.

The Ten Commandments were a personal code from the beginning. Here's the road map, use your free will, said God. He didn't tell Moses to go bludgeon the Hebrews with the stone tablets. They've been read by individual eyes from the beginning, interpreted and twisted by humans at their worst. At their best, humans do get it right, even in the courtroom.

This isn't the first age in which some have needed to prove something about themselves by imposing their beliefs on others, pounding others with their yardstick, punishing others who don't conform. Governments have done it for power and glory. But in this age, it's driven by Christian missionary zeal, and it's warped. The theme is not to convert, but to coerce.

To put it on the courthouse wall doesn't bring God's law into government or into individual conscience.

If a church wants to erect its own granite monument of the Ten Commandments, go for it. Print the code on cards, T-shirts, jewelry. Pay for the big billboard version at the sports stadium. Tattoo your body with it. Weave it into your rugs.

The Ten Commandments furor dredged up an old favorite gospel song in my memory. I can just hear Mahalia Jackson singing, "I'm going to live the life I sing about in my song."

When someone lives by the Ten Commandments, there's the monument.