Ten Commandments And Religion

The Ten Commandments are receiving a great deal of ridicule in more recent years. The heated debates within legal systems across the United States on whether or not it is constitutionally correct to have a religious symbol such as the Ten Commandments displayed on government lawns has been met with mixed reviews by Christians. After speaking with my neighbors in an almost completely white-privileged, Christian dominated city on the Iron Range, I find that a great deal of people feel the removal of the Ten Commandments is an attack on their religious identities. Many used a similar argument saying, “the United States’ founding fathers based the Constitution and the Bill of Rights on their beliefs as Christians.” Little did they realize, several …show more content…
First, God has a prescription for the destructive tendencies that are human nature, as Lumbala illuminates. A Christian community is only as strong as its covenant with God and the laws which have been prescribed for us, the beloved creation. Can we be God’s compliant patients of faith? Second, can we continue to ignore our placement in a white, privileged society that eerily parallels the caste system of India? Our American society claims racial equality when in actuality it has merely rendered the racial lines invisible. In many ways, this society has created its own version of the ex-untouchables which Soares-Prabhu tries to liberate through the apodictic Decalogue. From a privileged status, are we able to understand that we are not above the Ten Commandments? Finally, we need to abandon the “false gods” of wealth that we are warned about by Pixley. In a middle-class world we focus on padding our resume, adding more and more activities that leave us less and less time with our family and neighbors, all in an effort to attain a position that brings even more money than the last. Even worse, we impose this process on our children as we continually add more extra-curricular activities, as if children need a resume to be children. The more activities that are added the less time we, as Christians, have to devote to God. We sacrifice our time with family and community to work that extra hour and attain that extra money to collect trivial goods that we did not have time for in the first place. My community has become unbalanced in its understanding of the Ten Commandments and these exegeses have brought the laws’ universal qualities back into