The Logical Atheist

Would it have been so difficult for Yahweh to have squeezed an 11th commandment onto those tablets? He's omnipotent, right? Did He have a decimal or even-number compulsion or something? "Thou shalt not enslave" would have been a good one -- not to mention truly pathbreaking. Slavery, after all, has existed throughout history and still does exist in Africa and the Middle East. It was in the modern West that abolitionism arose and achieved its goal.   The only reference to slavery in the Decalogue is in the 10th commandment, where we're ordered not to covet our neighbor's stuff, including his servants. In other words, if you want slaves, go get your own! Don't even yearn for your neighbor's! If it had to be 10, Yahweh could have eliminated one of the existing commands, such as the prohibition against taking His name in vain (whatever that means) or the order not to work on Saturday. (What if you enjoy working?) We could have managed without those, considerin...

Why didn't "Thou shalt not buy and sell human beings" make the ten commandments?

Would a good God have commanded, "Thou shalt not kill," with these two implicit footnotes? Unless I authorize or drcree it, and This commandment does not apply to me.

Would you think differently of God if he, as the supreme author of the moral commandments, one day commanded, "Thou shalt kill"? What's to stop him from doing so?

Before anyone will be able to convince me that "Judeo-Christian" morality has been a great contribution to the world, he'll first have to explain why the Ten Commandments order us to keep the Sabbath and honor our parents, but don't prohibit us from keeping slaves or dishonoring our children.  He might also explain why we don't find this: "Thou shalt presume innocent those accused of an offense until proved guilty," seeing as how something like that appeared in the 18th-century BCE Code of Hammurabi hundreds of years before the Ten Commandments were said to have been given to Moses at Mount Sinai perhaps in the 13th century BCE: "If any one bring an accusation of any crime before the elders, and does not prove what he has charged, he shall, if it be a capital offense charged, be put to death." (For the record, the Israelites were not slaves in Egypt and did not escape to Canaan through the desert, stopping at Sinai to pick up the two tablets. ...