Which Ten Commandments are they?

No one leaves anything out or adds anything in.

(The numbering itself really isn't a big doctrinal issue anyway, even if they did number them; there are theological differences about interpreting them, but that's true within denominations as well as between them, and they aren't going to come up on a billboard.)

nice little summary of the differences, which i got from Slacktivist

"....oy. TEN! These TEN Commandments i bring you!"

xp

as some AP articles on the Supreme Court have noted, there is a frieze of Moses on in the Court, but also one of Muhammed(shown holding the Koran)...

The argument is simply that the Old Testament -- which from an Islamic perspective is largely written by Allah's prophets -- is not inherently non-Muslim; it's common ground shared, in its broad strokes, by Jews, Christians, Muslims, Mandaeans, etc etc. Putting something specifically Muslim up would justify something specifically Christian from the New Testament or elsewhere (and something specifically Jewish from the midrash or Talmud, etc etc).

No, definitely not. Remember that until recently -- and I'd bet still, among a lot of people -- Moses was popularly considered the author of the first five books of the Old Testament, the ones containing the bulk of what Christians know about it (Adam and Eve through Moses; David, Jonah, Samson, stuff like that, comes later). The movie came about because of the interest in him, not the other way around. And for most of Christian history, parishioners haven't read the Bible -- they've had it read to them; simple, formulaic lists (the ten commandments, the beatitudes) and evocative stories like Cain and Abel or Noah's ark became the most important parts of the popular view of religion because they were easy to remember.

The ten commandments have always been relevant to legal discussions/thoughts/moral philosophy/etc informed by Christianity, because out of all the imperatives in the Old Testament, they're the ones Christians more or less kept -- Leviticus is out, anyone who wants to can cross running water, you're welcome to the bacon cheeseburgers, but "thou shalt not murder" stuck.

For a long time, the Code of Hammurabi was believed by many to be influenced by the Ten Commandments and other Old Testament writings -- positioning the ancient Jews as the intellectuals of their time and place was the standard historical take for most of Western history, so where commonalities were found, they were assume to stem from the Jews to elsewhere, not the other way around; it goes the other way now, with historians bending over backwards to try to demonstrate monotheism as an Egyptian invention given to the Jews while they were slaves -- and they've certainly been used as the justification for both code and common law. They're not the important influence on American law the Christian right would like them to be -- it'd be more accurate to say they're an example of the Western moral tradition which informed that law -- but the claim that other legal and more systems are essentially an elaboration of the Commandments is an old one, for both Christians and Jews.

The funny thing is that the thousands of Eagles monuments around the country (like the one in Texas) were funded in part by Cecil B Demille to promote the Ten Commandments movie. So, uh, yeah it sort of is Charlton Heston's fault.

Most of the monuments have some sort of nondenominational version of the Decalogue.

The blurriness of terms like that gets tricky; they're never quite accurate, and with a composite term like "Judeo-Christian" or "Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian," you can't weight the parts -- the use of Greco-Roman material in Christianity, or the difference between various Jewish and Christian takes on material they have nominally in common, are huge topics that get glossed over by labels. (And of course talking about "Judeo-Christian intellectual tradition" would ignore the Muslim contributions to math, science, and the preservation of classical texts, but "Judeo-Christian-Islamic" would be just as misleading.)

xpost; nearly everything was polytheistic outside of the "Peoples of the Book" and little exceptions here and there, yeah. Monotheism has always been the dark horse, if you give every religion the same number of electoral votes.

re: monotheism, it's a weird and complicated topic. You have lots of things that look like monotheism but are incompatible with modern-day contemporary monotheism (you also have more and more lay theologies which start to resemble these): henotheism, "there are many gods but one is supreme"; monolatrism, "there are many gods but only one of them or one related group of them is appropriate for me to worship and has an influence on my life," basically the "household gods" framework that Abraham's contemporaries would have thought he followed; "all, or many, gods are aspects of the same divine thingy," etc.

Henotheism has been common in polytheistic cultures, especially large ones where the population is varied and the gods become associated with different groups instead of, or as well as, different phenomena. Early Jewish religion was henotheistic, probably as the result of a revolution, and became strictly monotheistic over time. Akhenaten's Atenism made the leap straight from polytheism to monotheism, redefining the god in question in the process. Both of these were pretty minor -- and in the case of Atenism, short-lived -- exceptions.

OK, number 9 is a bit of a stretch (perjury), but I'll give it to 'em. So THREE of the commandments are the basis of our legal system, and I'm pretty sure the murder and steal ones would have been in there anyway, ya know?

except the bit about homos. the rest, the fundies ignore. how surprising.

Sorry. Apparently I was Monsieur Gullible there.

it isn't really, when you consider that (a) european legal codes were based as much, if not more, on pre-christian codes (e.g., justinian's codification of roman law, anglo-saxon/germanic codes, etc.).

xpost; don't get me started on Pagels; I've posted about her somewhere around here, and revile her. I don't know if the far right has taken much notice of her, really.

Michael Williams' Redefining "Gnosticism" is a good overview of the problems with the term and the work done on the subject, which is kinder to Pagels than I am, and probably more fair.

maybe I should stop talking, cuz I guess that's me! I have a passing interest in religious esoterica (be it Idris Shah or DT Suzuki), and had a much better time with the Nag Hammadi (which I purchased first) once I got into Pagels. But I won't annoy you anymore about this...

Oh, and Bart Ehrmann is pretty good, too, if I'm spelling his name right. I disagree with his conclusions sometimes, but his facts not at all, and it's always clear which is which.

Also, while it may be true that people like Falwell, Robertson, Roy Moore, etc. are aware of Augustine and the Christian intellectual tradition, it seems to me it's only in a very superficial way. Those guys aren't really purveyors of any kind of intellectual tradition.

thank you, gypsy, for saying what i wanted to say!

i am by no means an observant catholic, but i was raised catholic and i DO take pride in SOME aspects of the catholic church (especially its intellectual history through folks like augustine, aquinas, the jesuits, etc.). in much the same way that non-observant jews take pride in THEIR heritage, while eschewing the religion per se. this is why it REALLY makes me boil to hear some ignorant evangelical who can probably barely read the bible he's banging talk all sorts of ignorant and bigoted crap about ANYTHING.

This always amuses me. In Islam one of the things you're absolutely not supposed to do is make a representation of Mohammed.

Haven't read it since it came out but it was interesting. This reminds me that I'm inclined to assert that, despite the continuity of institutions, different generations of 'believers' redefine and re-justify their faith/sect/church, etc.. every couple of generations.

A little of both -- I think the second feeds the first, because she made her mark with writing about gnosticism, and people want to keep hearing about it, even if there isn't more that can accurately be said about it (especially as it becomes more and more clear that "gnosticism" as a modern term isn't as useful as we once thought it was, and that we should be focusing more on the individual groups and recognize their differences).