In December 2014, over 2,800 atheists responded to a challenge to rewrite the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) with modern, humanist alternatives. After collating and condensing the submissions, thirteen judges voted on the top ten atheist Ten Commandments – or perhaps to avoid the hierarchical implications of the word, we ought to call them Suggestments. I would like to offer a few, brief observations to this list, which aren’t so much chiseled into immutable stone as they are finger-sketched into the sand at low tide. The original CNN article can be found here.
Every person has the right to control their body
Here we invoke the unalterable principle of playground hierarchy: “Says who?” Who is commanding this and what makes that entity’s claim any more legitimate than another saying the opposite? Where did this right come from? Is it a law of the universe? Is it a right only in the West, where the importance of self-determination was born? Did the law apply to homo sapiens, but not erectus? Apart from a transcendent lawgiver, there is no such thing as a right of any kind, only privileges granted by the human conglomerate, who can also revoke the privilege on a whim.
Clearly, this commandment is a response to the perceived attack on sexual freedom and, by extension, abortion. But without naming it explicitly, it leaves too many windows open, and immediately we are confronted by a gnat-cloud of caveats each biting off a tiny mouthful until the whole command exsanguinates. Do all persons always have absolute rights to say what can and cannot be done to their bodies? If so, does this include the thief’s right to point his gun at my face? Do we intervene when the man despairing of life wants to eat a bullet? What happens when one person’s right to control their body impedes another’s? And does this right of self-determination apply to the tiny persons growing in the womb?
The typical approach to this last question is to rehearse the axiom that the growing baby is not a person but more like an appendage of the mother’s body or, more crudely, a tumor. Claims such as these are dogmatic, in the same category as those that claim each human is made in the image of God. When the ones granting the rights of bodily autonomy are also the ones who decide what a person is, few atrocities cannot be justified. And, conveniently, you have just located the god of the system.
Thought Butter 