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.
Treat others as you would want them to treat you, and can reasonably expect them to want to be treated. Think about their perspective.
Where have I heard this before? Hmm… can’t quite place it. Anyway, it’ll come to me.
All the ripe fruit atheists eat in the basket of 21st-century America, you find growing on the trees in the orchard of Christianity. This suggestment is a case and point. Jesus gave us this golden apple, which he reiterated from Levitical law (Leviticus 19:18), ironically, the portion of the Bible most attacked by atheists for its unloving disposition.
Jesus says loving your neighbor, the shorthand of the Golden Rule, is half the equation that sums up all the law and the prophets, and it is love that underwrites the suggestion above. No one disagrees that walking a mile in your neighbor’s shoes is a good and necessary ingredient in a civilization’s coherence.
But loving your neighbor cannot operate on its own. This is why Jesus tells us that neighbor-loving is the second greatest command. They are not disjointed commands; they are not listed alphabetically; they are ordinal. Loving the Lord must be first for the second to function properly.
Not much difference exists between the greatest and the second greatest heavyweight boxers. First and second places are often a difference of fractions. Your kid finishing second in the state meet is a cause for celebration, not failure. It is easy to think of the first and second greatest commandments in the same way. But this is incorrect.
Separating the first from the second greatest commandments does not just leave us leading with the second best. It is removing a head from a body – all the parts are intact, but in the same way a cadaver is. To change the metaphor, it is like a liver cell gone rogue, rebelling from its genetic instructions. Neighbor love, apart from God’s love, is a tumor. Like a cancer, it will grow unchecked and lose its function, and kill the host.
Thought Butter 