A Neat Essay By Richard Carrier

[Minimalist]

It could be subtitled:  Go Blow Moses Out Your Ass but those are my words, not Carrier's.

https://infidels.org/kiosk/article/the-r...nts-2.html

I keep hearing this chant, variously phrased: "The Ten Commandments are the foundation of Western morality and the American Constitution and government." In saying this, people are essentially crediting Moses with the invention of ethics, democracy and civil rights, a claim that is of course absurd. But its absurdity is eclipsed by its injustice, for there is another lawmaker who is far more important to us, whose ideas and actions lie far more at the foundation of American government, and whose own Ten Commandments were distributed at large and influencing the greatest civilizations of the West--Greece and Rome--for well over half a millennia before the laws of Moses were anything near a universal social influence. In fact, by the time the Ten Commandments of Moses had any real chance of being the foundation of anything in Western society, democracy and civil rights had all but died out, never to rise again until the ideals of our true hero, the real man to whom we owe all reverence, were rediscovered and implemented in what we now call "modern democratic principles."

The man I am talking about is Solon the Athenian. Solon was born, we believe, around 638 B.C.E., and lived until approximately 558, but the date in his life of greatest importance to us is the year he was elected to create a constitution for Athens, 594 B.C.E.

So fuck David Barton and the rest of these lying jesus freaks.

[Amarok]

Get ready for cries of but Richard Carriers a conspiracy theorist because his critics  never read his works. And are ignorant of the fact he has refuted this charge six ways from Sunday .Proving his critics have no clue what a conspiracy theory looks like.  .  His idea's are peer reviewed supported by academics in his field . And  Mythicism is just as probable as historicity but better in evidence and scope . But if were snarky enough and quote apologists and academics who switched their brains off then we  can pretend his case away .

[Minimalist]

Why should the asswipes read something when they can just sit back and let some self-proclaimed Holy Joe tell them its wrong and they shouldn't bother.  A lot of those people are Trumptards and they don't read, either.

[Little lunch]

Moses creates ethics, comes back down the hill and kills a heap of people by having molten gold poured down their throats for worshipping a bull.
X-tians would say it was actually god that gave Moses the commandments.
The same god that killed one of Moses' crew and all of his descendants by opening up the ground from under them for burning incense at a ritual.
Yeah, it's quite laughable.

[JackRussell]

Yeah, and the jews didn't know murder and theft was wrong before Sinai and slavery was still cool afterwards.

Great plan god.

[Minimalist]

For a great comparison of primitive iron age thinking v Enlightenment thinking consider the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp

The representatives of the French people, organized as a National Assembly, believing that the ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments, have determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, unalienable, and sacred rights of man

In many ways, superior to our Bill of Rights.

[JackRussell]

Vive le revolution.

We need a bit more of that.