Tell me, legislators; when the stone wears away and no one does unto another that which they would have done to them, will you still believe that you are more loved by God?

TheCharmerUnderMe: Somacandra: AdolfOliverPanties: Isn't there something in the Ten Commandments about graven images?
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Yup, that's the monument--with misspellings and all.

I'm sorry, but is that the All-seeing Eye in the pyramid above the eagle? What the hell is THAT doing on there?

Apparently, the Christian who believes in only this part of the Jewish book that he hasn't actually read doesn't know squat about the sacred symbolic graven images of other beliefs, either. 

/As a Christian, I wish we Christians would act more Christ-like.

Bonzo_1116: Great Porn Dragon: simplicimus: AdolfOliverPanties: Isn't there something in the Ten Commandments about graven images?

I think that refers only to the competition, Baal and whoever else was being worshiped.

More properly, refering to graven images of all the ba'alim and ashtarot, aka the old gods and goddesses of Sumer (which were later adopted by the Babylonians).

(To make a long story short, it's now thought by actual archaeologists that Judaism started out as a monotheistic fork of Mesopotamian polytheistic faiths (being probably the first monotheistic faith to actually catch on, versus Akhenaten's failed attempt). There are still some traces of the old polytheism (particularly in Genesis and the creation myths), and at the time that the Ten Commandments were encoded as the basis of halachic law, there were still a lot of issues with folks reverting to the polytheistic worship of the old gods.

Hell, even the Bible itself mentions this in relation to Moses and Aaron--with Aaron having set up a golden calf, a ritual item of Ba'al Hadad (the old Sumerian god of storms) which was specifically designed as an idol to the (monotheistic) god of Israel. There are at least two instances recorded after this when royalty or the people in general went back into frank polytheistic worship (with the God of Israel equated to either Ba'al Hadad or El) and a number of other instances where the early Israeli people had gone into partial polytheism reversion (with the God of Israel being paired with Ishtar or Astara, and the female companions of God/the gods being referred to as the ashtarot--"Astara" may well have been a functional title of "Lady" in this case, much as "ba'al" is actually a title of "Lord").

Yes, this is where knowing a bit about the predecessors of Judaism gets very interesting :D

I sometimes wonder how much of the monotheism that the Hebrews picked up was related to the dualistic ideas of Zoroastrianism coming out of Central Asia. Judaism has a weird mix ...

A little from column A, a little from column B, a little from column Z:

a) The original monotheistic concept...we're not 100% sure what the inspiration was, whether this was homegrown or whether there could have been some influence from Egypt's failed experiment in monotheism (Akhenaten's state cult of Aten the sun god, which was immediately reversed upon his death)--there's actually even been some speculation that the story of Moses could have been influenced by stories of Akhenaten's attempts to form a monotheistic faith.

b) The later substrate of monotheism (particularly the transformation of the role of ha-Satan from Prosecuting Attorney In the Divine Courtroom to overt anti-Deity as canonised in Christianity) seems to have had DEFINITE influence from Zoroastrianism (and it would appear Judaism may not have been the only religion "cross-pollinated" in such a way).

SquiggsIN: And because they had a well-trained / lucky army their views have managed to propagate/evolve and dominate two-thirds of the planet.

I'd really argue that the spread of Christianity(and Abrahamic faiths in general) as something other than a subsect of Judaism (akin to the Essenes or Chabad Lubavich) is due to two fairly lucky accidents:

a) The conversion of a Romanised Jewish person (Saul of Tarsus, who later renamed himself to Paul in a fairly long tradition of "renaming upon conversion" that seems to have been a trope in pre-Diaspora Jewish communities) who introduced a "goyim-friendly" version of the then-nascent Christian faith and no longer restricted the faith to observant (if dissident) Jewish people.

b) The conversion of Constantine I in 313 AD (which effectively ended official persecutions and blood libels against Christianity by the Roman Empire, and led for the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire (and later, the Western Empire and its descendants and the Eastern Empire in Constantinople until well into the Middle Ages).

As for Islam, it's a little more difficult to trace back to the Abrahamic faiths but Muhammad was almost certainly exposed to both Christianity and Judaism (even explicitly acknowledging the groups as People Of The Book who had received revelations from the Most High)--it can be best seen as an Arabicised continuation of the tradition of "new revelations" that Christianity set a basis for. (Of particular note is the fact that the Arab peninsula was one of the few areas left in the Middle East at that point that still followed some sort of pre-Abrahamic faith, which again provides "colour text" for some of the commandments in the Quran to go after idolators and wipe them out--you can see the direct predecessors in the struggles of the Old Testament prophets against the return of the "Old Religion". Honestly, had the Christian canon not been "frozen" in the Council of Nicaea, we'd probably have had stuff just as bloody from Scandinavia or other areas where the "old faiths" still reared their head now and again in the Christian holy books.)

simplicimus: The design is wrong. It's two tablets, 5 on each. Did this guy even read the Old Testament?

Does anybody know the cretin who paid $10,000 for this monument? If so, hook him up with me in this thread. I'll give $100 to any charity of his choice if he can recite the Ten Commandments from memory without either cheating or cramming.

/'Cretin'. Funny word, that one.

Doesn't the Bible have something bad to say about people who change the wording of the Bible?

AssAsInAssassin: Ahem... wrong link...

Yep. "Jupiter" comes from the Indo-European "dyeu-peter", or "god-father." Another name for Jupiter was "Jove." Except it was "Iove" (That's a capital "eye," not a lower-case "el.") which means it was pronounced "YO-WEH." "Zeus" comes from the same source.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=jupiter & searchmode=none

Which is actually fairly impressive, considering that the Indo-European language family has no known relation to the Afro-Asiatic languages (of which the Semitic languages are a broad language family, much as the Romance or Germanic languages are part of sub-families of Indo-European)...save for some as-yet-unproven theories of relating some of the larger primary language families that still tend to be considered a little fringey.

(That said, I don't discount it could have happened. Somehow Semitic peoples got the one pre-Abrahamic faith (for which we have good records) from the people of Ur--and Sumerian is a language isolate which has no known relatives (and--at least if some interpretations of the fact there are sometimes as many as four or five separate glyphs in Sumerian for the same syllable are any clue--there's even a chance ancient Sumerian may have been a tonal or partially tonal language, like Vietnamese or Thai or quite a lot of language families in Africa). One theory is that when the Akkadian peoples (who spoke proto-Semitic) moved into the Middle East that they essentially "Sumericised" (taking on religion and culture, as well as apparently a form of cuneiform script) whilst causing a language shift from Sumerian to Akkadian.)

Great Porn Dragon: simplicimus: AdolfOliverPanties: Isn't there something in the Ten Commandments about graven images?

I think that refers only to the competition, Baal and whoever else was being worshiped.

More properly, refering to graven images of all the ba'alim and ashtarot, aka the old gods and goddesses of Sumer (which were later adopted by the Babylonians).

(To make a long story short, it's now thought by actual archaeologists that Judaism started out as a monotheistic fork of Mesopotamian polytheistic faiths (being probably the first monotheistic faith to actually catch on, versus Akhenaten's failed attempt). There are still some traces of the old polytheism (particularly in Genesis and the creation myths), and at the time that the Ten Commandments were encoded as the basis of halachic law, there were still a lot of issues with folks reverting to the polytheistic worship of the old gods.

Hell, even the Bible itself mentions this in relation to Moses and Aaron--with Aaron having set up a golden calf, a ritual item of Ba'al Hadad (the old Sumerian god of storms) which was specifically designed as an idol to the (monotheistic) god of Israel. There are at least two instances recorded after this when royalty or the people in general went back into frank polytheistic worship (with the God of Israel equated to either Ba'al Hadad or El) and a number of other instances where the early Israeli people had gone into partial polytheism reversion (with the God of Israel being paired with Ishtar or Astara, and the female companions of God/the gods being referred to as the ashtarot--"Astara" may well have been a functional title of "Lady" in this case, much as "ba'al" is actually a title of "Lord").

Yes, this is where knowing a bit about the predecessors of Judaism gets very interesting :D


I STILL can't quite accept that it's a total coincidence that Ahnknaten got his monotheism on, led everyone out into the desert and right around the same time the Hebrews appear on the historical scene as monotheists and have a story about their leader, a prince of Egypt leading them out of Egypt. After all "Moses" is the Egyptian word for "son of. It makes me wonder if the original Hebrew weren't some sort of loyalist remnant of Ahnknaten followers (maybe mixed with "Habiru" mercenaries from a sort of praetorian guard) who left Egypt after the priests of the traditional cults re-asserted dominance

When these politicians allow and endorse these 10 commandments, and in this case one of them helped pay for it, they should personally have to foot the bill for the legal defense that they know is coming. Put your money where your mouth is, not the taxpayers money.