{"id":612,"date":"2012-11-25T10:49:30","date_gmt":"2012-11-25T16:49:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/?p=612"},"modified":"2012-11-25T10:49:30","modified_gmt":"2012-11-25T16:49:30","slug":"the-ten-commandments-510","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/2012\/11\/25\/the-ten-commandments-510\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ten Commandments \u2013 5\/10"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continuing our journey through Oklahoma’s Ten Commandments<\/a>, we come to commandment the fifth:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”<\/p>\n

This is the first one that I really want to affirm. My wife and I are raising three children, and we wouldn’t mind in the least if they’d mind us a bit more. Once again, though, the Bible goes completely overboard<\/a> on the punishment for failing to follow the commandment, meting out the death penalty left, right, and center. How many times must I point out to my Christian friends that you don’t get to honor the commandments as a standalone document? One must carefully consider the entire context in which they arose, with particular emphasis on crime and punishment. Of course it is generally a good idea to honor one’s parents, but how can you possibly accept moral advice from a people so barbaric as to\u00a0believe\u00a0the punishment for estranging oneself therefrom should be death?<\/p>\n

That might not be the worst of it, though, because the latter half of the verse contains an unveiled reference to the genocidal invasion<\/a> of the so-called ‘Promised Land’ which was supposedly carried out by ancient Israelites and is arguably ongoing to this day.<\/p>\n

All that said, I still like the basic idea of honoring one’s parents, insofar as they are honorable, so I’m giving this commandment half a point for modern relevance. That brings the running total so far to one out of five.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continuing our journey through Oklahoma’s Ten Commandments, we come to commandment the fifth: “Honor thy father and thy mother, that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,16],"tags":[31],"class_list":["post-612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-counter-apologetics","category-theocracy","tag-ten-commandments"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}