From Deseret News archives:
Thou shalt not ... underestimate impact of the Ten Commandments
More than 3,000 years after Moses walked down from Mount Sinai with a pair of stone tablets, the Ten Commandments continue to be extolled, displayed, removed, agonized over, sued over and, of course, broken.
And they continue to make headlines. For some people, they've become the symbol of everything that could be right about America but isn't and their removal from schools, parks and courthouses a symbol of America's decline into depravity and godlessness. For others, displaying the Ten Commandments on government property is trumped by the First Amendment of another famous list, with its prohibition against laws "respecting an establishment of religion." So it's a battle that continues to be fought in Utah and elsewhere, despite two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions attempting to make things clearer.
Our anguish about the Ten Commandments is not just about church and state but about the origins of morality itself.
The Ten Commandments were not the first set of laws instructing people how to behave with each other, nor the first rules about worship. Other, pagan cultures in the Middle East had similar sets of moral imperatives about how to live in community with other people (don't kill or steal from each other, honor your parents), as well as rules about how to please their gods.
But the Ten Commandments were revolutionary in two respects: The laws they prescribed applied to everyone, even the mighty; and the worshipping was to be done not to a collection of gods but to one God with a capital "G." And, unlike the other 600 commandments in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Ten Commandments were literally spoken by God to the entire people of Israel at one time, as they stood at the foot of Mount Sinai, explains Rabbi Joshua Aaronson of Temple Har Shalom in Park City.
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