"If the Ten Commandments constitute our greatest source of morality, why is it there no commandments saying do not rape, do not torture, or do not commit incest, yet there are commandments against swearing, working on Sunday, and making statues to other gods?"

Bill Maher is being deceptive. "Thou shalt not commit adultery" is a commandment. It was later explained by Jesus as such "If you even LOOK at a woman who is not your wife, you have commited adultery in your heart". So, rape and incest are certainly covered, as marriage is consent and you cannot marry a close relevative. It does not matter what the modern english definition of adultery is. The commandment itself means what Jesus said it means.

Luther insists that "Thou shalt not murder" covers even harming your fellow man in the slightest way. Even if it did not, Torture would be covered by "Thou shalt not steal". Torture steals a person's dignity. Ergo, it's covered.

You might argue that a commandment against theft does not deal with intangible assets, however, that would be putting an arbitary limit on an infinite God.

Now, the astute Orwell reader might compare this to thoughtcrime. However, Jesus himself in word and deed advocated separation of church and state, to wit, saying "My Kingdom is not of this world" and "Give to caesar what is caesar's". Every sort of bad behavior you could think of is covered by the ten commandments, and the ten commandments are by design impossible for anyone but Jesus to keep.

Bill Maher does, in his deception, raises the point that many so-called Christians like Bush are ignorant of God's law. Indeed, some "defenders" of the ten commandments could not recite them.

Sadly, that point will probably go over many people's heads.

I think your point is way overstated. The very notion that a politician might be a hypocrite - perish the thought.

hypocrisy is one thing. But this is ignorance combined with hypocrisy. I'd rather have a smart hypocrite in office instead of a stupid hypocrite.

this is what Jesus had to say:

"The first of all the commandments is, . . . thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

And the second is like, namely this,

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. -- Mark 12:28-31

I don't think this is a matter of intelligence. Bush is often, or rather constantly being slammed for his supposed stupidity. I don't think that's actually a just conclusion. It's easy to call someone stupid who holds beliefs that you and your friends don't agree with at all - as in diametrically opposed. Taken from a high level its not stupidity so much as rigidity or flat out an ideology that doesn't have any common ground with your own.

As for hypocriticism, everyone is guilty of it and a stupid person is no more evil than an intelligent one. Indeed you can easily make the claim that an intelligent hypocrite is worse, as that person knows better.

The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are that love is the most important virtue.

The story of the Decalouge is from the older Jewish text.

Jesus was one of many rebels against the hypocrisy of the Jewish religious leadership of his day.

While the Ten Commandments story is clearly a significant part of the foundation of the concept that we now call law, it does not stand alone. It is also not complete. To make the Decalouge appear to be a complete representation of law, you are required to push interpretation of the text beyond it's reasonable limits.

We are dodging the meat of this issue. The Decalouge has been turned into a political football recently by Dominionist Christians. The Church has no place in a modern secular government.

Everyone is free to practise their own religious beliefs. We don't need an Official Religion.

"To make the Decalouge appear to be a complete representation of law, you are required to push interpretation of the text beyond it's reasonable limits."

Reasonable? Is it reasonable to say Christians do not forbid rape, incest and torture?? Meanwhile, I push nothing. I am merely parroting the true meaning of the decalogue, establish nearly 2000 years ago by Jesus himself.

"The Decalouge has been turned into a political football recently by Dominionist Christians."

Bill Maher is certainly using it as a political football. Does that make him one of them there dominionists?

Corrupt Buddha takes another quotation of Jesus on the commandments. Jesus has commented on the commandments many times. In Buddha's quotation, Jesus distilled the ten commandments into two. But this is not meant to subtract from the ten(Except in the liberal mind where they invent instances of God contradicting himself. Even if God has contradicted himself, this is not a case of such). To steal, murder, or lie is to fail to love your neighbor.

To rape and torture is to fail to love as well.

"Everyone is free to practise their own religious beliefs."

It would be a WONDERFUL world if this statement were true. It is not. In the muslim world, people are killed if they leave the faith and become a different religion. In America, there might be nominal freedom, but there is also stigma. When a jackass like Bill Maher gets a bullhorn, and is allowed to make absurd comments like "rape is not forbidden by the ten commandments", and such stupid comments go UNCHALLENGED by people of faith, it puts a stigma on the rest of us. Obama had a decent response, but he still let Bill Maher off the hook for a GROSS misrepresentation of the faith of over a billion people.

After reading this I better understand where you were coming from. At this point I don't think you WAY overstated your point, but maybe just simply overstated it. I believe your argument requires a certain mindset or belief in order to agree with it. I see Christians misrepresenting their faith on a daily basis. I see all religious people misrepresenting their faith on a daily basis. I consider it human nature and not malice or ignorance. You don't need to be so grandiose as torture or murder in order to slander and injure your faith - simply lying or socially cutting someone is sufficient to do so.

I'm an atheist which gives me liberty to do whatever I wish within the confines of my own moral and ethical beliefs - beliefs which are free to change as my view of the world changes. A Christian, Buddhist, Shinto priest, Muslim, Jew, whathaveyou is bound to behave in manner outlined by the articles of his/her/it's faith and anything less is slandering the faith they proclaim to hold.

Now I understand your complaint. You wish to silence Bill Maher because he made jokes about those who would impose a theocracy on the US.

Good luck with that.

No, I don't want him silenced. I want people of faith to be educated enough to be able to have a rebuttal when he says such outrageous crap-- Especially if they are public figures like politicians.

"I want people of faith to be educated enough to be able to have a rebuttal when he says such outrageous crap"

In all fairness then you should state that the OSM has 613 commandments, that heysus is a fictional character and that the Buddah predates the xtain mythology which is why it filks from it and every other available source material.

While I agree that a reasonable case might be made for the position that the prohibition of adultery could also cover rape and incest, the point that the prohibition of theft covers torture is a huge stretch.

And the commandment against adultery would NOT prohibit marital rape or incest -- both of which almost certainly were in fact permitted and practiced by early Jews.

And in any case, it is clear that the way the commandments were interpreted by those to whom the were supposedly given was much different from that.

As I see it, the only mistake Maher made was the assertion that the commandments prohibit working on Sunday -- it clearly applies to Saturday instead.

Since you apparently speak for the educated part of the community of the faithful, perhaps you can explain this to me: I was raised to believe that Judaism was a monotheistic faith: that in Judaism there was only one God, all others being false. Christians took this position quite literally, going as far as burning Bogomils and other dualist heretics for allowing the possibility that there wasn't a complete monopoly operating in the God business.

But the commandment, as i remember it, goes "I am the lord thy God, and thou shalt have no other gods before me."

That doesn't say that no other gods EXIST, just that we're all bound to the worship of the God from whom Moses received the tablets, and not the EXCLUSUVE worship, mind you, but just the PRIMARY worship. To be first in line doesn't eliminate all the other guys in line, now, does it? So what about the other gods? Can we worship them a little in our spare time, say on the weekend (except for Sunday, of course)? Maybe wednesday afternoons?

I remember when i was a kid, the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship types thought Anselm's Ontological Proof was an absolute ironclad proof that there was only one God and it was Their God. Actually, it proved nothing of the kind. Professional Christian polilticans are even dumber than the ICF, by and large. They aren't going to rebut Maher. He'd make them look like fools, which is what they are, except for the total hypocrites like Giuliani who REALLY believe in nothing.

It’s necessary to recall that the 10 commandments didn’t arise de novo but as an exposition of the normative ethical values of the human society that authored the scripture in which they appear. They’re a code of behavior based on what a primitive nomadic middle eastern society a few thousands of years ago found empirically to be of utility in governing and maintaining their society. There aren’t prohibitions against torture, or slavery, or rape, etc., because at that time their society viewed torture as a necessary tool, slavery as a respectable institution, and rape to be already covered under the general prohibition against theft (given that women were viewed as being either the property of their patriarchal family or the husband to whom they were given in marriage.)

There are more types of "gods" than dieties. Anything people worship, whether it be an economic system, such as capitalism or communism, or a person, like a singer or actor or ballplayer, or an inanimate object, such as a family heirloom, money, the land, or the sun, is forbidden.

Imagine if the Israeli came across sun worshippers with the paradigm that all other gods were false. The sun worshippers could just point and say, uh, guys, our god is real. There he is!