Passing over religious imperatives concerning false gods, idols, misuse of God's name and the keeping of the Sabbath, we have six rules of social organization. They include respect for parental authority and prohibitions against murder, theft, adultery, perjury and covetousness.
And that, we are told, is the foundation of Judeo-Christian law.
The often-cited commandments are good rules, but they are not enough. Civilizations which last the longest and produce the least misery among their members follow an even earlier commandment, the Zeroth Commandment.
According to biblical history, the prophet Moses and his band of outcasts were following the Zeroth Commandment when they received the Ten. They were moving on.
Genesis1:28 gives us, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle and all the animals that crawl on the earth," a passage which is widely summarized as "go forth and multiply". The term "earth", as used in the ancient texts, refers not to the planet earth, a concept which was unrecognized at the time, but to the condition of existence distinguished from heaven and hell. We are enjoined to fill all of existence, the space between the stars included, with copies of ourselves.
As a species, we humans have been gifted with intelligence and imagination. These are the tools which allow us to obey the zeroth commandment of God by leaving the earth, which we now know to be only one of many planets in God's creation. So far, we have demurred, which brings us to the need for a Newer Testament.
In the approaching season, for it is nearly Christmas, we will hear a great deal about the need for charity from persons who subscribe to Christianity, the ethics of Charles Dickens, or both. We must also throw Marxists into the charity league, since, for them, "to each according to his need; from each according to his ability" is axiomatic.
To Christianity, some have said, we owe the decline of the Roman Empire after Christ. The first five books of St. Augustine's City of God are a defense against those pagan accusers who claimed that the Christian religion, by prohibiting worship of the gods, brought about all the calamities of the world, especially the sack of Rome by the Goths. Augustine argues that the tribulations of Rome began before the coming of Christ, and that, far from preserving Rome from harm, the gods it worshipped plunged Roman society into a moral corruption from which it could not recover.
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