Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Comparisons between the Bible and the Koran

But the very claiming of these values for Christianity, as opposed to any other religion, is itself offensive and a very good reason to keep religion (call it religion or call it Christianity; the latter is merely one branch of the former) out of politics. Yes, the values themselves are good, but don't Jews or Hindus or Rastafarians or Muslims also believe in those values? What about secularism? These are general values, not by definition attached to any religion.

And bring religion into the mix and you have politicians arguing that their own branch of private morality must be law. Alternative sexualities, even divorce or minority rights: all of these issues get decided on the basis of religious beliefs that may not be shared by the whole population. Be opposed to homosexuality on a personal level if that's what you believe; just don't turn that belief into a set of political principles. I looked up Fred Thompson's website, looking for his political position, and was horrified to discover references to 'sodomy'. I have gay friends and colleagues, some of whom have been with their partners ten years and more, and, sorry, I don't want to see them referred to as 'sodomites'.

I've left abortion out of the above list because it's not an issue of private morality; however, it's also something that tends to be debated and decided on the basis of religious beliefs and is likely to lead to disagreement on the same basis.

Incidentally, just so it's clear where I'm coming from, I was brought up staunchly Episcopalian; went to church faithfully every week and often more than once (in college daily), but gradually became disillusioned as teachings of the mainstream church diverged from my own sense of right and wrong (for example, on gender and other equalities), and as increasingly I see religion used to justify actions I don't support. I'm not at all anti-faith; I just prefer to see it as part of personal lives and kept out of politics.


Wendy

I have to echo Wendy here. As an agnostic, why on earth should I be obliged to follow so-called Christian principles in order to be considered a moral or ethical person? And why on earth do some Christians claim these principles as their own exclusively? My parents were quite able to teach me right from wrong. I need no god to tell me how to behave morally and I find the entire notion that I can't possibly be a moral person or behave ethically unless I follow the Christian god deeply offensive.

This seems to me to perfectly illustrate the entire problem with the premise being discussed. One person's religion being forced onto those who don't share it.

LabRat

Mercy, you asked me a very interesting question:

Let me tell you a little about my parents, Mercy. My father lost his mother when he was eight years old. His mother died of cancer. My father had to leave his home and spend several years with relatives, until his father remarried and could take him home again.

The relatives that my father spent some years with were fundamentalist Pentecostalists. I do believe they were kind to him. However, my father rarely spoke of his childhood, and he seemed relatively uninterested in religious matters. He never spoke about such things. Yes, he went to church with my mother every Sunday, but that was about it. I think the trauma of losing his mother so young and having to leave his father was so great that the religious things his relatives may have tried to teach him just didn't make such an impression on him.

My father was a member of a Pentecostalist church, nevertheless, but he left it when he was twenty-one. He never told me many details, but once he said that money had been disappearing from the congregation, and no one wanted to look into the matter because they were afraid of a scandal. My father disliked that sort of fear, so he left and joined a liberal church, the Swedish Missionary Society, instead.

Unlike my father, my mother has told me a lot about her own childhood. She belonged to a Pentecostalist family, and her parents believed in something that you can apparently read somewhere in the Bible, “you shall not sit down with sinners”. Don't ask me to find that passage for you, and don't blame me if it wasn't an exact quote. But that was the rule that my grandmother and grandfather lived by.

This meant that my mother was not allowed to have any friends who were not Pentecostalists. But since there were so few Pentecostalists where she lived, she was not allowed to have any friends at all except her sister and one other Pentecostalist girl whom she didn't like. None of her classmates were Pentecostalists, so she was never allowed to go home to any of them, or invite any of them home to her, or even spend any time at all with them outside school hours. She has often told me about a time when a circus came to her village. She stood some distance away and watched all the kids in her village file into the big circus tent. Only she, her sister and that other Pentecostalist girl were not allowed to go in.

When my mother was eighteen, she once went to church wearing a thin gold chain around her neck:



The pastor spoke to her after the service, but he didn't say anything about her necklace. But as soon as she had come home again the phone rang. It was the pastor, who wanted to speak to her father, my grandfather. And then the pastor told my grandfather that he had to make sure that his daughter didn't come to church wearing the kind of jewellery that made her look like a harlot.

Now my mother had had enough. As soon as she was able to, she left her home as well as her congregation. She moved to Gothenburg, Sweden's second biggest city, and joined a big church, the Swedish Missionary Society. She made lots and lots of friends there and had an absolutely splendid time. Later she met my father there, and they fell in love and got married.

My mother never returned to the particular Pentecostalist congregation she had left behind, but a person who still belonged there told her that the congregation kept praying for my mother's soul, Sunday after Sunday. They seemed to believe that if she didn't return to her Pentecostalist home, she would probably go to Hell.

When I was a small child, my grandfather took a very great interest in me. When I think back on my childhood, I can see what an imposing figure he was. Whenever we met my grandparents, my grandfather managed to be alone with me. And he often called, and when I answered, he would speak to me for an hour or more.

He always talked about religion with me, behind my mother's back. She never had a clue about what was happening.

My grandfather had lost his daughter to the Swedish Missionary Society. I think he was determined to win me for his own Pentecostalist church. He showered me with religious children's books about Christian little children who were almost supernaturally good and perfect. The horrible thing was that these kids didn't have to pretend to be good. They were absolutely perfect, through and through. They were never angry, petty or sullen. They were forever jubilant because God loved them, and they loved nothing better than showing God their gratitude by being wonderfully good little boys and girls in return. On the extremely few occasions when a girl did something wrong – because it was only the girls who ever did something wrong – she was tearfully happy and grateful to her parents for spanking her to save her soul.

My parents spanked me. I hated it. I never really forgave my parents for doing this to me. There was no way I could ever, ever, ever be grateful to my parents for spanking me. I was so bad. I could never be like the children in my grandfather's religious books. If people only knew how ungrateful I could be!

What would my relatives do to me if they knew how bad I was? I concluded that they would probably take me prisoner and lock me up in a small room, where they would pray with me and scold me and read the Bible to me and never leave me alone and never let me out until I folded and lost my ability to think for myself and became just like them. So I never dared to show them anything at all of my own sheer badness and my religious doubts and confusion, because if I could make them think that I was just a good little girl, they would probably leave me alone.

Up until I was ten, I spent most of my time with people from either the Pentecostalist Church or the Swedish Missionary Society. We spent the summers on an island with our Pentecostalist relatives. Those of my cousins – second cousins – who were girls had to spend much of their time doing household chores. They had to tidy up their brothers' room, hang up their brothers' clothes and make their brothers' beds, and then they had to help their mothers with things like cooking, washing up and doing laundry. When the girls were finally let out of their houses, they merged in a flurry of summer dresses and flowing hair, and then they took off like whirlwinds and disappeared where I couldn't follow.

During the rest of the year I spent a lot of time with girls from my parents' congregation, the Swedish Missionary Society. These girls didn't have to do a lot of household chores, and instead they were shown off by their parents as the family jewels they were. The girls did great at school (well, so did I), they wore splendid clothes and looked great (I didn't) and they certainly knew how to make others feel inferior. Once, when my mother had come to pick me and another girl up after choir practice, this other girl haughtily informed my mother that I had made a spectacle of myself by giggling during the rehearsal.

When I was ten, we moved to another neighbourhood in Malmö, and here I suddenly got some truly great friends. They were kind and tolerant, and they never talked religion with me. They never complained about me to my parents. They liked to be with me, and they didn't try to change me. They liked me for the person that I was! Wow! I had never come across kids like them before.

Thanks to my new friends, I was able to relax and stat looking back on my religious experiences and try to understand them. One thing that really bothered me was how the Pentecostalists and the Swedish Missionary Society people could be so different in their religious behaviour, even though they claimed to believe in the same God.

After thinking about it, I concluded that it was the Pentecostalists who were the better and the more devoted Christians. They seemed to love God more, and they seemed to be willing to sacrifice a lot more for God. The Swedish Missionary Society people, the SMS, seemed a lot more interested in worldly success, and their religion sometimes seemed to be just one more perfect little thing that they flaunted before others to demonstrate how good they were.

So I concluded that the Pentecostalists were God's favourites and the ones who were likely to enter Heaven before all others. I also concluded that while many and perhaps most SMS people would be let into Heaven, they probably knew deep down that they themselves were not as good Christians as the Pentecostalists. I suspected that all Christians somehow knew that the Pentecostalists were God's favourites.

When I was nineteen and in my last year of high school, we were given a school assignment which meant that we had to go to a religious service which was not given by the national Lutheran Church of Sweden which all Swedes were just born into at the time, which meant that practically all Swedes belonged to it. (Nowadays you aren't born into it.) We had to visit a service given by another church and find out facts about this church.

I hated that assignment, because I found it hard enough to deal with two churches, or rather three, the Pentecostalists, the Swedish Missionary Society and the national Lutheran Church of Sweden. I didn't want to find out things about a fourth church as well. But I always did what my teachers told me, so when my best friends decided that they would visit the Mormon church in Malmö, I tagged along.

The service was very unmemorable, but afterwards the pastor took questions from us. I had only one question for the pastor. What did he think about my Pentecostalist relatives and their faith?

At first the pastor ignored my question and pointedly talked to my classmates instead. But when I had repeated the question twice, he finally answered. And he told me that… my Pentecostalist relatives would go to Hell.

To say that I was thunderstruck was putting it mildly. My Pentecostalists relatives would go to Hell? Even though they had devoted all their lives to God? Even though they went to church several times a week and gave away much of their possessions in tithes and contributions to charities? Even though they uttered phrases like “Praise the Lord” and “Halleluia” in every other sentence? Even though their homes were plastered with pictures and posters and paintings of Jesus? Even though they spoke in tongues and burst out in spontaneous prayer at unpredictable moments? They were going to Hell?

I had no reason to assume that the Mormon pastor knew more about the fate of my relatives than my relatives did themselves. But then again, could I assume just like that that the pastor was dead wrong?

The other thing that was so unspeakably shocking about what the Mormon pastor had told me was that he seemed so sincere about it. He wasn't lying to me. He truly believed that my relatives were going to hell.

And finally I had to ask myself – how do I know that religious statements are true at all? Because people believe in them? But there will be other people who are every bit as adamant about not believing in them. How do I know if they are true?

The Mormon pastor told me that only those who had had the Mormon baptism could go to Heaven. What's more, the pastor also told me that now that I knew this, it was my duty to become a Mormon myself, because then I could have the Mormon baptism vicariously for my relatives and thus save them, so that they could go to Heaven. Many years later, I thought to myself that it would be sort of, well, “fun” if I had become a Mormon and baptized myself for my relatives. Because if God prefers Pentecostalists, then my relatives would go to Heaven because they are Pentecostalists. But if God prefers Mormons, then my relatives would go to Heaven because I had baptized myself for them.

Then again, what if God doesn't prefer either Pentecostalists or Mormons? There once was a Monty Python sketch where Saint Peter guarded the gateway to Heaven and told almost all the applicants: “I'm sorry, Sir, the Jews were right all along… follow this way to Hell, Sir…”

The truth is that it is not possible to know what religious creed is the right one, or if indeed there is a right creed at all. So, Mercy, you asked me if it isn't cruel *not* to steer people down the path that you yourself believe is the right one. Yes, perhaps it is. Then again, consider my mother. She was not allowed to have any friends when she grew up, because her parents firmly believed that God only loves Pentecostalists and only wants Pentecostalists to be friends with other Pentecostalists. Were her parents right to treat her this way? Perhaps you say that if she would go to Heaven thanks to the fact that she was made to shun non-Pentecostalists, then her eternal happiness in Heaven will be worth the inconvenience she suffered for a few years on Earth. But what if God doesn't care one bit if you are friends with Pentecostalists or Lutherans or Catholics or Swedish Missionary society people or Mormons or any others?

And what about Muslim parents who treat their girls in a way that we find cruel, just because the parents are honestly convinced that this is the only way for their daughters to get good lives and go to Paradise after death? Should we condemn the parents for treating their daughters in a way we find shocking, or should we say that it would be more cruel for the parents to treat their daughters the way girls are treated here in the west, if the parents thought that this could mean that their daughters will get to spend eternity in Hell?

All I can say is that if people want to deprive me of my rights for my own good, because this is the only way I can go to Heaven according to these people's own faith, then I guess I'm not going to be thankful to them for trying to help me to Heaven.

Ann

I can see I've ruffled some feathers. That was not my intent although I can understand why they were "ruffled."

I think I'll just bow out of this thread for now....

I realize that this thread is over 40 entries long now, but I'm just starting at the beginning, so forgive me if I'm going over old ground.

Ann, first let me so that I'm impressed with your reading - so many people have a habit of saying that such-and-such religion believes this or that without ever having read the source material. Kudos for not doing that! And I've never read to Koran myself (and for that reason I'm not in the habit of commenting on Muslim beliefs), so I was interested in some of the things you said about it.

Regarding female heroines in the Bible -
First, it's true that a lot of women are portrayed in their contexts as mothers. I certainly believe that there many types of heroism, but don't discount the work and sacrifice that goes into being a parent. Mothers (and fathers) make their mark on history in a very real way. Second, what about Esther? This is a woman who saved thousands of people from genocide. She did it by relying on her feminine attributes to be sure, and perhaps that isn't very feminist, but the point is that she did it.

It might be accurate to say that Paul founded the church - the congregation of believers - but he didn't found Christianity. That would imply that he came up with the basic tenants that we follow, and he didn't. He promoted them, and he did a darn good job of it, but they weren't his ideas.

I absolutely agree. Jesus said: 30Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' 31The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'There is no commandment greater than these." (Mark 12:30-31) This is hard to do - very hard sometimes - but I have difficulty understanding why so many Christians just ignore the second part completely and think it's ok to hate certain types of people.

I just heard this for the first time a few weeks ago. A visiting pastor, Ron Something, said it to me and just about bowled me over.

You know, I've heard about this, but I haven't actually seen it in action. Around here people still say Merry Christmas and have Christmas trees. Then again, I live in the south, that may have something to do with it.

Ah, but were we, really? Do Christians have a monopoly on morality? I don't know much about other religions, but it's my understanding that most of them don't condone things like murder. I think it would be more accurate to say that that America was founded on humanist principals. After all, there is nothing in the constitution about God.

I don't. I do believe in the separation of church and state most wholeheartedly. Think of it this way - what if there is a tidal wave of change and in time the President and Congress are dominated by Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or Pagans? I don't want "In Allah We Trust" on my coins, either.

Skipping over lots of stuff about polygamy (because I've never thought much about it, honestly) and the role of women in Christian marriages (because others Steph and Doranwen have already eloquently replied)...

It wasn't the majority of the Jews; it was the Pharisees. The controlling party, if you will. They were threatened by the very fact that so many of their people believed in Jesus. He threatened their power, plain and simple.

Do you have any evidence for this aside from your gut reaction? The Gospels were written as biographies, with the exception John, which is a first person account. And as in all biographies, there is room for error. But, that being said, the Gospels been authenticated in as much as it is possible to authenticate documents that have been around for two millenia. (Check out The Case for Christ .) Regardless of whether a person believes that the events recounted in the Gospels are true, it is an undeniable fact that the Gospels themselves are valid historical documents. To say that they were tampered with is a pretty big leap to make without anything to back it up.

Ann, your story of how you interpreted Christianity as a child makes me so sad. I wish I could make you feel the presence of Jesus the way I do - love and grace without fear.

Hear, hear!

Yes, it does. Just what I quoted above - 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' No, Jesus didn't come right out and say "don't burn witches" in so many words, but he was expecting us to follow the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law. That's like a parent telling their child to come straight home after school. Instead, the kid goes to the mall and then says, "Mom, you didn't say I couldn't go to the mall!" Yes, she did, she just didn't use those words. Obviously there have been and continue to be horrific examples of people not following the spirit of Jesus's words, but that's a human failing.

The reason Christians don't follow Old Testament doctrine is simple - we are saved by grace. We don't need to burn witches or be circumcised because we are not trying to win or keep God's love. We already have it, forever.

It certainly seems that way when you watch tv, and I'm sure there are lots of parents out there that aren't teaching their kids things they need know. But I doubt it's really a majority - if I meet ten random people on the street, I doubt six of them are going to think it's ok to whip out a knife and stab me to death. I'd be suprised if even one thought so. There are still millions upon millions of people with morals and ethics in the world - some are Christians and some aren't.

Now this I certainly agree with. You can separate church and state, but you can't separate a person from their beliefs. When you elect an official, you're electing the whole person. That's why you learn as much as you can about them before you vote. If you don't like their beliefs, don't vote for them.

What the Constitution actually says, by the way is: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Steph, I completely get what you're saying here, but you have to remember that Christians don't have a monopoly on these good traits. I know a lot of people who aren't Christians who are still good people. I'm related to some of them, even. I certainly wish they knew the grace of God, but even though they don't, they still have morals, ethics and a sense of right and wrong, and there are a fair few that I would trust to run the government.

Bottom line - I'm a Christian. I believe in the separation of church and state. Those values aren't mutally exclusive, despite with the media likes to tell us!

The only religion my two kids have been raised in is "The Golden Rule" and they are turning out pretty damn fine. I personally think that if everyone made an effort to just live life and try to incorporate that "Do unto others" concept (and lots of other faiths outside of "Christians" have versions of this in their creeds) that there would be a lot less sadness in this world...excepting of course the psychopaths and sociopaths but then they always play by their own set of rules anyhow, right?? All this worry over heaven and hell and how the neighbours are running their lives when we can create a better place here and now by treating others with the same kindness and caring that we'd hope they show to us. Idealistic I know but it works for me and many others to whom religion has lost all meaning and who want to live life at peace with themselves.

(emphasis mine)
The values Steph listed are the values of the Christian faith; thus, is is accurate for her, as a Christian, to describe them as "Christian values". She neither said nor implied that they are *exclusively* Christian. In fact, the way I read her post, she seems to be saying that they are *not* necessarily exclusive to Christianity. I understood her to say that she is more interested in a person's values than in their religion, and that as long as a man shares her values (forgiveness, giving, faith, hope, love, honesty, generosity, etc.), that is more important to her than what religion he practices. I also understood her to say that she feels we would have a better country if everyone practiced these principles, and that she is glad that the founders of our country believed in them (due to the fact that the founders happened to be, for the most part, Christians, and Christianity teaches these principles.)

I'm sure that's what she meant, Vicki; it's just not what she said. This is what she said:

If she'd said Principles espoused by Christianity and many other faiths, then I wouldn't have picked up on it, though it's true (as LabRat said) that this also excludes atheists and agnostics who also follow a strong code of ethics in their lives.

But I'm sure it was just a poor choice of words


Wendy

I'm not going to get into much but to clarify this for Ann since I don't think it has been clarified.

Another way to say Old Testament and New Testament that I think makes this clearer it is this:

Old Covenant and New Covenant.

The Old Covenant applied to us before Jesus. It was the prophesy and the doctrine telling us of his comming. The New Covenant applies to the new agreement so to speak that we have with God. This is the new doctrine and the new relationship we now have because of Jesus.

I could go into more detail but I think the simple explaination is best here.

~Jojo, who was a Christian Ethics major with a Christian Studies Minor but doesn't touch online debates on religion with a 1,000 ft poll. However she would love to have a cup of tea with Ann and talk about it cause it seems like great fun.

Lol, getting into Old vs. New Covenant could really open up a can of worms. From what I've seen, the OT has two sets of laws: the Ten Commandments (which are still binding, as Jesus kept them and never mentioned them disappearing), and the rest (which, although the principles behind them are still sound, the actual laws were designed for the culture and place that the Israelites were, and no longer apply to us today). I believe there's a couple differing views of that out there, though. Some believe all the ritual laws still apply today (and I wonder what they do because they don't have a temple to go sacrifice at), and others believe the Ten Commandments are somehow done away with now . . .

The Old Testament religion wasn't really based on works either--it's not like the sacrifice of the animal actually did take away the sins--but it was based on the hope of the future Sacrifice yet to come, and all the ritual was designed in a way to point minds and hearts towards the future Messiah, to help people see the gravity of their sins and repent. But God has never operated on works--the Israelites could no more earn their way to heaven than we can today. Salvation was a promised gift then, and it's a waiting gift now.

I would argue that the Ten Commandments are not exactly binding today, not all of them. First of all, the way the Bible describes them, it is hard to argue that there are ten of them. They way I see them, it makes more sense to argue that they are eleven. Here's how the Bible describes them:

Let's repeat them, commandment for commandment. This would be number one:

Number two:

Number three:

Number four:

Number five:

Number six:

Number seven:

Number eight:

Number nine:

Number ten:

Number eleven:

Admittedly, it is possible to merge commandment number two, the ban against making graven images and other pictures, and commandment number three, the ban against worshipping the graven images and other pictures. If we merge them, we do get ten commandments rather than eleven.

What Christianity has done, however, is that it has merged commandments one, two and three, and then it has conveniently forgotten commandment number two, the ban against making graven images and other pictures, as well as commandment number three, the ban against worshipping such images. (To come up with ten commandments after this merger, it was necessary to split the last commandment up in two.)

Anyway, we have apparently lost and forgotten one or two entire commandments, the commandments against making pictures and worshipping them.

Who can say that we aren't making pictures?

Uncle Sam poster made up of 700 different pictures

And who can say that Christians have never been worshipping before graven images, like this statue of a man who is seen worshipping (a statue of) Mary? Can we say that no Christians have ever bowed down before statues of Mary and Jesus and prayed and worshipped before these statues?



Why have Christians forgotten the commandments against making images and worshipping before them, even though those commandments are there to read in the Bible, plain as day? There are two answers to that one. First, when Christianity tried to export itself to the Roman Empire, it quickly became clear that the Christians couldn't seriously challenge and ban all the statues and paintings that decorated the heartland of the Empire:



Could the Christians just demand that the Romans simply throw out all their statues and paintings? Sure. Why don't you ask them to spit on their Emperor, too?

The Romans made heroic statues of their Emperors. This is Augustus:



On the relatively few occasions when the Christians were persecuted in Rome, they were usually accused of refusing to bow down before a statue of the Emperor and worship before that statue. Refusing to do so could be seen as treason.

There was just no way that the Christians could make the Romans believe that it was wrong to make statues and paintings. If the Christians wanted to make themselves acceptable to the Romans, they had to stop criticizing Roman art.

And stop criticizing it is what they did, so thoroughly that most Christians today don't know that the commandments actually contain a ban against pictures. I'm very glad that no one in the west tries to uphold that Biblical ban against pictures. But it bothers me that some Christians are so sure that they are obeying the ten commandments, and yet they don't know what the ten commandments are, because they haven't looked for them in the Bible.

Ann

Dorawen wrote:
Separating the Ten Commandments from the rest of the Mosaic law isn't proper. You can say that they provide a general overview of the intent of the Mosaic law, or that they're an introduction to the law, that they give us a hint of what's in God's mind and heart, or that they're excellent moral principles to live by. But to state that they are separate entities is incorrect. The Jews of Jesus' day didn't do that, and there's no indication that the writer of Exodus intended that they be separate.

While it's true that Jesus never "turned off" the Ten Commandments, it isn't true that they are binding to us today in the sense that we have to live by them or get punished by God or by civil authorities in this life. They are, however, still binding in the sense that they are moral guideposts for us, signs to point us in the direction we're all supposed to live.

And it is also true that we are not responsible today to fulfill the law of Moses in its entirety, even assuming (as Dorawen correctly pointed out) that there was a Temple at which we could perform those mandated sacrifices. The other point I would like to make is that the Lord gave the law of Moses to Israel to follow, not to all mankind in general. Which means that, in order to live a righteous life, we must individually follow Jesus and discover what He wants each of us to do (beyond that which is revealed in the Bible, of course).

There are two reasons I make the distinction that I did. One is that we don't live in a theocracy as the ancient Israelites did. The other is the implication of what happened in the Temple as Jesus died--the curtain separating the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place ripped in two. This was a huge, thick, heavy curtain that no man could ever hope to rip with his bare hands. It was also far taller than any man could ever be, hence the ripping of it was a clear supernatural event. As it happened at the same time Jesus died, and Jesus was *the* Passover Lamb (plus other significance of the temple that I don't remember right now but have studied), the ripping of the curtain signals an end to the sacrifices. Many people have used this as an excuse to say that the Ten Commandments no longer apply.

I will pause to explain why ten commandments: they are ten because we group each commandment that speaks on a particular theme. I am not sure that it matters so much whether there are ten or not, as I can't recall Jesus ever naming the *number*. When he talks to the rich young man, he names off the six commandments that deal with relating to others (leaving off the four that deal with relating to God). It's pretty clear that the verses on making images and bowing to them are related and belong together; remember that verses are a construct of medieval scholars, as the Bible originally didn't even have punctuation, much less verses! And yes, you are correct, Ann, many Christians have not paid attention to the 2nd commandment. The Roman Catholic Church wished to bring more pagans into the fold, pagans who were accustomed to bowing to their idols and statues (and the pretty colors and images would make the worship a "richer" experience), and so they began to make saints of people and sell people pictures of them to pray to (the money didn't hurt either). Although I don't think they ever altered the Bible text itself, in many (perhaps even today, I don't have one to check) Catholic Bibles the special pages with the Ten Commandments on them for easy reference will look a little different than the ones Protestants are used to, as they cut the 2nd commandment (the one about idols) out entirely, and dropped much of the 4th commandment (as they had instituted Sunday as a day of worship to bring more pagans in, the glaring text proclaiming the *seventh* day was a little too obvious). Many Christians have bowed to idols unwittingly--but what God looks at is the heart. It is those who have led them astray that will bear the blame for it.

Anyway, although all the signs make it clear that Jesus was the ultimate Sacrifice (doing away with a need for more sacrifices), it doesn't do away with the moral precepts behind the law, which are embodied in the Ten Commandments. They are not separate laws so much (as I'm afraid I made it sound) as one set is the guidelines and the other set is the implementation. A good example is our laws today in the US. The Constitution sets out ideals such as everyone having the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If they left it at that, people would run roughshod over others because the laws aren't specific. So the specific laws were created to make the ideals obvious and to keep people from maliciously ignoring them. The laws, however, cannot be made to fit every single possible case that could ever exist, and so they are only partial approximations of the principles. In the theocracy the Israelites lived in, the principles in the Ten Commandments were the ideals to live by, and the laws were the approximations of the principles, but necessarily limited. This is another reason why we see laws that don't seem to be completely fair. God required enough to start changing people, but those who really followed Him would show it by applying the *principles* to what they did, not just the laws. We see some of the difference there in relation to the six levels of moral development that are known in modern psychology.

Hence, although we no longer need to follow the literal laws as laid out, the moral principles in the Ten Commandments are timeless and apply even today. The six principles regarding one's neighbor still apply: honor your parents, don't murder, don't steal, don't commit adultery, don't lie, don't covet. It also stands to reason that the four principles governing our interactions with God still do: put God first in everything, don't bow and worship images, don't use God's name lightly or for cursing, and keep the Sabbath day holy. The actual details of how each of these principles looks when put into practice may vary slightly depending on culture and upbringing (this is where the questions come in that will split a group down the middle, each side believing strongly that they're trying to do what is right), which is where it reverts to our conscience, and as Terry said, we have to seek out God's will and earnestly try to do what He impresses on us is right. In many cases there are other clues in the Bible that help us decide what God wants, but in the more complex dilemmas there isn't always an obvious right answer.

I hope that makes things a little more clear--thanks for correcting my error in making them seem too separate.