Here is today’s The Big Questions, with Maryam Namazie and Peter Tatchell and Andrew Copson. The question is
Have human rights laws achieved more for mankind than religion?
Hahahahahaha yes of course they have, that’s an easy one, thank you for watching, good bye.
I’ve paused it at 4:00 because Nicky Campbell – the presenter – just said
The 10 commandments is often cited as a perfect distillation and perfect example of human rights.
That’s the most ridiculous claim I’ve heard in whenever. The what? The 10 commandments have almost nothing to do with human rights, apart from the very minimal right not to be murdered or robbed or lied to. Most of it is about god’s rights, not our rights. What a completely absurd thing to say.
I really don’t think the right not to be murdered is very minimal (it’s a right I enjoy every day), but I get your point.
I think what Ophelia means by “minimal” is the kind of thing that even the most minimal human rights document ought to include. However, I don’t think the Ten Commandments encode the right not to be lied to…what they encode is a prohibition against “bearing false witness against a neighbour”, which I take to mean “don’t lie about them.”
The ten condiments are a fourth rate interpretation of a third hand copy by a second rate religion of the first legal code handed down in human history, the Code Of Hammurabi. (Condiments are something unnecessary that people add on for personal taste. Forcing others to consumer them is offensive, rejecting them is not.)
The Code Of Hammurabi predates the Old Detestable by 1300 years, travelling along the Silk Road during that time. The fable of the ten condiments even rips off the Sumerian fable of how “Marduk shone light from the skies and burnt it into rock for King Hammurabi” (re: the Old Detestable’s “lightning wrote onto stone for moses”).
And it’s not the only thing ripped off from Sumerian stories (re: the flood fable), Greek myth, Egyptian myth, hindu myth(re: krishna -} kristos -} christ) and many others. Pretty much everything in the book o’ blood is plagiarized from somewhere else, and poorly done at that. If anything in the buybull has any value and moral lessons, the writers stole it from someone else who thought of it first.
The popular Protestant version is not only not a human rights document but violates important rights found in the U.S. Constitution. The commandments about theocracy and censorship violate the First Amendment. The 10th commandment is about property, so it condones slavery and says wives are husbands’ property. We forbid slavery and say women are citizens with rights to vote and hold public office.
I would also tell this guy that the Bible has 3 different versions of the 10Cs, one of which is very different from the others and is the only one specifically called the 10Cs. Its 10th C is about not cooking a baby goat in its mother’s milk. What human right is that? The fact that Judaism, Catholicism and Protestantism can’t even agree on which version is the real 10Cs and how to phrase them adds to its problems.
Finally, that great human rights advocate Adolf Hitler praised the 10Cs as one of the greatest moral codes. And the great human rights advocates who defended slavery cited the 10th C as proof God endorsed enslaving Africans.