'Thou Shalt Not!'
Christian nationalists hope to impose Biblical law on the American people. How would that look?
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024).
Next week: ‘God’s faith in Job’ (6th of 7 essays on Judaism)
I REMEMBER my primary-school (Christian) teacher ordering us to recite the Ten Commandments.
We lined up on the dais and each boy had to step forward and recall a commandment.
If we stumbled or got the commandments in the wrong order, the teacher whacked us with his cane. He didn’t hit us hard, and we treated it as a game.
‘Ham!’ the teacher barked. ‘Commandment Six: Thou shalt not – what?’
‘Ah . . . er . . . kill, sir?’
Whack!
‘Hahahahahahaha!’
‘The word you’re looking for, Ham, is '“murder”.’
The striking thing about the Ten Commandments is the finality of the ‘not’, which forecloses any h…