Interestingly, the biblical god does not base his rules on their universal moral qualities. Instead, the Ten Commandments “unmistakably rest even the universally accepted prohibitions (as against murder, theft, etc.) on the sanction of the divinity proclaimed at the beginning of the text,” as the Supreme Court noted in a ruling against governmental displays of the Ten Commandments.8 This puts the commandments on shaky ground, as we’ve seen it is, at best, only Moses’s word that vouches for the divine origins of the tablets. Formulations of these rules in other cultures are actually based on
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