Something To Think About - 10

The Ten Commandments and Religious Conversion - Part 5


It seems to be not a bad idea to conclude a serious discussion with a few comments on a rather lighter note. The Fourth and Fifth Commandments of Moses conveniently help us along in that direction.


“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work:
But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.”

This is how the Fourth Commandment reads.


And the Fifth Commandment says: “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee.”


In his highly illuminating, entertaining and thought-provoking book “Don’t Know Much About the Bible” (Avon Books, Inc., New York), Kenneth C. Davis points out, “While the sacredness of the Ten Commandments has always been held up as central to American law and virtue, people through the centuries have done a pretty poor job when it comes to obeying them. Even Israel’s greatest national hero, King David, didn’t fare too well when it came to following the commandments. He broke the Sabbath rule at least once – as Jesus also later does – and he murdered, committed adultery, and coveted………… With that in mind, take a closer look at the Ten Commandments and see just how well modern society does in observing this basic, presumably immutable, set of rules.”


It would appear, then, that the Fourth and Fifth Commandments too need to be taken with an appropriate pinch of salt, just as it happens with any other commandment.


In this book Kenneth C. Davis makes a few tongue-in-cheek comments about the Fourth Commandment. Here are a few gems.
** First of all, note it does not say the Lord “hallowed it for NFL football”. Does watching six to eight hours of sports on Sunday count as keeping the Sabbath holy?

** In New York city – long famed as “Sin City” – you still cannot buy a bottle of wine or vodka from a liqour store on Sunday, even though you can buy beer in a grocery store after noon and order a drink in a restaurant. Go figure.

** Of course, Christians have no monopoly on circumventing Sabbath holiness rules. Many observant Jews have long found ways to get around the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. Before the days of modern electrical timers that could turn televisions and other appliances on or off, Jews commonly employed Christians – “sabbath goys” – to perform certain predetermined services, such as turning on their lights.


These light-hearted comments by Kenneth C. Davis certainly show up the considerable amount of hypocrisy involved in the way the commandments are obeyed/disobeyed and followed/violated in practice. However he follows this up by pointing out how Jesus Christ himself openly disobeyed this particular commandment. “He and his disciples were accused by the priests and rabbis of Jerusalem of violating the commandment by ‘laboring’ on the Sabbath. Jesus responded to his Sabbath-day critics in two ways. First, he said the things he was doing on the Sabbath, such as healing the sick, were too important to put off. And Jesus also professed a belief that internal holiness, an inner sense of spirituality, was more important than the ‘show-off’ piety, typified by the Sabbath templegoers who outwardly kept God’s commandments but then behaved badly the rest of the week.”


This is a very telling comment on the ‘Book-ishness’ of the two religions who claim their going by their Books as their major strong point, the Christians with their Bible and the Muslims with their Koran. And they claim that Hinduism does not have “A” Book of that type. How amateurish and how ignorant! As Kenneth C. Davis has brought into sharp focus above, most often people toy with the commandments to suit their personal convenience and commercial interests, while hypocritically accusing others of violating rules even if they do it in a just and righteous cause. And Jesus Christ has only too clearly demonstrated how the spirit of the rule has to be understood, using one’s brain, intelligence, education, knowledge, discretion etc which are God-given assets, and put to good use in rendering service to one’s fellow beings.


“Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee,” is what the Fifth Commandment says. Does it mean that just by ‘honour-ing’ one’s father and mother one will live to a ripe old age of 100 or 150 or 200 years? Does one want it anyway? Does it mean caring for them by providing them with shelter, food and other necessities to keep them comfortable, or catering to their every wish and doing their bidding lifelong? As Kenneth C. Davis points out: “This commandment was aimed at protecting the elderly and sick from being abandoned to the elements once they were no longer productive members of the tribe.” Even though he makes these remarks with reference to the semi-nomadic desert tribes of the Biblical age, isn’t it true of the very materialistic, very commercial, very selfish Western society as it obtains today?


Davis also adds, “Many people doubt that such a commandment demands unqualified acceptance. Does the physically or emotionally abused child have to ‘honor’ an abusive parent? Sadly, an observer of the modern world might conclude that, in an era of increasingly commonplace physical and sexual abuse of children, perhaps a better commandment would be Honor thy children.”


God might have said, “Honour thy father and thy mother”. It is understandable. But the second part of the Commandment seems to be the result of some sort of poetic licence employed by whoever wrote this down, to give free scope for his imagination. Any commandment or injunction or “God’s Word”, as it is called, throws up this query as to what exactly is the wheat portion given out by God and what is the chaff added by various people while handing it down by oral tradition initially and transcribing it into writing later.


This idea of questioning the rationale of a concept and understanding it properly may be novel to the “Book-ish” religions whose leaders demand unquestioning obedience to the Books by the laity while reserving to themselves the right to interpret the rules according to their own convenience. The Vedic religion, on the other hand, has always encouraged people to use their discretion, ask questions and arrive at their own conclusions according to their own understanding. This aspect is brought out clearly in many of the Upanishads wherein spiritual concepts are expounded in the form of discussions between the preceptor and the disciples who are encouraged to think for themselves to get at the truth. Nowhere is it brought out more pointedly than in the Bhagawat Gita, a lesson in the philosophical, spiritual as well as practical aspects of leading one’s day-to-day life, given by Lord Krishna to Arjuna. Almost at the end of a long discourse running into about 700 verses, Krishna tells Arjuna that He has given him all the knowledge He possibly can and it is upto Arjuna now to think over it, reflect on all that has been said and arrive at his own decision and act according to that.


It is in this context that Kenneth C. Davis makes this very sensible and realistic remark, “They should remind modern readers that the Bible was composed a long time ago for a very different group of people. This is where people have to determine what is law appropriate to desert nomads four thousand years ago, and which are universal laws that transcend time and setting”. One may add that even in the case of universal laws which transcend time and setting, the way it is used, the exact scope of its application, may vary with time and the nature of the setting as well as the context of the situation.


In any civilisation, in any type of community, at any era, principles do get distorted as time goes by, vested interests twist the scriptural messages to suit their convenience, and corrupt practices get injected in the society. Many civilisations and many faiths have fallen by the wayside as time goes on. Even though Hinduism, taking off from the ancient Vedic religion, has also stumbled quite often, divine personages, as well as social reformers not considered to be divine personalities, have appeared on the scene from time to time to reinterpret and revalidate the rules appropriate to the prevailing social environment, and give a fresh direction to it and resurrect it.


Isn’t it significant that in Christianity people are referred to as “flock of sheep” and their God is called the Shepherd? Sheep are singularly known for their brainlessness. And that is precisely what the Popes, the Archbishops, the Bishops and the entire church hierarchy want their “flock” to be. From their flock they want brainless, unthinking, unquestioning faith and acceptance of whatever they claim as God’s Word as given in the Bible. In Hinduism too, distortions have occurred over a period of time whereby elders with vested interests, including religious leaders, have appropriated for themselves the right to interpret the scriptures and impose some rigid practices for people to follow. However, the Vedic scriptures encourage people to use their God-given gift called the brain and think for themselves. Take for example just one verse from Rig veda which says: Aa no bhadraah kratavo yantu viswathah. This means: let noble, auspicious, propitious thoughts, intelligence, talents come to us from all directions from all over the universe. In simple, plain language, what it says is: Do not blindly follow any thoughts or practices just because you have been instructed to do so by somebody. Keep your mind open always to receive good ideas from anywhere and use them to improve your own understanding of things, and fashion your life accordingly. What a huge difference between the “flock of sheep” concept of Christianity and the intelligent, thinking, human being, the homo sapiens concept of the Vedic religion!


Without knowing the ABC of Hinduism, or even of their own religion for that matter, the Popes are giving a call for the evangelisation of India and of Far Eastern Asia for the Harvest of Faith Programme for the third millennium. What a pity!
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