Rating the alternatives to the Ten Commandments

2025/06/26

All fields must settle, sometimes, into fertile fallow. As I continue to work on bigger poetry projects ¹ I find myself with a slop-content-shaped hole in my heart. This is why God invented rating things out of 10. Today, I revisit one of my favorite struggling Wikipedia articles, Alternatives to the Ten Commandments, until I get bored, in hopes of mocking attempts to seek moral truth, sincere and insincere alike. Will I be pleasantly surprised, or will I feel only the joy of mocking those who are bad at mocking the flawed structures of our world?

Bertrand Russell (1951)

Favorites:
(1) Do not feel absolutely certain of anything;
(3) Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed;
(6) Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

Weirdest parts:
(4) When you meet with opposition, even if should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent on authority is unreal and illusory.

We start off with Bert Russell, the coolest philosopher ever to be a basically pleasant bureaucrat rather than a sexy murder poet.² That makes his Ten Commandments actually really strong. I like his use of cute parallel structures, and how they serve as a sketch of a justification for everything he says. It shows that he's trying to construct ethical principles from something. "If you use power to suppress opinions, they will suppress you back" is kind of nonsense but it's really meaningful nonsense.

Sure, "from your husband or your children" is a strange framing of us as housewives being lectured at, but the principles here are just strong! I like truth as a virtue! I like skepticism! I like argument in place of authority! It's kind of just ten good, mutually coherent beliefs. 9/10.

Ten Commandments of Socialist Morality and Ethics (1958)

Favorites:
(3) You should help to eliminate the exploitation of man by man;
(7) You should always strive to improve your performance, be thrifty and consolidate socialist labor discipline.

Weirdest parts:
(9) You should live clean and decent and respect your family;
(2) You should love your fatherland and always be ready to use all your strength and ability to defend the workers' and peasants' power.

When this one goes hard, it goes hard! "Eliminate the exploitation of man by man" is cool in a way rivaled only by supervillain speeches. I also vastly prefer being pro-personal-discipline over assuming "after the revolution, there will be no need for the distributive principle or thriftiness".

But, come on. Sneaking the fatherland business into some line about peasant power is really cheaty. How convenient that the First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party thinks we should respect the fatherland! And the ninth one, about cleanliness and decency, sucks because those words could mean literally anything. Not to kick East Germany while it's down, but Moses didn't bring home a tablet that said "Thou shalt not do indecent things that cause various harms", it listed specific harms like murder. Make a claim about something, you know? 7/10.

Anton LaVey (1967)

Favorites:
(3) When in another's lair, show them respect or else do not go there.

Weirdest parts:
(5) Do not make sexual advances unless you are given the mating signal;
(4) If a guest in your lair annoys you, treat him cruelly and without mercy;
(11) When walking in open territory, bother no one. If someone bothers you, ask them to stop. If they do not stop, destroy them.

I like that the founder of the Church of Satan is always talking about "lairs" and "mating signals" and shit. He is out here saying "I'm a Satanist and I have a lair", and that's way cooler than respectability. I also like that, seemingly, he went "The Bible has ten rules? Oh yeah? Well I have eleven!!!"

A lot of them are orthogonal to what I believe, though. Not bad, necessarily, just on a different axis. "If a guest in your lair annoys you," says Anton, "treat him³ cruelly and without mercy". Like... okay? I can see saying "You have the right to treat him cruelly", or "Treating him cruelly and without mercy might be an extension of your own internality". But saying I gotta? A normal position, at least from an anarchist perspective, might be that when someone annoys you, you can make threats based on the things you control (e.g. "I don't want to work for you anymore, then" or "Not in my house"), and outside of violence that's all we have. So identifying that ability to threaten isn't offensive to me, but LaVey jumps the gun. Is it a moral good to respond to everything that "bothers" or "annoys" me with full force, with cruelty or even "destroy[ing] them"? Because a lot of the time I go "that annoys me, but I don't want to use the resources I have at hand to deal with it".

Also, he talks about magic, claiming that if magic helps you out and you deny its power, you'll "lose all you have obtained". That's a weird threat, right? This just makes magic seem so non-noumenal. Imagine if the Ten Commandments were like "Thou shalt not murder, because if you murder, you might get caught, or a community might miss the person you murdered". 5/10.

Summum (1975)

Favorites:
(2) As above, so below; as below, so above;
(6) "Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause... Chance is just a name for Law not recognized".

Weirdest parts:
(7) Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles; Gender manifests on all levels.

This one has lore! Summum is a religion(?) that says, actually, these were the first seven principles Moses brought down, before the Ten Commandments. They're all stuff like "the universe is a mental creation" and "everything vibrates"-- basically, the world is ideal and deterministic but the thing that determines it is New-Agey dualities / oppositions of various kinds. I feel like that's a lot of metaphysics for a Ten Commandments-- cool, all paradoxes may be reconciled, but tell me how to act given that!

The best one is the shortest: "As above, so below; as below, so above" is a neat little encapsulation of what they mean when they say the world is a "mental creation". I also reacted strongly to "Gender is in everything" (I'm listening!) followed by "Everything has its masculine and feminine principles" (No! No! Bad Summum! No gender essentialism in the house!) Everything else, though, rolled right past me. I read that everything flows or whatever, and my reaction is as follows: "Okay... so am I supposed to start meditating, or get mummified⁴, switch to A432, or what?" It's not their fault that Wikipedia compared their list to the Ten Commandments, but commandments these are not. 4/10.

George Carlin (2001)

He boils them down to just three:

1. Thou shalt always be honest and faithful, especially to the provider of thy nookie.
2. Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone – unless, of course, they pray to a different invisible man from the one you pray to.
3. Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself.

Look. Maybe Carlin's performance here really sells what's happening here. That said... as a written text, this is just nothing. "Invisible sky daddy" stuff probably went hard in an age of post-9/11 radical reactionary sentiment (who knows? I was 1). Nowadays, it's an eye-roller. Reducing religion to "choose your invisible man" completely evaporates my interest in what Carlin has to say-- I'd allow incorrectness or a playground-level insult, but not both at once.

And he doesn't even have the decency to stick the landing! The idea of killing people based on sky daddy, even under the veil of obvious sarcasm, is so repulsive to him that he has to tag out of that persona immediately. He has to end on a sincere expression of his thesis, but he still can't bear to not ventriloquize the invisible sky man believer he's made up for us because he hates that dude's guts too much. But it's unclear why he hates this murderer so much. It's not because of the murders; if it were, you'd think he'd dismiss us with something stronger than "hey man, you don't bother me, I don't bother you"! My heart is not warmed by the great works of Reddit-atheist pseudo-pluralism. 2/10.

Ten Offers of Evolutionary Humanism (2005)

Favorites: (10) ...become a part of the tradition of those who desire(d) to make the world a better place in which to live.

Weirdest parts: (1) Serve neither foreign nor familiar "gods"...to possess science, philosophy, and art means not to need religion! (4) You shall not lie, cheat, steal, or kill-- unless, in an emergency, there is no other way of asserting the ideals of humanity!

Okay. Science and religion being opposites is a really disagreeable move to me, but it's common enough that I know exactly what they mean and why I disagree. But the idea that art is a substitute for religion (or part of a balanced breakfast of such substitutes) is zany and novel to me. It feels incompatible with the more agreeable claim "All Gods Are Bastards includes reified concepts", in fact. Maybe this guy only likes really boring art and not the worthwhile art that counts as religion, like the Angel of History or Understanding Comics?

I'm also amused by this line about "asserting the ideals of humanity". First of all, it's just a goofy line and I like that; but second, you don't need to tell me that your moral instructions are pro tanto. If you needed to kill to not be coerced into worshipping an idol, and all you had was the OG Ten Commandments, you might be conflicted, but you wouldn't throw an error because Moses didn't say "Thou shalt not kill, except for the exceptions".

The rest of these are whatever. "Have no fear of authorities, but rather the courage to reason for yourself!" is dollar store Russell; "Behave fairly to your neighbor and also to those farthest away" is cheeky and fun but ultimately just a wrapper around the word "fairly". I'll take my science and art and my religion, too, thanks. 4/10.

Adam Lee, popularized by Dawkins (2006)

Favorites: (10) Question everything; (6) Always seek to be learning something new; (8) ...always respect the right of others to disagree with you.

Weirdest parts: (5) Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.

This is another set of ten Pretty Good Beliefs! Some of them are stock: The Golden Rule, of course, and multiple that are basically the multiple faces of "don't be dogmatic" we've seen a lot by now. But stock is better than incomprehensible. It also has some voice-- for example, a focus on autonomy and respecting particular rights of others, which is a nice vein to mine.

Two things I don't like: First, there are constant weaselly words like strive to cause no harm, never seek to censor, and so on. My modal-logician brain feels strongly that there has to be a situation where "Try to follow principle P" is distinct from "Try to follow this principle: Try to follow principle P". Second, why do you gotta thought-police my sense of joy and wonder? I can't be miserable and a good person? Sounds like you mixed up correlation and causation there, buddy. Still, those only bring it down to an 8/10.

Adam Lee apocrypha (by Richard Dawkins) (2006)

So Richard Dawkins was impressed by Adam Lee's set of ten and cited them in The God Delusion. Then, Wikipedia says, he "adds four more of his own devising". Let's just go through these one by one.

1. Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business.

A good exercise for the budding writers in your life is to have them rewrite this sentence, focusing on removing redundancy. Why is this commandment written like a tweet that's preemptively defending itself from all bad-faith attacks?

It's useless, anyway. The people who disagree with Dawkins de re will agree with him de dicto, because they'll just debate the meaning of "damages nobody else" (or perhaps "private"). But at least we spent the words we could've used to elaborate there on saying "no, really, they're none of your business" in a big huff.

2. Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.

18th century Richard Dawkins: "Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of creed, nation, or (as far as possible) bastardy". Like, I'm with you, I'm okay discriminating between humans and cows when deciding what to milk, but if I were writing a story and trying to imply a guy is going to be on the wrong side of history in 50 years, I would write like you do here!

3. Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Remember how these are apocrypha of the Adam Lee commandments? Isn't this just a corollary of Lee's Commandment #1 (treat others how you want to be treated) and his various anti-dogma commandments? I hate indoctrination, also, but if I wanted to cut these back down to ten I think we already had this one.

4. Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.

You know what? I'm not even going to bring up the effective altruism guys. This is just an oasis of good well-written advice in a sea of bad redundant advice. Begrudgingly, this raises us up to a 4/10.

Christopher Hitchens (2010)

The main thing I knew about Hitchens going in is that he was a New Atheism type guy who virulently, irrationally hated Islam in particular. The only other thing I knew about him is that in a desperate scramble to defend Gitmo (see: virtulently hating Islam), he said that waterboarding couldn't possibly be that bad, volunteered to get waterboarded in a controlled environment, and gave himself lifelong trauma. To commemorate his act of humbling yet ultimately self-inflicted torture, let's end our time together by going through every last one of his Ten Commandments.

1. Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or their color.

Okay, maybe I was being pre-emptively harsh. Sure, we know that he basically just winds up at racism through some other means, and I'm a little surprised that "condemn" is the only verb. But I can't complain!

2. Do not ever even think of using people as private property, or as owned, or as slaves.

Again, the content is good, but the cracks are seeping in. I'm weirded out by the compound phrase "as private property, or as owned, or as slaves". That's for a maybe-not-so-obvious reason: It implies that Chris is speaking very precisely in this document, using different phrases to mean different things. Given that, it seems that "do not condemn" in #1 and "do not ever even think" in #2 mean different things, which points us toward "do not ever even think" being literal. That's odd. I'd think a certified Atheism Guy would know that thought crime is bad!

3. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations.

Again, I agree, but why is he choosing to make them not parallel? Am I not supposed to "despise" slavers? Hell, am I okay to think about condemning people based on their ethnicity, or not despise those who do, as long as I don't do it? Is this all actually deliberate? Going back now to #1, was it intentional that he didn't say "Don't discriminate", just "Don't condemn"? Clearly he's not averse to compound phrases. In my heart I know these increasing preambles are just because Hitchens is a columnist who needs this list to feel like it's escalating over time, so people get lost in the sound and fury a little bit. But given that he is so precise other times, it sure does feel like he's implying "Yeah, we should despise rapists, but that's the fullest extent to which we can talk about it".

4. Hide your face and weep should you dare to harm a child.

This is soooo exhausting. There are truly not that many de dicto pro-child-harming guys out there, Chris! A "do not" should suffice! There's a reason nobody else goes out of their way to stack-rank the commandments. Not only does it make you seem like a tedious outrage-farming scold, I'm wondering whether it's meaningful that you started on "Do not be racist" instead of "SHIT YOUR PANTS AND LIGHT THE TURDS ON FIRE IF YOU CAN EVEN IMAGINE BEING RACIST".

5. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature — why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them?

I'm writing this on the 9th anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges, where the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot prohibit marriage based on sexual orientation alone. Of course, this is a good decision, with material consequences such as "Gay people can treat their partners as family on their last wills". I've always felt uneasy about it, though, in part because their argument requires sexual orientation to be a protected characteristic, which means they have to establish that gayness is an "inborn nature" rather than a lifestyle choice. They cite a brief, for example, that notes how ineffective conversion therapy is on average. That chills me to the bone. We know (and Hitchens eventually learned) that torture is not something you can just shrug off. If homophobes were just a little better at inflicting trauma, just a little better at abusing the marvelous neuroplasticity of the brain, would the case have gone differently?

That is what makes me queasy about Chris' phrase "inborn nature", but there's a second, more obvious criticism: Really? All of them? If Chris met someone who said they were naturally drawn to religion, that they were raised atheist but converted to Islam because they found it fulfilling, do you really think he would follow this commandment? I think he should, to be clear; I just think he doesn't give a shit, and this commandment is mostly a launch pad for him to tritely ask about the problem of evil as though it's a novel criticism and not a millenia-old known quantity in Abrahamic religion alone.

6. Be aware that you, too, are an animal, and dependent on the web of nature. Try and think and act accordingly.

I like this one basically unreservedly. I don't know what he has in mind for "act accordingly"-- I wish he'd elaborate enough to rule out weird racist evo psych-- but whatever, I use this principle.

7. Do not imagine that you can escape judgement if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.

Again, we're back to these moralisms! Why not just "Do not rob people with..."? This extra fluff actually dilutes the meaning! People escape judgement on fraud all the time; perhaps they would be better served thinking about morality! Imagine if Chris did this for all of them. "Do not think that you won't suffer consequences if you use people as property"-- do you see how that's less of a truth than just saying slavery is wrong?

(Unless, of course, Hitchens is saying that he believes in a sort of omniscient figure that can judge someone, perhaps even after death-- okay, I'll stop.)

8. Turn off that cell phone-- you can have no idea how unimportant your call is to us.

You know, Chris Hitchens hasn't talked about adultery, stealing, gossip, or lying. I'm guessing he's probably against all three of those, but he's yet to codify it. I'm not saying that I want to see him figure out how to deal with the Heinz problem or whatever, but I do think he should use this slot to say, like, "Don't gossip". Or even "DRIVE YOUR CAR INTO THE NEAREST TELEPHONE POLE IF YOU THINK YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH RUMORMONGERING, LIBEL, OR SLANDER."

But no, we gotta say phones bad. Not gonna prescribe when you should turn the phone off. We're gonna say phones bad, and then reverse a common phrase in a cutesy way that doesn't add anything at all, because this isn't a Ten Commandments it's a charcuterie board of petty grievance, to be consumed as a creature comfort over brunch. Can't you be serious, Chris?

9. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

9, cont'd. And terrible sexual repressions.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Ahem. Sorry about that. What I meant to say was "Golly gee willikers, what an awful yet familiar move that is, to imagine evil actors as sexual degenerates with evil inborn natures!" I thought we were supposed to be chill about inborn natures, but I guess that's only for the specific identitarian concerns Chris can use to show he's better than the Old Testament.

And come on, criminals? That's the best you got? You hate jihadists and crusaders more than anything in the whole world and all you've got for the noun is "wahhh they're doing something illegal. they should be arrested"? I've heard stronger bile from my octogenarian grandma. We aren't even getting a good idea of what jihadists and crusaders are. Is the problem going to war over metaphysics, is it killing over belief systems in general, is it self-identification? We don't know. Christopher is only giving us vacant images: Jihadists! Crusaders! The exoskeletons of captured evils, pinned lifelessly to the corkboard, no memory of what they were like while alive.

10. Be willing to renounce any god or any faith if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. In short, don't swallow your moral code in tablet form.

You know what I've realized is awesome about the good atheist Ten Commandments alternatives we've seen? They don't actually distinguish between religion and secular belief. Bert Russell isn't like "Don't believe in any god that induces you to do dogma", he just says "Don't do dogma". Civic religion, bad philosophy of science, and religious fundamentalism alike meet the cold-iron of his commandments, at least in principle. The GDR doesn't tack on "Don't believe in a god that prevents you from doing this" at the end, because when you extend that to "Don't believe in any belief, religious or secular, that prevents you from doing this" the redundancy is obvious. Even Richard Dawkins has it in his shriveled heart to denounce indoctrination in general.

But Chris Hitchens is a reactionary, in the sense that he can only react to "crusaders and jihadists". His whole project was setup for this punchline. He is utterly dependent, or so it seems here, on apophatically determining his beliefs by taking the religions he sees in the news as a negative example. He barely makes any positive claims about what a good person should do. Really, he doesn't actually exclude that many behaviors! He scarcely even cares about what you actually do with your life-- most of his commandments are about who you should or shouldn't "condemn", "denounce", "despise". All he has is the manipulation of hate, hollowed hate, and he isn't even good at it on a craft level.

1/10.

#mysticism #rating-slop #spirituality