HISTORY OF IDEAS: Religion

Religion was an ingenious solution to many of mankind's earliest fears and needs. Religion is now implausible to many, but the needs remain.

An Updated Ten Commandments

The Ten Commandments (which appear in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5) maintain an extraordinary hold on our imaginations even though many of them can sound – in the context of our own times – really rather peculiar, bound up with injunctions not to covet a neighbour’s livestock or carve images of god-like figures.

It isn’t so much the precise contents of the 10 Commandments that still proves compelling, it is their form, which is astonishingly concise and simple, a distillation of a mass of ethical thinking down to just a few robust rules. Our culture keeps promoting the pleasures of extension – and along with it, the qualities of subtlety, digression and elaboration – but we’re in truth creatures who for the most part crave for things to be laid out succinctly for us, so that we know exactly where to look and what to do amidst the ambiguous and chaotic conditions of existence. It is no sign of low intelligence to want to have some very clear rules that we can pin to the fridge door and live by – a powerful truth that our elites keep forgetting. MORE