ManusJustus said:
Aren't the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament? I've always thought of them as being 'top' laws for the Bible. |
You are kind of running Judaism and Christianity together. You are totally right that the Ten Commandments are important in both of these religions, but Christianity really has some overarching laws that supercede everything else.
Really the "law" in Christianity that encompasses most every other law (not all of them but most) is to simply love everyone in the world around you and treat them in a way a person who loved them would. However simple this standard sounds, it is really more difficult to acheive than just about anything in the Old Testament. Its pretty much an unacheivable standard that humans can never meet, but one they should aspire towards because it is the only way to acheive a Christ-like ethos in a tangible form.
And that love can encompass a lot of things, including anger towards some people as an expression of how they are failing to live up to a Christian standard. This is generally only applicable in the case of other Christians, as the New Testament, particularly in Paul's letters, tells Christians to not focus on those who are outside the Church as it is not a Christian's job to judge their standard of living since they are not trying to live by a Christian standard as long as they are also not trying to persecute Christians.
But anyone who claims to invoke righteous anger is invoking the law, and when a Christian chooses to invoke the law on others rather than forgive those who have transgressed the law, they are subjecting themselves to harsher judgement rather than forgiveness. Those who forgive others are forgiven themselves.
Christ proclaimed that he came to fulfill the Judaic law while simultaneously moving beyond it. But this does not mean that the Judaic law was simply abandoned. Paul aptly sums it up when he tells people that they should follow the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. Its kind of the difference between someone who is a petty person who never breaks any laws but never helps anyone else out either versus a generous person who sometimes breaks the law because it will help other people.
Judaism and Christianity share a rich history, but they are definitely distinct in many, many ways, even when it comes down to how they approach the Bible.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
