Why the 10 Commandments Are Wrong for Children

"Why the 10 Commandments Are Wrong for Children"

I just recently read two very interesting artciles regarding how the 10 Commandments can actually be harmful. They are as follows:

"The Ten Commandments vs. America"
An opinion piece found in the Wednesday, March 2, 2005 edition of the The Courier-Journal by By Harry Binswanger

(You can also find it on the ARI website at here.

You can find the article at this link:
"Protect My Children from the Ten Commandments"
by Lewis Vaughn, as published in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 19, Number 4.

I enjoyed reading both articles because they give two opinions on the 10 commandments from two very different viewpoints:
1. Objectivist viewpoint
2. Secular Humanist viewpoint

I haven no problem with my children knowing the 10 commandments. In fact, I plan on making sure my kids have an opportunity to learn about the bible and christianity in general and other religions, and even expose them to some good old Greek and Roman mythology. I consider it a part of their education in learning something about the world. The 10 commandmnents are not appropriate to use in order to teach my kids how to be decent people because:

1. They are not being taught to think critically or rationally (other than you will incur God's wrath there is no reason to obey them)
2. They are not being taught to personal responsibility

These are fairly short pieces, and I would encourage all to take the time to read them, as I really cannot do them justice.
But, as you can see from both articles, there are sound reasons from a societal/humanist and obectivist/individualist point of view as to why using the 10 commandments to try to teach children to behave is harmful.

For me, I think Ayn rand summed it up best:

"If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments."

(John Galt's broadcast in Atlas Shrugged...thanks Bruce, for mentioning where the quote was from in the comments...I finally got to that part in the book, but just finally got to update the blog.)