Recently a law has been passed in Louisiana which requires that the Ten Commandments be posted in every public school. What’s wrong with this? A lot.

And that gets to the next question: Why are some powerful politicians pushing the Ten Commandments like drugs? Because these politicians are Christian fascists—religious fundamentalists who are racist haters on Black people and other people of color, immigrants, women, LGBT people and everything that is about justice and enlightenment.

This brings us back to what’s wrong with commanding obedience to the Ten Commandments.

One big thing that is wrong, right off the bat, is that this is a way of indoctrinating children with a particular religious viewpoint—the Christian fascists’ murderous version of religion.

And a very big problem is what’s actually in the Ten Commandments themselves: They uphold and insist on all kinds of horrors, including slavery. (You’ll find that in the 10^th commandment, if you read all of it; “manservant” and “maidservant,” in the “King James” version of the Bible, is just an old-fashioned way of saying “slave.”)

Also, according to the Bible, children should be put to death if they do not obey the Commandment to “honor thy father and mother.” (This, along with other horrors, is found in Deuteronomy, as well as Exodus and Leviticus, in the Old Testament of the Bible.)

Really, the Ten Commandments insist that it is the authority of the father (and men in general) that must be “honored and obeyed,” because in those Ten Commandments it is made clear that, along with slaves, wives are the property of their husbands. That, too, is in the 10^th Commandment—the whole 10^th Commandment that you can read in Deuteronomy (or Exodus)—not the shortened version the Christian fascists are putting up, which hides what is really in the 10th Commandment.

And what, according to Deuteronomy, is the punishment for women who are not “pure property” for their husbands—women who are not virgins when they marry? Once again, it is death!

There are many other horrors connected with the Ten Commandments, including the insistence that people who worship some god other than the “one true god” of the Bible should also be put to death. That is what flows from the first commandment that “Thou shall have no other god before me.”

So, when the Ten Commandments says that “Thou shall not kill,” it only means that the ancient Israelites (“god’s chosen people”) are not allowed to kill unless “god,” through Moses (or some other leader of the ancient Israelites), commands them to kill—and, in the Bible, they are commanded to kill in all kinds of horrific ways, including the slaughter of people who worship a different “god”—all of them, including children—except for virgin women: they should be taken as sex slaves for the conquering Israelite men. So says Moses in the Bible.

The same for “thou shall not steal”—once again Moses, in the name of the “god” of the ancient Israelites, repeatedly orders them to plunder and steal from people who worship some other “god.”

It is bad enough—it is truly terrible—that these Ten Commandments are being used to brainwash children in Louisiana; but this is only part of a much larger move by Christian fascists to force everybody to bow down to the authority of these Christian fundamentalist maniacs. Already Christian fascist officials in Oklahoma are moving to enforce the same kind of thing in the schools there.

As I said in message number Fifty-Three:

Christian fascism is not the same as Christianity in general as a religion. Christian fascism insists that government and the rule over society must be based on absolute adherence to the Christian Bible, taken literally, as the “gospel truth” which must be enforced—when the reality is that the Bible, taken literally, involves very real horrors, which I have shown in a number of works, including my book Away With All Gods! Unchaining The Mind And Radically Changing The World.

The Christian fascists, in and out of government, have been the driving force in the move to overturn the right to abortion. And that is just one part of their overall horrific agenda. The Christian fascists are determined to suppress anything and everything that challenges the myth of America as “God’s chosen nation.” So, according to these Christian fascists, exposure of racism, throughout the history of this country and down to today, cannot be allowed and must be removed from school education and other parts of public life. It is no accident that the strongest base of Christian fascism is among white people in the South who have vehemently opposed the struggle against racism in this country, and have never really accepted the defeat of the southern slave-owning Confederacy in the Civil War (which is reflected in the fact that they insist that Confederate monuments must not be taken down).

And, as I have also sharply called attention to before, with what these Christian fascists are doing:

We can recognize the looming shadow of a situation where not just school children, but everyone in society, will be required to pledge allegiance to a white Christian fascist America.

If you have a hard time believing what I have said here—or you want to get into this deeper—you can find analysis of this in Part One of my book Away With All Gods!—particularly the sections “The Bible, Taken Literally, Is a Horror” and “What About The Ten Commandments?”

Yes, people should have the right to religion—and this right is upheld in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, which I have authored, putting forward a sweeping vision and concrete blueprint for a radically different, truly emancipating system.

But that is very different than the government of this system brainwashing children with a murderous version of religion and forcing everybody to bow down to that.

And fundamentally, what is needed, to really be emancipated from every form of oppression, is a revolution to get rid of, and move beyond, this whole system of capitalism-imperialism—a revolution guided by a scientific, not a religious, approach and method. In the words of the final section of my book Away With All Gods!, what people everywhere need—to really, finally get all the way free—is “Liberation Without Gods”: the only real liberation there is.