Louisiana's new "Ten Commandments" law actually contains eleven commandments

So you’d totally give in to the Christo-fascists, but you’d also be a smart-ass about it?

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I’d have classed it as insolent defiance, but your point of view is certainly valid.

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I suspect they would love to fire school administrators for noncompliance with State law. Then install one their buddies into the school administration.

Laws that try to establish religion in a roundabout way are used to filter out from positions of power the people that won’t put up with that shit.

So I guess people can:

  1. Do nothing.
  2. Quit in protest.
  3. Openly refuse to comply with the state law.
  4. Fighting it in court. Easier if they have standing by being fired in option 3.
  5. Comply maliciously, making them difficult to fire.

The last option of malicious compliance is less risky and less effort than quitting or waiting to get fired. Maybe less brave, but given how stupid religious zealots are it is probably the most fun option.

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My daughter once asked for baby corn in her quesadilla (corn tortillas), and I wondered if that was not kosher in some dimension.

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Definitely. It’s just important to remember it’s an “in the meantime” action taken while the law is taken through the court challenge process.
For this law, I’d be tempted to print off a bunch of versions in comic sans (easily readable font) and formatted like a checklist/comparison chart. Down the left side are the commandments, along the top, list Trump, Biden, and leave a bunch of slots for teachers or students to fill in names of their choosing, then put check marks next to each commandment each person has violated. That would be fun.

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Interactive and educational. This is very appropriate for a classroom.

For authenticity’s sake, I’d want the list of Commandments to be printed on both sides of the paper, as the Jews (generally) believe. With 5 on each side, but written simultaneously from one side with God’s hand. So that 1 and 6, 2 and 7, etc are all related in some mystical way. But it loses the effect when secured to the wall and people can only see half of them.

I’d also like the Three Laws of Robotics hanging next it.
And perhaps most relevant to this new generation is the Orange Catholic Bible:

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

Let’s invent some wallpaper or contact paper that will make it easier for schools to comply with these laws. A 40 ft roll of fictional gibberish that can be easily pasted up as needed.

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Christian denominations agree on several important points, and disagree on many minor points. But that’s because after the Nicene Creed they persecuted or murdered almost all of the nontrinitarian.

But the iconoclastic controversy as Rick mentioned happened after that was formulated, so it clearly isn’t relevant to interpreting that verse. And not all Protestants accept the Nicene Creed anyway. :man_shrugging:

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The bill specifies the exact wording of the Commandments that must be printed on the poster.

The bill includes requirements designed to defeat any attempt to bury the Ten Commandments in amongst other texts or otherwise engage in malicious compliance.

Each public school governing authority and the governing authority of each nonpublic school that receives state funds shall display the Ten Commandments in each building it uses and classroom in each school under its jurisdiction. The nature of the display shall be determined by each governing authority with a minimum requirement that the Ten Commandments shall be displayed on a poster or framed document that is at least eleven inches by fourteen inches. The text of the Ten Commandments shall be the central focus of the poster or framed document and shall be printed in a large, easily readable font.

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the easiest non-compliance – other than not complying, which is by far the best way – would be to hang the five prayers right next to it, along with the wiccan rede, the four noble truths, and so on.

comparative religion is the best religion

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Good things schools all have spare money to put up a whole set of posters in every single classroom, irrelevant to what they are actually teaching there. :frowning:

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And in a sane world, that is what we’d get… but we know the real reason that they are doing this, and it’s not to celebrate religious diversity.

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According to Robert Graves, the practice of cooking a young goat in its mother’s milk was part of a ritual used in the worship of Ishtar, so while this might seem oddly arbitrary, it’s actually a straightforward injunction against practicing the rites of a competing religion.

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It doesn’t specifically state the poster can’t be put up with the words facing the wall…

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Unfortunately, fascists only care about the letter of the law when it suits them, or else this could never have been passed in the first place.

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Interesting… people forget that, ultimately, these are historical texts, and that the authors were often referencing their specific culture and experiences…

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Unfortunately

Aset does parallel the Virgin Mary in some respects. Artists clearly borrowed images of Aset and Heru to create images of the holy Christian mother and child. But the Roman Empire, in which the concept of the Christian Trinity developed between the first and fourth centuries CE, was both patriarchal and patrilineal, and had no concept equivalent to Ma’at.
“A feminine deity would not translate into the new social-political-spiritual system centered on masculine deities which upheld patriarchy,” Williams writes.
That left Mary without Aset’s divine powers—and outside the Christian Trinity.

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So, like… what are the authors’ backgrounds? The only thing that really comes up is this doc or their book… and the one review I found came from an objectivist rag which is full of antisemitic dog whistles… :woman_shrugging:

Who do they cite? What sources do they use to support their argument? What journals have they published articles in? What journals did they send their book to for reviews?

So far, I’m seeing no reason to trust this as a source for understanding the origins of the religion…

[ETA] Not that I’m gonna say that Amazon reviews are the LAST WORD on stuff like this… but…

In a word; sensationalist.
First off this isn’t coming from an upset believer, so don’t dismiss this over that. The authors are very self-congratulatory and make a big deal out of “30 years of research” or whatever. This entire book is essentially what’s known has the “Flavian Hypothesis” which has been kicking around on the Internet for about 15 or so years. It’s gained some popularity in the conspiracy theory circles which sort of explains the author, Valliant’s, connection to the idea. I was wondering who this scholarly author was so I looked him up and he’s…an Objectivist blogger. Oh boy.
The ideas are interesting but there really isn’t much other than just speculation going on here. And most scholarly works don’t say things like “presenting IRREFUTABLE evidence,” that’s what authors trying to sell books like to say. The language used here shapes the idea to make the conclusion they’re aiming at seem like it’s inevitable. Sort of like what Objectivists do to make their selfish psychotic ramblings seem reasonable.
The beginning of the book hammers on the idea that having an open mind is necessary. The last book I read, which I was reading for fun and didn’t even begin to believe, was a book about a ghost haunting. That book began like this one, a preemptive assault against those who would criticize it by painting their detractors as being narrow minded and unwilling to even listen to the evidence. Common tactic for the snake oil salesman.
Well-researched, I guess. But you can hit up Wikipeadia and do about as well. The Biblical contradictions pointed out are nothing new, many have been debated for centuries. The thing about the coin is interesting but hardly a smoking gun. The authors are not part of any institution or university, just two dudes with an Internet connection and desire to sell a book. These ideas weren’t even theirs, they’re just presenting stuff people have been posting on obscure forums for years now.
At least Dan Brown wrote a book of fiction that didn’t pretend to be scholarship. Go read that one, if you don’t mind the cliched evil albino character trope.

:woman_shrugging:

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It’s not really an obscure topic though… there are entire academic departments dedicated to studying the history of religion and theology… And I’m not talking about right wing religious schools, but at high prestige universities around the world. There are even a few high profile figures in the media who study this specific topic (Reza Aslan comes to mind). It’s a more than well-established field with thousands upon thousands of phds working on these issues… This seems far more akin to flat earthers or those aliens built the pyramids kooks.

I’m not sure it’s established that they are academics (at least the two men who wrote the book - it looks like at least 2 of the people in the doc have academic credentials of some kind)? I can’t find anything about them otherwise. Normally, you do a simple google search for an academic, you’re gonna get their page at their school which will have their CV… the only thing that comes up is their site and that one objectivist review, which screams SEO gamification to me… :woman_shrugging:

Just… color me skeptical…

[ETA]

If you’ve never seen it, it’s worth watching Kaz Rowe’s video about historical misinformation, as although this is a book/documentary, it likely covers some of the same ground about being critical about sourcing and how wording things vaguely can be signals about historical BS…

In this case, it was a woman claiming that there was no Roman Empire… But same idea applies, I think.

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This sounds a lot like Caesar’s Messiah by Atwill, which was as that article says torn apart by almost everyone who knows anything on the subject. As Mindy points out, it’s not really encouraging that nobody seems to have even bothered to do that for this new version…

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