David Klinghoffer writes for the Seattle Times:
For years, I have been conducting the experiment of trying to better understand social and political issues by applying the wisdom of a book that inspired the founding of our country — the Bible.
Scripture’s wisdom is summarized in the Ten Commandments. When I walk out the door of our office building, I see ready evidence of the crumbling of traditional authority epitomized by those 10 majestic statements about moral reality.
The commandments on the first tablet describe a proper relationship to God. The commandments on the second tablet describe the kind of relationship we should have with other people. The most basic insight of the Decalogue, as illuminated by a millennia-old biblical interpretive tradition, teaches that the commandments on the first tablet bear an if-then relationship to those on the second.
If a society cultivates serious ideas about God, then it will insist on respectful interactions between its citizens. By the same token, vapid ideas about religion produce vapid ideas about morality.
Seattle, a beautiful and gentle place in many ways, finds itself unable to straighten its spine and clean up this notorious neighborhood. If the Ten Commandments are right in what they imply, that spinal degeneration may be traced to secularism.
You could hardly find a bluer city, where people have dogs instead of children. Indeed, the whole Pacific Northwest ranks as the country’s most secular, unchurched region.
Yet, human beings seem unable to live without a behavioral code of some kind. Even in a secular society, they simply embrace another, bearing little relationship to the Ten Commandments. This code — not of morality, but of what I call the moral-esque — is no less particular about its commandments being observed than is the old moral system.
