Rebuilding God: Ten Commandments

Photo by Andy Holmes on Unsplash

Okay, so you don’t like God. I get it, believe me I get it.
Or, maybe I should be more precise: You don’t like the God of the Bible.

Let’s be even more precise..

What God of the Bible? Jesus? The loving guy who thinks everyone is alright and you should like totally feed the poor and stuff? Hard to not like that guy, but he didn’t write the Ten Commandments (though..)

Or the Hell fire and brimstone God of the Old Testament. The one who strongly encouraged what seems pretty clearly to be genocide.

Or maybe even the Jesus who both loves and accepts people but also talks a lot about following the law and people going to Hell.

And there are a million different flavors in between. So much so that there are over 30,000 denominations of Bible believing Christian. That’s a lot of different flavors of God.

So, here’s my question: Can you do better?

Could you, as God, create ten commandments and get “your people” to live in the way you want them to? Would you use fear? Would you just scrap the laws completely? What you just let them do as they please?

It’s a fun thought exercise. There are some ones pretty “easy” here right?

1. Don’t kill (well, unless I tell you to.. oh yeah, war doesn’t count.. if it’s a “good war”.. or, if someone else kills someone, then you can kill them.. err.. we are going to need some more laws)
2. Don’t sleep around (well, unless everyone is cool with it.. but does that really ever work out?)
3. Don’t be jealous of each other or “covet”. Yeah, this seems pretty easy. Though, I’m not sure how enforceable it is..

You get the idea.

The real challenge is.. what if it doesn’t work? What if they disobey?

Are you a good God? Are you an angry God? Have you raised kids? If so, you might be surprised how that affects this.

I do know one thing: There isn’t a person on this planet, past, present, or future, that would be willing to send their kids to be tortured for eternity. Maybe Stalin actually.