St Peter
Pamela Bone regularly writes for Melbourne's Age newspaper arguing that we don't need God to have morality. On 13 July she was holding forth in the usual way, with a teaser that read, “The Treasurer should realise the Ten Commandments have little meaning for this era.”
Under this, Ms Bone wrote,
I thought about Peter Costello's call to abide by the Ten Commandments, but couldn't get past the first: “I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Then I couldn't get past the next three: “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image”; “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”; and “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy”.
It is clear that before anything else, God's commandments are about shoring up God's position. Do people really, in this day and age, want to obey a God who, like a Third World dictator, insists above all on unconditional, absolute reverence to Himself (because it must be a him)?
And so on. I tried and failed for publication with this letter:
Pamela Bone wants us to snip God out of the ten commandments (‘Disregard the gospel according to St Peter’, Age, July 13), an understandable reaction as the classroom is always more fun if there is no teacher around to enforce the rules.
Unfortunately, leave God out of the picture and you are left simply with restrictive, oppressive, unpleasant and changeable secular moralism, with all the attendant problems of self-righteousness, hypocrisy and repeated moral failure. Leave out the God of the Bible and you also have a form of justice but no concept whatsoever of mercy, just a weak-kneed sentimentality and intellectual relativism. Well done St Pete, for reminding us where justice and mercy meet.