Thou Shalt Make Shit Up if it Pleases Thou

Some people give a lot of weight to the ten commandments. Within that group, a subset support various policies involving killing people. This seemingly runs up against the commandment "thou shalt not kill." Believers then reply that the actual commandment is "thou shalt not murder." Their confidence in this version is matched only by their lack of curiosity as to what it means.

The problem is that murder isn't a defined term in the commandments. Murder is simply killing that isn't allowed. The purported commandment then becomes redundant. You are commanded not to do things that you are commanded not to do. Nothing of substance has been communicated. It's like a street sign that says "obey this sign." No one bothers to print up such signs, and it's unexplained why God would bother to chisel something like that into the purported fundamental law of the universe.

Now, if the commandment actually was "thou shalt not kill," there's no problem. That's a substantive command, though there are boundary questions about what counts as killing. The problem is that many Christians are uncomfortable thinking that their religion requires them to leave unfulfilled their desire to kill people. Apparently, that desire is strong enough to compel Christians to render their own moral code absurd.

I'm not sure whether we should be glad that Christians are... "flexible" about right and wrong. Lately prominent Christians seem to be much more flexible about violence and the distribution of wealth than they are about, say, being a homosexual. In general, though, it's probably for the best that Christians have put aside the inconvenient consistency that made them so intolerable to the Romans. Pragmatism serves human ends, and pure Christian values would make for a pretty miserable society wherever they dominated the polity.