cure me and here's my problem why are that ten you don't need ten i think the list of commandments was deliberately an artificially inflated to get it up to ten it's a padded list here's what they did about five thousand years ago a bunch of religious and political hustlers got together to try to figure out how to control people how to keep them in line they knew people were basically stupid and would believe anything they were told so they announced that god had given them some commandments up on a mountain when no one was around god had given them that turned commandments let me ask you this when i was sitting around making this shit up why did they pick  ten sounds important ten is the basis for the decimal system it's a decade it's a psychologically satisfying number the top ten the ten most wanted the ten best dressed so having ten commandments was really a marketing decision to me it's clearly a bullshit list it's a political document artificially inflated to sell better i'm going to show you how you could reduce the number of commandments and come up with a list that's a little more workable and logical  to start with the first three and i'll use the roman catholic version because those are the ones i was taught as a little boy i am the lord thy god i shall not have strange gods before me now shalt not take the name of the lord thy god in vain thou shalt keep holy the sabbath right off the bat the first three pure bullshit day lord's name strange god spoke the language the line wage designed to scare and control primitive people in no way to superstitious nonsense like this applied to the lives of intelligent civilized humans in the twenty first century you throw out the first three commandments you're down to seven next honor thy father and mother obedience respect for authority just another name for controlling people the truth is obedience and respect should not be automatic they should be earned they should be based on the parents  thou shalt not bear false witness stealing and line well actually these two both prohibit the same kind of behavior dishonesty stealing and lying so you don't need two of them instead you combine them and you call it  be dishonest and suddenly you're down to five and as long as we're combining i have two others that belong together thou shalt not commit adultery thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife once again these two prohibit the same kind of behavior in this case marital infidelity the differences coveting takes place in the mind and i don't think you should outlaw fantasizing about someone else's wife otherwise what's a guy going to think about when he's waxing his car fidelity are really part of the same overall value so in truth you could combine the two honesty commandments with the the commandments and give them simpler language positive language instead of negative and call the whole thing down shall always be honest and coveting your neighbor's goods is what keeps the economy going y commandment and the one we haven't talked about yet thou shalt not kill murder the fifth commandment but when you think about it when you think about it religion has never really had a big problem with murder not really more people have been killed in the name of god than for any other reason know you have to do is look at northern ireland the middle east kashmir the inquisition the crusades and the world trade center to see how seriously the religious folks take that shot not kill the more devout they are the more they see murder as being you know go sho that depends on who's doing the killing and who's getting killed so with all of this in mind i leave you with my revised list of the two commandments thou shall always be honest and faithful to the provider  shall try real hard not to kill anyone unless of course they pray to a different invisible man from the one you pray to was all you need moses put a car down the hill in this fucking pocket and if they had a list like that i would mind those well that was george carlin take on the ten commandments we'll get back to just a couple minutes but welcome once again to the radical imagination i'm your host jim verraros i'm a sociologist who started john j college here in new york it would be hard to disagree whatever one's political party allegiance our ideology that wall street large corporations the world of high finance and its culture of profits above all else the materialism the consumerism greed in worship of big money the power elite the prison military industrial complex if you will dramatically controls and profoundly influences all americans at all levels of our daily existence whether it's corporate control of the political system the economic system higher education the criminal justice system the media religion the military the food supply medical system except for what we eat what we think what we see how we die what we read how we conduct what we listen to how we fight how we control people how we relate to each other are increasingly products of a corporatization of america of unparalleled unprecedented historical proportions even calvin coolidge who made the statement in the one nine hundred twenty s that the business of america's business would be shocked and perhaps even embarrassed at the country's obscene conspicuous consumption today these excesses exist alongside record levels of homelessness poverty and vicious structural violence associated with poverty and racism that propel america to be the most violent developed industrial country in the world by far as cornel west has put it the most frightening feature of the civic melancholia in present day america is the relative collapse of integrity honesty and decency an undeniable spiritual blackout of grand proportions in short the rule of big money and its attendant culture of computer and mendacity have led to our grand moment of spiritual blackout today on the radical measure and we are thrilled to have it and to have reverend ana livy lines on the show to discuss her just published book no other gods the politics of the ten commandments in the book she tries to show how the ten commandments are not about antiquated moral restrictions as george carlin so artistically describe it but a code that has vital contemporary relevance that can bring us meaning illuminated our values resistent justice heal our earth find personal dignity and help us navigate this is a turbulent waters of social injustice environmental crisis and societal inequality so george wherever you may be take a listen we we don't have to invent a bunch of new practices for a meaningful way to live out our spirituality and social justice politics we have something that has existed for some three thousand years that will give us as much progressive fire power as any of us can handle ana is a writer and preacher serving as senior minister of first unitarian congregational society in brooklyn her work revolves around building a religious counterculture a multi faith movement that redeploys preditions religious practices to address the urgent needs of our time her sermons and articles are published in a quest for meaning criterion you you thank you it was meant from the deepest of our radical imagination because this is the book no other gods the politics of the ten commandments and imagine george religious liberalism tends to say you know we don't need we don't need them anymore right that's that's kind of old news and he did this whole right gammick of like how can we get him down to you know to not at all you don't need to be commanded yeah well we certainly don't need to be commanded according to the left right that's a huge that's a huge the end of my of my book but his his sense that these are sort of obvious effort go guidelines that's that seems to be the prevailing view on the left right we don't need him and a little bit of the sort of darker twist that he gave to it when he said that this is i think he said a way of controlling you know scared and primitive people right so they're really marketing marketing p s yeah marketing is her manipulating right initialing people right so that's he sort of represents that that view of the left and  comical way of dismissing where we don't need them right then you have to critique on the on the right not the critique but then you have the view of the ten commandments on the right people like roy moore and  have them in all the courthouses in the country and in our schools even though as you put in the book he doesn't he can't recite the ten commandments if you ask yes so not so maybe i think it's a lot of religion he doesn't need to memorize them or write to lynn westmoreland i tell the story in the book he goes on the colbert report writes when you get why here griese to be interviewed by stephen called there i don't know but at some point in the interview yeah yeah  but at some point in the interview steven kull bear says what are the ten commandments and he could name them because it's not about the content it's not about the content of what the commandments actually are i think to these people who claim them on the religious right it's about cultural identity it's about what they represent it's about establishing christianity as our national religion in some way so it's they've they are used to represent something but there's very little investment in what the actual content of the commandments and following through on what these commandments are all about yeah so it's interesting so is paying lip service or t of contemporary evangelical interpretations of the bible the ten commandments has come to be a symbol of that of the social conservatism and if you were to press somebody who was a little bit more theological they they've they mean something to people and to everybody wants to kind of use use them to to further their agendas and we're so we're going to listen to reverend william barber here in just a couple minutes and we're so polarized by the culture wars that perhaps at the center revolve around these ten commandments and what people resonate about that so if we can let's let's take a short clip now and look at reverend william barber talk about faith and morality in america today right yes the issue of extreme militarism we are very clear that the time has come to  challenge the limited view of morality often put before about the so called religious right or so called conservative evangelical ism as pastors and train theologians we understand that any notion of evangelical to be biblically consistent must begin with a critique of systems that create poverty and justice and equality and the class that people certain people are less than other people somebody must stand up and say it doesn't matter which party is in power who has a political supermajority once elections are over there are some things that transcend political majorities and mere majority politics and the narrow categories of liberal versus conservative and democrat versus republican there are some things that must be challenged because they're wrong derek stream and they're immoral but before the election is over people of faith people who have a deep moral conscience must be engaged we cannot simply judge candidates by whether they had a photo op here or a photo op they we must look at policy policy and how that policy lines up when we look at for instance in the jewish texts as they of chapter ten says well one to those who legislate oppression and rob the poor of their rights and make women and children to have prayed or we go for instance to the new testament jesus  first sermon first evangelical sentiment where he laid out the kinds of concerns we ought to have in the public square he talked about the poor the sick the blind the broken hurting and everybody who has been made to feel different made to feel strange as he said we must declared acceptable a year of the lot and the closing of jesus life he said nations will be judged by how we treat the least of these the poor the hunger the thirst those in prison and so we believe we must expand we must really define morality in the public square we can no longer just accept when we talk about moral issues the conversation is simply about prayer in the school where you stand on abortion where you stand on homosexuality where you stand on the second amendment and where you stand on property rights and tax cuts we believe from our deepest religious values and i deepest constitutional bad because even our constitution does not begin with the things i just listed our constitution says that our deepest moral principle first of all is an understanding of we not simply about man and then secondly the establishment of justice the providing for the common good the promoting of the general welfare and they insure domestic tranquility those are the great mark tenets of our constitution and faith and justice and love and mercy and equality of the great mark how the real moral religious issues of our day are not those sort of individual more ality issues of abortion and homosexuality and whether you pray in school or not but they're there the big social systemic questions of poverty and the destruction of our environment i wish you talked more about that those are the big the way that evil is really being perpetuated in our in our world today is through systems and the systems in which we participate and we have the opportunity to resist those systems to me the contemporary reading of the ten commandments calls us to think systemically about our world that the commandment to not to still mean something very different in a global economy right where people on the other side of the world where working in sweat shops right to make your running shoes right and you can pay the listed price for those running shoes but you're still stolen you've stolen from the people who didn't get a living wage or who are working in a factory there collapsed are stolen from the common good of the environmental resources that we have actually hit the word resources that the elements of the natural world that exist and the the clean water and the clean  air that were damaged by the production of those shoes so fast takes on a very different meaning and a global economy and i think when we look at the ten commandments we need to broaden our understanding to think this is barbara sands yeah yeah and it would have a clue in the book world the blackouts that cornell west talks about so and so many others now i think it's because the the we don't see it because the gods that we have now are invisible ok we still worship the gods in our secular world but those gods are invisible to us because we like to think that we live in the world of freedom right we have unlimited choice to right by this or that car so that for salvation where we're looking to the internet and the number of facebook likes that we get when we post something we're looking to the approval of others we're looking at our social status at these are all our but it's not me into that evil it's again like you say it's we have such wonderful freedom of choice and don't we play devil's advocate here we have these wonderful advantages really benefited from these advances and then there is a large majority of the earth's population still living in poverty that's thing one thing too is that this is all come at the expense of the natural world and our ecosystems and so all of the benefits that we're getting all come from somewhere they all those airplanes and the oil and all that stuff is and at some point back in its history it was extracted from the earth living we extract you steal from the earth in a way that is not even close to sustainable the production the extraction the consumption never stops and so what we're ending up with is an impoverished planetary system that's literally unsustainable and we're seeing now with climate change as sort of the most sort of obvious and drastic impact of the consumer economy that we're creating a situation where humans won't be able to exist on this earth and they are and we're still never satisfied we're never pieces insatiability we never have enough that's right and  that's and so what does the commandments what can the commandments offer us here in this world that has become so bleakly whacked out yeah  will yeah blind to the other commandments and how the religious have to tackle it yes it was the commandments and religious tradition in general i think offer us a god that we actually intentionally have as our god and what i what i mean by that the god that is introduced in the beginning of the ten commandments right there is this the the setting i'll give give the setting of this the israel lights have have left egypt in the story that if they've escaped from slavery in egypt through the parting  the red sea they have wandered for three months eating that god has provided for them and then they're going to have this great revelation they are there at the base of mount sinai they are told to not have sex three days and not touch the mountain or else you're going to die if you touch the mountain it's all very dramatic they're getting set up for this huge revelation and then god speaks directly to the people first time ever addressing the entire community and god defines what god is as the very beginning of the ten commandments and god says i am and the english charter transliteration would be why  v h your god the y h v h and hebrew you'd have of hey is the hebrew verb to be it's being itself reality itself is being god is being god is is existence and reality it's not some delighted it's not some dude with a beard in the clouds right as george carlin would probably picture as he learned it right perhaps oh absolutely movement once said that the god that you don't believe and i don't believe in either so i think i think i could say that to george carlin right so this is god introducing god self as being and if if god had stopped right there then it would have been a very buddhist thing right god is just existence god is just reality ok but god doesn't stop there god defines itself further saying affairs and is actually taking sides has entered into history in the sense yes or the right has jewish people intervened in human lives in a human history on behalf of an oppressed people against their oppressors then gets universalized to being oppressed people all over we should be mad at absolutely right absolutely so this is but that's not ok yeah but that doesn't that doesn't and they say to aaron make make us a god and they take their gold jewelry which was gold that they had gotten from egypt from the place of the slave meant and they turn that gold into a god that they worship this is not subtle symbolism right there worshipping their own status symbols material possessions which was the which was their link to the place where they were enslaved they revisit revisiting spiritual experience religious understanding needs to be brought into this co optation yeah yeah oh i get it that's yeah absolutely absolutely i think i think that we need to reclaim an understanding not just of the ten commandments but of our religious traditions in general religious traditions of course have elements to them that are oppressive right and that's what that's what the left has reacted against all of these years there is awful stuff in the bible and the name of god is calling for himself in the link in the name of god still going to churches which is a violation of the third commandment but we can we can get to that in a minute  but and so liberals have understandably reacted against violence and oppression that's that's in the biblical text itself that the bible is written by human beings i believe most most people most scholars believe certainly written by human beings and so it contains the sort of oppressive mindsets of their of their cultures from which they were writing in the times in which they are writing i believe that it also includes genuine revelation it also includes language text images stories that are truly resources for transformation and i think part of our job as as modern people is to kind of sift through and sort of find out what is what is the what is the true voice of transformation and love in these texts and what's an and so on over a nation over and over and over again it says you know why in the in the torah that we should be kind to the alley and be welcoming to the alley and because we were once aliens in the land of egypt it says that over and there and yet again there's there's splits within judaism christianity all the major belief system so that how do you explain that and left has gone off the rails a little bit and response to this with the there oppressive elements of of the bible right and what the i think what the left has done especially since the sixty's and seventy's is sa because there's bad stuff in here we're going to throw the whole thing out and we're going to reject the even the notion of being commanded right the idea of command of this and the left became very individualistic and  it's sort of what we've ended up where we are today with the selfie taking you know me generation where there is no the narcissism and the sense that there is no higher or deeper authority  it's all everything's relative and the self is sovereign right and so we've gone off the deep end we i'm saying sort of the progressive movements have gone off the deep end in the other direction with no with no anchor with no accountability to anything right with no real accountability to anyone in an ultimate sense right the individual gets put before the community there's a story that i always think about and i have it in the book i was doing a sort of exercise with a group of religious liberals and asking them to imagine their own religious community but really really religious really really observant really religious version of their own religious community what would that look like what kinds of foods would they eat what would be prohibited what would they do what would they not do and people just stared at me and they said well look different each each each saying each thing they said but there's nothing would be prohibited nothing would be nothing be required and nothing would be prohibited so i pressed them on this little bit and nothing like no no food for example would be prohibited even if they were made by exploited workers even if they caused you know of suffering to animals even if they accelerate climate change really like you wouldn't in your ideal religious community you wouldn't prohibit any foods like that and there was a rule about this group of religious liberals who value all those things right said well we would probably wouldn't want to eat those kinds of foods but no they wouldn't be prohibited really so all because they make the choice yeah i would ok individual to the value that they placed on the freedom of individuals to make that choice was a higher value than what they decided to do with that freedom so they bought sort of the capitalistic mindset exactly exactly moving up the ladder and adding whatever you can and so i think that has spiritually and poverty to the left and i think that's part of you asked kind of how how has this been kind of breaking apart you know between the religious right and left happen i think that's i think that's part of it but the right has embraced it the greed if you will but big that's a great way of putting it right right and i'm trying to advocate for people to you're always going to serve a god you're always going to there's always going to be something that you are looking to you know make your life complete beyond empty and so i'm saying why not intentionally embrace a vision of god don't use the word god if you don't like it but it in a vision of ultimate reality that says i am the force that m transformation possible i am the force that liberates that brought us out of egypt that liberates us have no other gods but that and have that have that guy do right and liberates the individual at the same time creates liberating structures yes yes healing with racism and poverty absolutely mass incarceration and so on absolutely so that's the that's the beauty of it as i as i see it that if you if you keep sort of an orientation and alignment with that force of transformation not only do you personally and spiritually get get liberated from your you know the hunger for the next facebook like  but you also have a clarity to see how you can participate in systems and healthier systems and how you can resist the systems of our world that are causing the poverty that are causing environmental destruction and if everybody did that if everybody instead of consumer you know their consumer objects as their god if they if they had this god of liberation we would i mean capitalism as we know it would collapse and as our colleague and friend raise our consciousness so the way you put it here section creating religious countercultural space to create religious color space concolor cultural space requires first and foremost that we distance ourselves from the culture of coveting so to realize that what we are participating in is really dysfunctional and toxic yeah and yet we've been conditioned to want it and to desire it and that becomes the be all and end all that's a hard transition to make for most of us right but but you do q do offer some very very concrete practices  which i really love here you know so the father examples of practice for creating such space for ourselves in this read a few of these recognize all intertainment as cultural entertainment educating us as to who we are who we should be and what we should cover it sort of like the opening hours giving tightly titrate the angst lot of media images and information get rid of television especially in households with let's the thing is i think that we need to pretty radically we need to do something pretty extreme to sept two to be able to give ourselves some space from the gods that we normally have in our culture because they are they have been intentionally designed by teams of experts to be really appealing the they not only objects actual products but other whole lifestyle of the way that we live and what's considered normal in our  day it's all marketed to us and every everywhere we turn and so when people you know liberals tend to sort of grasp this intellectually and say that they don't like it and they may even say that they don't buy into it but we do and the the small efforts that we make to give ourselves some some distance a gratitude journal you know adult coloring books for the sort of spiritual practices that are really grounded in anything sort of deep aren't gonna hunt going to kind of they're not going to give us that freedom from the gods of our modern secular culture so i think that we need  changing people's attitudes individually and collectively through social movements absolutely that's yeah these periods when that occurs are the times that really radical change can happen absolutely yes the culture mean i guess on that is that those that countercultural movement it was such a it was such a beautiful thing and i often feel like i was born in the wrong generation because that was very much like my heart is with that sort of way of and looking at the world but it wasn't the ground it was like a plant with shallow roots and wasn't grounded in deep traditions and i think that it really could have been i think  that christian traditions and jewish traditions and other religious traditions could have could have given some some real gravitas and grounding and accountability to those movements but instead it was very much the beginning of what we were talking about earlier the kind of the self is sovereign if it feels good do it there's this very kind of individualistic and everything's you know if i'm ok you're ok and this moral cultural relativ right and so it didn't have any real staying power because it wasn't it wasn't rooted deeply in people or an accountable to something larger than themselves to a certain extent fuelled by drugs resistance people were rebelling so strenuously against the kind of hierarchical systems that they were encountering in the government in the military and in just society in general that they tried to believe that there was a that they didn't have any hierarchy that there was that this was a completely sort of you know harras on toll democratic new world that they were creating but that was almost never true and i read recently about one of the example of this of ken casey and the merry pranksters yes i had they they wanted to believe there was nobody in charge right there was nobody in charge it was just a kind of self regulating system where everybody was contributing and  had this flow to it but can't he see bankrolled all of it with the money that he made from one flew over the cuckoo's nest and he was there was this year i think ted too politically transformed the institutionalisation he would try to he would create sort of these mechanisms for people like there would be games and sort of sort of random lottery systems tea leaf reading things that would allow different people to make decisions at different  times and that sort of conceal that helped to conceal the fact that he was actually in charge but people wanted to believe that nobody was in charge right and so when you don't acknowledge what's in charge it's back to like we always the throne is never empty like something or somebody is always actually in charge and you but you're better off knowing what that is and deciding what that is instead of pretending that it's not there absolutely absolutely we've had todd gitlin on a couple times on the show was the second president  s students for democratic society we hope to have mark right here too is where the columbia rebellion is fifty years old this year and again and the discussion was also very much like this nobody wanted to be the president there was such as no please don't elect me we don't want it we don't want this but participatory democracy not controlled but there is always someone in control it's a matter of who is going to do that and which set of values and ethics are going to follow the corporate exhibits exactly of a vicious aggressive violent world view based on fear racism yet for the other or this  certainly in the country in the sixty's so you have some hope on this optimism that people are still yearning and looking for this in trump's america as we get more and more into a neo fascist corporate militaristic mindset i think the i think people are yeah i do i think that i think people are i think that the rest are these independent politics and the young people are very open the idea of socialism and we'll have you get back and talk more all right so we will be back next week this is jim brother with your host on the radical magination and we're going to go out with an excerpt from h