Ten Commandments

When I was growing up in church, we were taught the ten commandments:

1.  You shall have no other gods before me.
2.  You shall not make for yourself a carved image.
3.  You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
4.  Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
5.  Honor your father and mother.
6.  You shall not murder.
7.  You shall not commit adultery.
8.  You shall not steal.
9.  You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
10.  You shall not covet.

Of course, in elementary school we're unable to completely comprehend the full meaning of these commandments so the teachers had to break it down for us.

1-2.  Basically we can't worship other gods instead of the actual God.
3.  We're not allowed to say "Oh my god!"  We can say "Oh my goodness!" or "Oh my word!" instead.
4.  Sundays we have to go to church.
5.  We have to obey everything that our parents tell us to do.
6.  We shouldn't kill anything.  (Then we got into a whole argument about bugs, and how it was okay to kill ants and spiders but not other animals.)
7.  We'll know when we get older.
8.  We can't steal.  Stealing is when we take something without permission.
9.  We'll also know when we get older.
10.  We can't be greedy.  We have to share.

Who else sees really big problems here?  I understand that as a really young child, this is all you can really say, but as we grow older, the church that taught us these silly made up rules should be responsible for teaching us correctly.  Unfortunately after I had 'learned' the ten commandments as a child, that was all I knew about them until I personally decided to look into it further because it made no real sense to me.  That was about when I was in high school.

It didn't make sense that an entire commandment was dedicated to not being able to say the phrase "Oh my god!"  It didn't make sense that church was mandatory.  It didn't make sense that we had to obey everything our parents told us because I had struggled with doing what was right and what my parents said.  The whole drawing a line between bugs and other animals made no sense, either.

What mostly got me was the whole "Obey your parents."  For a long time I really did think that one of the ten commandments literally said "Obey your parents."  I was taught in Sunday school to obey.  My parents would quote from the Bible that I had to obey them.  But sometimes they would tell me to do things I knew were wrong.  They would tell me to lie from time to time.  They were biased because for some reason I was always greedy but my sisters never were.  It was okay for my dad to steal things from my mother.  It just didn't make sense.  But when I decided to look it up in the Bible itself, the word 'obey' wasn't on there.  Instead it was the word 'honor.'  From then on, through experience, I had to learn the difference between the word 'obey' and 'honor,' because whenever I asked someone else, their definition of 'honor' meant 'to obey.'

But this topic of honor vs. obey is for another time.