RE: TEN COMMANDMENTS
Editor’s Note: This letter is in regards to last week’s Capital Highlights installment.
Gary Borders’ concise reporting regarding the continual legal wrangling over placing copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms (April 29 Edition) highlights an overly legalistic and atomizing tendency in our culture.
Judaism and its offspring Christianity are intellectual and historical taproots of our civilization which should be understood by all educated citizens.
Many of the founding fathers read Hebrew, Greek, and Latin so they learned the wisdom as well as the turmoil of history in the original. Our founding documents reflect that.
“All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator…,” are ideas based in the Torah and spread by Christianity. In the classroom setting, it is irrelevant whether students believe in either or any religion but very important that they understand the grand sweep of human history.
The Ten Commandments are a welcoming portal into our shared intellectual wealth. Some of your older readers will remember the film “The King and I.”
The mid-19th Century monarch in question was Mongkut or Rama IV. A serious Buddhist and monk for over 20 years, he invited Christian missionaries into his kingdom and supported their work in education and medicine. The Catholic French taught him Latin and astronomy and the Protestant Americans taught him English.
The King famously stated that what the Christians asked him to believe was foolish but what they asked him to do was noble. To this day, the King has the title of protector of all religions while concurrently serving as the head of Thai Buddhism. East and West can arrive at similar resolutions. Buddha taught the “Middle Path” and Aristotle the “Golden Mean.”
We beggar ourselves by getting into petty legal spats which cut us off from our glorious past. Cannot we be more like King Mongkut and put personal belief aside and respect and propagate the good? The young could use some guideposts with so much substance abuse in an often frivolous society.
Donald Stader Lakehills
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