Power and authority in terms of the Ten Commandments (TCs) are discussed. The paper reviews the TCs in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The treatment and basis for power and authority in each religion are clarified. Implications of power and authority using the perspective of the TCs are provided. The paper suggests that in today's business environment people tend to be selective in identifying only with certain elements of the TCs that fit their interest and that the TCs should be viewed (...) as general moral guidelines. (shrink)

Ten commandments of philosophical writing.

II. Attempts to redefine freedom will change the consequences neither of respecting it nor of failing to respect it.

Because religious views are seen as sacred or holy, they are often protected from scrutiny more than other views. Simply, it seems that is not socially acceptable to say anything critical about them. While it is perfectly acceptable to argue over political views and human choices, we dare not critique religion in the United States. However, some religious assertions should be questioned: the morality of the Ten Commandments is such an assertion. In what follows, I argue that the Commandments are (...) a poor guide to morality and do not deserve the respect they have been afforded. (shrink)

Disagreement in the sixteenth century on the meaning of the First Commandment prompted dissension over such related issues as the nature of the Lord's Supper, the authority of the Old Testament for the church and the pace of ecclesiastical reform—issues that are still in dispute.

This book review discusses You Bin’s intercultural approach to construct a Chinese version of catechism through the Ten Commandments as the vital content for both Chinese Christians and non-Christians in the Chinese context. It shows that integrating God’s Ten Commandments into Chinese traditional culture and social settings is not necessarily meant to compromise its biblical-theological essence with one’s self-critical awareness of culture. It suggests how this book might set an example for both theologians and practitioners to bring back the catechism, (...) to bear upon the needs of contemporary Christians in the non-Western setting. (shrink)

This book shows that atheism need not be only reactionary (against religion and God), but rather provides a clear set of constructive principles to live by that establish atheism as a positive worldview. The book encourages and guides the reader through the process of formulating his or her own set of personal beliefs.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 33.2 (2005) 71-97 [Access article in PDF] The Subject of Religion Lacan and the Ten Commandments Kenneth Reinhard Julia Reinhard Lupton Despite Freud's Nietzschean unmasking of religion as ideology, psychoanalysis has frequently been attacked as itself a religion, a cabal of analyst-priests dedicated to the worship of a dead master. Such critics "do not believe in Freud" in much the same way as atheists "do not believe in (...) God," and their rejections of psychoanalysis in the name of the secular partake in the very structure of religious thought they claim to repudiate. In Seminar XXI: Les non-dupes errent, Lacan comments on the blindness of the atheistic insight concerning religion: "I know that you're not believers, right? But that doesn't mean that you aren't all the more conned... because even if you are not believers, you still believe in that aspiration [for the love of God]. I won't say that you suppose it; rather, it supposes you" [Dec. 18, 1973; our trans.]. In Lacan's analysis, it is not that secular intellectuals suffer from unexamined religious "suppositions" or assumptions, to be swept away through a little ideology-critique or time on the couch. The case is rather, in Lacan's strong formulation, that religious discourse supposes us—supports and underwrites our very structures of being, subjectivity, and social interaction. That is, the secular subject is produced by the religious discourses that precede and continue to speak through it; the challenge for the contemporary critic is not to silence or debunk those discourses, but rather to bring the modern subject to assume responsibility for their enunciation.Throughout the decades of his seminar, Lacan addressed the monotheistic foundations of Western subjectivity as a set of discursive ruptures or cuts which continue to scar and brand the modern subject beyond their secular abrogation. Distinguishing between Freud "the individual with his atheistic profession of faith" and "the Freud who was the first to acknowledge the value and relevance of [the] myth... we call the death of God" [S VII 192–93], Lacan insists that Freud regarded monotheism as an epochal divide that irrevocably altered all that came before and after it: "On the left of this [monotheistic] message, there are some things that are henceforth outdated, obsolete; they no longer hold beyond the manifestation of the message. On the right, things are quite different" [172]. What, in Lacan's analysis, is the difference that monotheism has made, both during its periods of dominance and after? The laws, narratives, and symbols of monotheism continue to undergird key fantasies of personhood, nationhood, and neighborhood in the modernity that purports to have supplanted them. In Lacan's formulation, monotheism "supposes" the subject of these fantasies, precipitating it from out of the expanse of signifiers and in relation to a sublime object of both unbearable enjoyment and social obligation. Moreover, it is the scandal and the gift of monotheism that it not only creates moments of traumatic singularity, but also thinks the singular as trauma, rending the fabric of an animistic nature which would unite every polarity of being in the fullness of a sexual relation. Unlike the gods of Greek philosophy, the monotheistic God is not part of the nature he creates. In its decisive thinking of singularity, monotheism elicits and eludes all rapprochement with philosophical conceptions of the One, whether in the guise of Hellenized Judaism, Pauline theology, or Arab Aristotelianism. Lacan extends the monotheistic project of thinking singularity [End Page 71] by insisting that "there is something of One" [il y a de l'Un]—not the self-identical One of Greek logic, mathematics, and cosmology, but the One of a violent rupture that creates subjects and their worlds around a void, an un that un-does the primacy it speaks.If, from the Lacanian vantage, the singular invention of the God shared by the People of the Book forever separates religion from philosophy, we would also insist that religion is not simply a subset of "culture," understood as the symbolic practices that unify a people... (shrink)

With the Ten Commandments as a case, the overall focus of this article is how a reader’s a priori concept of a text influences how he or she allows textual content and interpretive context to interact. The frame of the article is the claim by the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda that they will establish a society built on the Ten Commandments, a claim that raises questions about what they mean with this reference to ‘Ten Commandments’. The article (...) falls into two parts. The first part surveys some examples from the history of interpretation of the Ten Commandments, demonstrating contextual and terminological fluidity both in their biblical versions and in their postbiblical history of interpretation. With this insight, the second part discusses how LRA refers to the Ten Commandments in ways that demonstrate that the very concept ‘Ten Commandments’ is stronger than the details of their content. This enables the LRA to form ‘new commandments’ fitting with their ideology and struggle. (shrink)

Can managers detect honest people’s lies in a handwritten message? In this article, I will briefly discuss graphology and a basic model of interpersonal communication. I will then develop a fundamental theoretical framework of eight principles for detecting lies based on the basic communication model, handwriting analyses, and the following assumptions: For most people, it is easier to tell the truth than to tell lies. This applies to handwritings also. When most honest people lie, they try to hide their stressful (...) emotions in the encoding process. As a consequence, they deviate from their own normal writing and violate their own personal moral standards. Interestingly enough, the art or science of detecting a lie in a handwritten sample is to focus not on what they write, but on how they write it. These 24 exhibits (cases) written in 11 languages—used in different parts of the world—help managers apply this important theoretical framework of interpersonal communication, understand the encoding process, pinpoint these sudden emotional changes, decode handwritten messages, unlock the secrets, reveal the message’s true meanings, and detect people’s lies. (shrink)

Many have preached the need for business schools to "teach" ethics, but very few have considered that business schools should also adopt and implement their own codes. The authors' previous research indicates that there is a perceived need for a code of ethics for business schools. Currently, relatively few schools have in fact adopted codes of ethics applicable to all the constituents of the institution. Proposals made to businesses to help them determine which values should be included in a corporate (...) code do not appear to adequately address the distinctive issues faced in an academic environment. In an earlier survey, the authors identified general principles of conduct that seemed to encompass the values expressed by the respondents. Relying on research that has indicated that ideally a code of ethics should be inspirational and value oriented rather than prescriptive and proscriptive, the authors herein propose ten values and correlating definitions that would provide a framework for a business school code of ethics. (shrink)

Assuming divine command theory is true, there are no moral limits on the commands God can issue. Nevertheless there are no possible worlds in which divine command theory is true and God commands cruelty for its own sake or the sacrifice of ten-year-olds in a gruesome ritual, or anything of the kind. The main conclusion of the argument is that God cannot command the morally horrible not because of God's moral perfection or God's lack of power, of God's kindness, etc., (...) but because commanding the morally horrible entails a contradiction. I show that the argument is an instance of a valid and uncontroversial counterfactual sequent. Divine command theory entails that there are commands that even an omnipotent and morally unconstrained being cannot issue. (shrink)

Commanders gain authority from obedience and lose authority from disobedience. We should expect commanders to therefore devise commands that reduce the probability of disobedience. To aid recognition of these techniques for reducing the risk of disobedience, I focus on the extreme of case of commands that reduce the probability to zero. Each of my ten commandments illustrates a logical technique for engineering out disobedience. Once you master these safety measures, you can confidently legislate your own universal maxims. Your innovations will (...) be good news for Immanuel Kant’s characterization of morality in terms of categorical imperatives. The commandments also raise interesting questions about responsibility for necessities and the nature of rule following. (shrink)

In this book, one of the most distinguished scholars of German culture collects his essays on a figure who has long been one of his chief preoccupations. Erich Heller's lifelong study of modern European literature necessarily returns again and again to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche prided himself on having broken with all traditional ways of thinking and feeling, and once even claimed that he would someday be recognized for having ushered in a new millennium. While acknowledging Nietzsche's radicalism, Heller also insists (...) on the continuity of the story in which he does indeed occupy a central place. By considering Nietzsche in relation to Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Yeats, and others, Heller shows the philosopher's ambivalence toward the tradition he inherited as well as his profound effect on the thought and sensibility of those who followed him. It is hardly an exaggeration to say, as Heller does in his first essay, that Nietzsche is to many modern writers and thinkers--including Mann, Musil, Kafka, Freud, Heidegger, Jaspers, Gide, and Sartre--what St. Thomas Aquinas was to Dante: the categorical interpreter of a world, which they contemplate imaginatively and theoretically without ever much upsetting its Nietzschean structure. Thus it is Nietzsche's thought, so pervasively present in the themes of modernity, that gives coherence and unity to Heller's essays. What emerges from them is that, despite his iconoclastic declarations and unorthodox philosophical practices, Nietzsche deals with the human spirit's persistent concerns. His questions remain urgent, and even the answers, in all their contradictoriness, possess the commanding force of his inquiry. An example is the incompatibility of the famous extremes, the teaching of the U;bermensch and the Eternal Recurrence of All Things. These cancel each other out and yet grow from the same intellectual and spiritual roots, as is shown lucidly and cogently by one of Heller's most forceful essays, "Nietzsche's Terrors: Time and the Inarticulate." In fathoming the depth of this contradiction, Heller at the same time reveals the importance of Nietzsche for those who seek to understand the wellsprings of the epoch's disquiet, turmoil, and creativity. (shrink)

Tainted political symbols ought to be confronted, removed, or at least recontextualized. Despite the best efforts to achieve this, however, official actions on tainted symbols often fail to take place. In such cases, I argue that political vandalism—the unauthorized defacement, destruction, or removal of political symbols—may be morally permissible or even obligatory. This is when, and insofar as, political vandalism serves as fitting counter-speech that undermines the authority of tainted symbols in ways that match their publicity, refuses to let them (...) speak in our name, and challenges the derogatory messages expressed through a mechanism I call derogatory pedestalling: the glorification or honoring of certain individuals or ideologies that can only make sense when members of a targeted group are taken to be inferior. (shrink)

A prominent way of justifying civil disobedience is to postulate a pro tanto duty to obey the law and to argue that the considerations that ground this duty sometimes justify forms of civil disobedience. However, this view entails that certain kinds of uncivil disobedience are also justified. Thus, either a) civil disobedience is never justified or b) uncivil disobedience is sometimes justified. Since a) is implausible, we should accept b). I respond to the objection that this ignores the fact that (...) civil disobedience enjoys a special normative status on account of instantiating certain special features: nonviolence, publicity, the acceptance of legal consequences, and conscientiousness. I then show that my view is superior to two rivals: the view that we should expand the notion of civility and that civil disobedience, expansively construed, is uniquely appropriate; and the view that uncivil disobedience is justifiable in but only in unfavorable conditions. (shrink)

Many have argued that certain statues or monuments are objectionable, and thus ought to be removed. Even if their arguments are compelling, a major obstacle is the apparent historical value of those commemorations. Preservation in some form seems to be the best way to respect the value of commemorations as connections to the past or opportunities to learn important historical lessons. Against this, I argue that we have exaggerated the historical value of objectionable commemorations. Sometimes commemorations connect to biased or (...) distorted versions of history, if not mere myths. We can also learn historical lessons through what I call repudiatory honouring: the honouring of certain victims or resistors that can only make sense if the oppressor(s) or target(s) of resistance are deemed unjust, where no part of the original objectionable commemorations is preserved. This type of commemorative practice can even help to overcome some of the obstacles objectionable commemorations pose against properly connecting to the past. (shrink)

Several extensions of the basic modal language are characterized in terms of interpolation. Our main results are of the following form: Language ℒ' is the least expressive extension of ℒ with interpolation. For instance, let ℳ be the extension of the basic modal language with a difference operator [7]. First-order logic is the least expressive extension of ℳ with interpolation. These characterizations are subsequently used to derive new results about hybrid logic, relation algebra and the guarded fragment.