From The Slacktivist:
Whenever you see a “Ten Commandments” monument, the first thing to check is whether it comes from the Bible or if, instead, it comes from the Fraternal Order of Eagles and Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille.The two telltale signs are: 1) The Eagles/DeMille version is not enumerated and usually offers a decalog of 11 or 12 commandments; and 2) The Eagles/DeMille version uses a King James Version pastiche that garbles the “graven images” bit as “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images.”
The newly installed Ten Commandments monument at the Rockwall County Courthouse in Texas is not the biblical Ten Commandments. It is the Fraternal Order of Eagles version.
You would think that it might matter to devout Christians intent on “bringing back the Bible” that this monument is something other than and different from the Bible. But it does not seem to matter to them. That is, at the very least, odd.
Given that Rockwall County is more than 60% Baptist, you might also think that people there would revere the central tenet of Baptists, which is the separation of church and state. But no. These are Southern Baptists and Texas Southern “Baptists” at that, and if they even slightly came to understand the implications of voluntary believers’ baptism they would reject it in a heartbeat and start practicing infant baptism the next day.
If you’re going to put up a monument with words from the Eagles then it’d be better to just go with the lyrics to “Desperado.” Or maybe just “Go Birds.” (I’d love to see that outside of a Texas courthouse.)
Rockwall County is in the greater Dallas area, so that would definitely be A Thing. You should click on that Friendly Atheist link for more details, but just knowing that they used a fake version of the Ten Commandments without being aware of it is pretty damn funny. Everyone involved deserves to be roundly mocked for it.
Note that this is separate from the force feeding of the Ten Commandments to the schools, but they do have one thing in common, and that’s authenticity. See, the official state version of the Ten Commandments that are being foisted into classrooms around the state are not the Ten Commandments that I as a Catholic school boy was taught in the 70s. We only had three commandments pertaining to The Lord Thy God – the “honor your father and mother” one was Commandment #4, “don’t kill” was #5, and so on – and two commandments at the end about coveting, one for your neighbor’s wife and one for your neighbor’s possessions. (*) I once tried to explain this to a conservative type who was not a Catholic, and she had no earthly idea what I was talking about. I couldn’t have made my point about why the Ten Commandments are not some neutral, universal thing that we can all relate to any better, if only she had been able to understand it.
(*) Specifically, the Tenth Commandment as I learned it was “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s ass”, which somehow didn’t cause us all to giggle in the classroom. Later on, as we got closer to the age where we would receive the sacrament of Confirmation (seventh grade), there would be jokes about not coveting thy neighbor’s wife’s ass. CCD teachers were not amused by these jokes.
You might also think that Catholics would protest against a Baptist/Anabaptist/Calvinist version of the Ten Commandments.
Having been raised by two of them, I’m pretty sure that the CCD teachers got their stand up lessons from the nuns.