"I recognize the basic concepts as pretty universal"

This is an interesting point Bill makes. The values in the Ten Commandments are shared across cultures and civilisations widely distributed both geographically and temporally. It seems that as a species our moral codes are dictated by a set of values that are very deeply embedded in virtually all human societies.

Why might this be? It's possible that these values confer an evolutionary advantage on us as a species; the survival of the species within a society of very social animals such as Homo sapiens requires some controls and these could be encoded in our DNA. Unlike our close relatives, we have developed ways of communication that allow us to record and transmit these values over many generations so we have records of them from millennia past.

What's even more interesting is it remains to be seen if this is an effective evolutionary strategy for ensuring long-term survival of the human lineage. Quite possibly it isn't, as we cannot control our numbers, preserve our resources, stop killing each other in the name of superstition or greed, trashing the planet to the point we're altering the entire climate and having the wit to develop sustainable and non-polluting forms of energy capture.