""God's Commandment forbids murder absolutely as an offense against God - but not battlefield killing or the death penalty. That's not to say that abolition of the death penalty, or the use of bean bags in war, would displease God, merely that the Commandment leaves those decisions to the state. Murder is an affront to God, but the death penalty isn't.""

The Commandment?.... The Ten Commandments?

A salient feature of a 6 millennia long game of Chinese whispers, which some misguided souls take to be literal truth.

Try it sometime! Line up fifty people fifteen feet apart and relay a reasonably complex message in normal conversational tones, then compare what comes out of the other end.

Then consider the same procedure carried out from father to son over several millennia, and while you are at it, have a brief look at the folk process and the variants it has produced.

What has been written of the Old Testament has been written by men with a social agenda, and as parable and analogy it serves its purpose.

But we have only the word of those MEN for the veracity or accuracy of the events described.

In fact, even if the story of Moses and the Ten Commandments were true, we would still only have Moses word as to how he came by them.

If anybody knocked on your door asking you to invest in a project based on that level of evidence, you would undoubtedly send him packing and probably inform the police.

Don T.