That's right, Donuel. Having or not having empathy for others is the key issue. Most religions devote a great deal of concern to the issue of empathy, but that doesn't mean that all members of those religions get the message. Some of them don't. Most philosophies pay a good deal of attention to the issue of empathy as well...or at least one would hope they would! But that doesn't mean that adherents to those philosophies will necessarily display empathy.

"Commandments" was the word that arose out of the ancient Hebrew culture from which came the books of the Old Testament. That was a society full of commands that were coming down from various patriarchal authority figures, so it's not surprising they would have used the term "commandments" for a set of religious instructions said to be emanating from God. They saw God as they saw their own patriarchs...a being invested with great power and authority, a being easily moved to anger, etc...

The later developments of Christianity tended to move more in the direction of a God of love...and love is based upon empathy.

We are also said to have been given free will.

If we have been given free will, then no one can command us!

Or if they do, then we can choose to disobey the command. And we sometimes do disobey commands, no matter who they are coming from, whether it be our parents, our teachers, the local government, the police, the national government, the club president....or God (presuming we can entertain that concept).

So...the ancient Hebrews called those statements "Commandments", because that fit their mindset at the time, and that seems to offend some people.

Okay, they might just as well have called those statements "suggestions" or "guidelines" or "good advice", which is exactly what they are, and what the stuff in the article is. The fact that they chose to call them "commandments" has little to do with the statements themselves, and a great deal to do with the nature of that ancient patriarchal, very authoritative society.

There's no point in people getting upset now over an expression of language that came out of an ancient tribal society, when the basic message contained in the "commandments" is a perfectly understandable set of instructions on how NOT to be an antisocial and destructive asshole in the normal terms of the society of that time.

And that's what the set of "commandments for atheists" is in the linked article as well. It's simply a group of suggestions on how not to be an antisocial jerk. The only reason the article even called it "commandments" at all was to symbolically link it to the Christian religious commandments which we already know about, thereby making a premise for having such an article in the first place.