What Life Was Like Before The Ten Commandments

Here's a post at the American Thinker from January 2018 by Karin McQuillan entitled What I Learned In The Peace Corps In Africa: Trump Is Right  A hat tip to Kevin at the Smallest Minority for pointing me to this old post.

I have lived for a time out of the United States, in what is often considered a third world country, but it was still a country where the people and those governing them had a strong attachment to a Biblical and Christian culture.  It is only recently that I have become aware of just how much we live in the culture, how much our ideas of right and wrong come from this culture.  It almost seems that these things are instinctual.  Indeed, I have had conversations with atheists who insist the can be moral without believing in God.  Truly, they can not, because without God's word, they wouldn't know how.

Several recent articles and books have pointed out just how revolutionary the Bible's moral code truly was at the time it was introduced.  Rather than being monstrous as the critics of the Bible claim, God's laws introduced a kinder, gentler way of life into a cruel world, one where men savaged one another constantly, where people sacrificed their own children to their gods, and other abominations.  Indeed, one in which a man might be killed for a pair of sneakers, had they had such things.

Miss McQuillan writes:

The longer I lived there, the more I understood: it became blindingly obvious that the Senegalese are not the same as us. The truths we hold to be self-evident are not evident to the Senegalese. How could they be? Their reality is totally different. You can't understand anything in Senegal using American terms.

Take something as basic as family. Family was a few hundred people, extending out to second and third cousins. All the men in one generation were called "father." Senegalese are Muslim, with up to four wives. Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty. (I witnessed this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.) Sex, I was told, did not include kissing. Love and friendship in marriage were Western ideas. Fidelity was not a thing. Married women would have sex for a few cents to have cash for the market.

What I did witness every day was that women were worked half to death. Wives raised the food and fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives. Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees.

...snip...

The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown. The value system was the exact opposite. You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives. There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system. They fail.

...snip...

One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic. One day, as the wait grew hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from the medical aides – who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree instead of working – collapsed to the ground. They turned their heads so as not to see her and kept talking. She lay there in the dirt. Callousness to the sick was normal.

Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's not. It seems natural to us because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture.

The Bible introduced compassion, forgiveness, and mercy into a world that had none. Christ in particular changed actual lives. The Apostles were changed men, and changed the lives of others through Jesus, for without Christ, nothing good could be done. For an example, the existence of hospitals was a result of Christian compassion. Anti-abortion laws were another effect of Christian compassion and mercy.  It may be, in fact, that the current rioting, looting, and destruction by the Left is God's judgement against us.  I pray we have more time, but we need to reverse the trend and as a nation turn back to God.

We need to appoint Justices who will reverse Row v. Wade. Yes, I understand that the question of abortion will return to the States, and many of those will permit it under some circumstances. But the current abortion regime will be curtailed. Please remember that as Christians, we should have compassion and mercy on all children, for they are the result of adult decisions and should be treated as blessings. They deserve to be loved and cared for, not thrown in the trash.