These Ten Commandments are gotten from The God Delusion - A 2006 best-selling non-fiction book by English biologist Richard Dawkins.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion , which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence .
He is sympathetic to Robert Pirsig's statement in Lila (1991) that "when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion. With many examples, he explains that one does not need religion to be moral and that the roots of religion and of morality can be explained in non-religious terms.
Below are the Ten Commandments from the book, please feel free to share your thoughts on the comment box below.
(1) Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.
(2) In all things, strive to cause no harm.
(3) Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
(4) Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
(5) Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
(6) Always seek to be learning something new.
(7) Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
(8) Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
(9) Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
(10) Question everything.
Dawkins uses these proposed commandments to make a larger point that "it is the sort of list that any ordinary, decent person today would come up with." He then adds four more of his own devising:
* Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business.
* Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.
* Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
* Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.
