The Ten Commandments, Illustrated

ONE: 'You shall have no other gods before Me.'

TWO: 'You shall not make for yourself a carved image--any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.'



THREE: 'You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.'
The "Reverend" Fred Phelps, of Westboro Baptist Church



FOUR: 'Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.'



FIVE: 'Honor your father and your mother.'
Jesus said, in Matthew 10:37: He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.



SIX: 'You shall not murder.'
Portrait of George W. Bush made up of portraits of soldiers killed in Iraq

SEVEN: 'You shall not commit adultery.'
Publicity still from the TV show "Big Love," about a Mormon Polygamist

EIGHT: 'You shall not steal.'
Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, former televangelists


NINE: 'You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.'
The "Reverend" Ted Haggard, who preached against homosexuality but was exposed as a closeted homosexual and drug user himself


TEN: 'You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.'
The high altar at the Vatican

The afterlife and sex education addressed on TV series

Interesting to see two frequently discussed subjects in atheist blogs popping up on two consecutive TV shows this evening.

On House, a patient deliberately electrocuted himself at the hospital in order to have a near-death experience. He'd had his first one after almost dying in a car accident a week before, and he said it was "the best 97 seconds of my life." He wanted to experience it again. Later in the show, after House is chastised by Wilson for arguing with another patient about what happens after you die (House is an atheist), House deliberately electrocutes HIMself, in order to find out if the near death experience is all it's cracked up to be.

It wasn't.

Next, on Boston Legal, a 15-year-old girl sues her school board because she got AIDS after unprotected sex. And the sex was unprotected because her school teaches only abstinence as an acceptable form of birth control, therefore, neither she nor her boyfriend had a condom on them on the fateful night. Allan Shore gives a brilliant and impassioned closing argument which I wish had happened in a real courtroom and gotten a LOT of press.

It's great to see these storylines on popular TV shows. You can't argue with a TV show...it's not a conversation. You just have to absorb whey they say and if you don't dismiss it outright you may spend a little time thinking about the message. Hopefully a lot of people will think about the messages in these two shows tonight.