Pastor Matt Queen, preaching at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, March 2023
The fundamental principles of Christianity are supposedly the rules allegedly handed down to Moses by God in the form of the Ten Commandments, although there is some confusion over which ten commandments is the because the only set of ten rules called The Ten Commandments in the Bible are all about what food to eat when, what to sacrifice when, etc., (Exodus 34:17-26) and nothing to do with human interactions - the basis of society.
The rules allegedly give to Moses in the form of writing on two 'tablets of stone' are what are normally referred to as The Ten Commandments, although there are two different versions (Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:7-21), differing especially over the reason for 'keeping the sabbath holy'. Apparently, God changed his mind on that point.
But incorporated in these latter commandments is the Golden Rule almost certainly plagiarized from neighboring cultures because no culture could succeed without a form of it - Treat others the way you would like them to treat you. In other words, do something that fundamentalists seem to find baffling - use your innate empathy ability to work out how to behave in any given situation.
that rule obviously covers killing, stealing, etc., so renders them redundant in any list of rules of civilised behaviour, so perhaps the second most important rule is 'no lying', or, in biblical terms, no bearing false witness against others and no trying to fool people into believing thongs you know aren't true.
You could argue of course that lying to someone, or to paraphrase Mark Twain's, "trying to fool someone into believing something that aint so", is really covered by the Golden Rules because you wouldn't want someone to trick you into believing some thig that aint so, so you shouldn’t try to trick them.
So, given the readiness of Christians to lie for their faith, it is very clear that scant regard is being paid to the rules they would like to impose on the rest of us if ever they regained the power over us that they once had. In fact, piety is used as an excuse to self-licence an exemption from the rules they insist other should live by, demonstrating yet again the truism that religions provide excuses for people who need excuses. They're not only trying to fool us with false witnessing but they're doing something to us that they wouldn't want us to do to them. In other words, they're being something that Jesus allegedly forbade them from being - hypocrites. (Matthew 15: 7-8)
It should come as no surprise than that a leading Southern Baptist has been exposed as a lying hypocrite. Indeed, its's almost as though he believes there is no omnipotent god who will one day judge him, with special scrutiny on how faithfully he's complied with the God-given rules, or not. This particular
