The Nugget:
Exodus 20:15 Thou shalt not steal. (KJV)
Exo 20:15 “Never steal.” (GW, God’s Word translation)
Exo 20:15 Do not take the property of another. (BBE, Bible in Basic English)
My Comment:
I have been reading yet again a book I have, titled A Lawyer Examines the Bible by Irwin H. Linton, published in 1943 and reprinted by Baker Book House in 1969 or 1970. Let me share a portion about the Eighth Commandment from Appendix F on page 246. Appendix F reproduces a professor’s objections to the Ten Commandments titled “Demolishing the Ten Commandments in Ten Minutes” by Dan Gilbert and I. H. Linton.
“VIII. Thou shalt not steal.
“The Professor: The commandment against theft is meaningless, from a moral standpoint. Pilate may well have asked, ‘What is theft?’
“Proudhon said, with much truth, that ‘Property is theft.’
“The commandment against theft of property, therefore, simply functions to prevent the people from taking back from the capitalists and the exploiters the property which the latter stole in the first place. Hence, it is a means of perpetuating injustice.
“Under it, the man who has stolen a lot of property and got away with it is permitted to keep his ill-gotten gains. And if we try to take them away from him, then our worthy clergy call us ‘Communists,’ and demand that we stop violating their precious Decalogue.
“There never will be social justice in this world until this Commandment is tossed on the scrap-heap.”
“Mr. Linton: How could society exist for a day if the ‘truth’ announced by somebody named Proudhon were acted on, and if one kept possession and use of only what his hands could hold while he was awake to retain it?
“Is every article of property possessed by every man ‘stolen property’?
“Are the professor’s own hat and pants stolen property, and are they proper subjects for sudden, violent, and embarrassing change of possession at any moment?
“If there is a single honestly acquired thing anywhere, there is use for this commandment.
“Would theft be a good thing if a ‘capitalist’ (anyone who has not spent all his wages) took something from a proletarian? What’s to protect the property of proletarians when all is in their hands if there is no rule or practice against theft?
“Surely the merry device invented by George Bernard Shaw of ‘making the worse appear the better reason,’ of standing moral things on their heads with a serio-comic attempt to make such an attitude plausible, seldom had a more absurd reductio ad absurdum than the professor’s solemn, oracular ‘demolishing’ of the Eighth Commandment.”
My application in this day and time:
The nonsense of liberal, actually Communist, professors has not changed since Linton included this Appendix F in his valuable book’s revision in 1943. The nonsense in the news of today (June, 2020) just continues to reflect the widespread indoctrination in the political science departments of our colleges and universities. The outcome is plain to see as young people and some of their elders engage with approval in violence, rioting, protests, and looting (stealing!) today.
I saw a headline yesterday about Dr. Fauci lamenting the ordinary citizen’s distrust of science and unwillingness to follow the directives of authorities. He has no license to complain, given his waffling opinions (January, masks are not needed; June, masks are needed now) and conflicts of interest (he is fully invested in the vaccine and pharmaceutical industry along with Bill Gates, even though such a conflict of interest is strictly against federal law). He is the one who finagled a way to fund the Wuhan, China laboratory (the source of the Communist Chinese Covid-19 virus leak), right when such funding was made illegal by federal law. Is it any wonder that the informed citizen has very good reason to distrust today’s so-called science? If any industry is guilty of theft of our individual and national wealth it is the medical/pharmaceutical industry’s monopolistic high cost to our economy of one dollar out of every five.
Agenda-driven science is not science at all, but monopolistic greed, which surely violates the Eighth Commandment.