As a Texas law mandating the display of the 10 Commandments in public schools faces an uncertain future, viral podcaster Joe Rogan is calling it a “problem” to display the guiding principles.
The conversation (content warning: there is strong language in the video) came up during a Sept. 16 episode of Rogan’s podcast, where he spoke with Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey, who argued the 10 Commandments, found in Exodus 20, are a good guide for moral truth, regardless of cultural trends or circumstances.
“Does anyone have a better suggestion than the 10 Commandments to get a child’s mind going, ‘Oh, just those 10 things? If I look at that and aim that direction, I feel like I can’t go wrong,’” he said.
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“Meaning, I’m seeing youth and adults spun out, man, I don’t understand the general expectation between us,” McConaughey continued. “‘What do you mean I could pick your pocket and steal from you, and if I got away with it, [Expletive] you, dude. I am not embarrassed about it. I don’t feel guilty.’”
Rogan, though, offered a different perspective.
The famous podcast host took issue with a few of the commandments, chiefly the first, second, and third (Exodus 20:3-6, NIV):
You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Ultimately, he argued placing the 10 Commandments in public schools across the Lone Star State could be a slippery slope leading to the implementation of Sharia law.
“The problem with the 10 Commandments — if I were to put it in a school where there are nonreligious people, there is a bunch of stuff in there like, ‘not taking the Lord’s name in vain,’ ‘not having any other gods before me,’ where that would give people pause,” Rogan said.
He went on to say people “do that all the time,” referring to taking God’s name in vain.
McConaughey, for his part, compared it to laws against flag burning.
“It’s similar, on a national level, to the flag burning thing [President] Trump’s bringing up,” he said. “That would be like taking the Lord’s name in vain. Burning the flag would be like taking the flag’s name in vain.”
“Yeah, imagine you get arrested for taking the Lord’s name in vain,” Rogan replied. “That would be a real problem, especially when you don’t mean anything by it. … Human beings always creep. They always move toward more and more power and control and, if you put something like that in, now what’re you gonna do? Are you gonna enforce Christian law? What if someone enforces Sharia law? There’s a lot fo talk of that.”
It should be noted that, while Rogan took issue with the Texas law bringing the 10 Commandments to public schools, he did praise the timelessness of the biblical tenets as “pretty legit.”
“Are there any in there that don’t hold up today?” he asked rhetorically. “No, I think they’re pretty legit.”
Rogan added, “If you think about it, they’re pretty legit and they’re 2,000 years old. They kind of nailed it.”
McConaughey suggested blending tenets from several religions to come up with a moral, 10 Commandments-esque creed to live by as a society.
While Rogan called the idea “interesting,” he said, “[T]he problem is, most religions are ideologically opposed to conflicting religions. They don’t want to accept that these other religions are correct about anything. … Like Judaism and Christianity, they share a bunch of things, but they disagree on Jesus.”
“I just think there could be a creed, a bit of a constitution, and if you pull the author out, I think we could find more similarities that are not exclusionary than we would find things that are combative ideas,” McConaughey said.
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