Today the students and I concluded a two-week theological experiment of sorts. Inspired by the recently released Year of Living Biblically (from which weve read in class), we've been trying to quantify just how often all the members of the class, including the teacher (that's me), broke the Ten Commandments. We wanted to find out which of the Big Ten was the hardest to keep.

    For the past two weeks, each of us kept a couple small scorecards with us.  Each scorecard fit in the back pocket of a regular pair of jeans. It was printed on slightly gray cardstock. It was a simple spreadsheet grid with the number of the commandment running down the y-axis. Across the top, we had the dates for each day of the week: one card covered the week of the first through the seventh and the other covered the eighth through the fourteenth. The idea was that we'd fill in the grid number of violations we made each day. The commandments would just be indicated by number so, should somebody find it, it wouldn't be readily apparent what we were doing. It was a condition of doing the experiment that nobody could be asked to provide details about an infraction and that nobody would put their name on any of the recording documents.

    It was also necessary, before we began, to lay down some definitions about what just constituted an infraction. There was some confusion about what was, exactly, a "graven image." From the hissy fit Moses threw, we knew a golden calf statue was a bad idea; but we were worried that it was one of slippery concepts that wasn't calf specific and might be just the sort of thing someone violated without intending to. A quick check of the dictionary wasn't completely useful: graven simply means sculpted, but there's a second definition specific to the entire phrase "graven image" that requires one worship said sculpture. Influenced by the film Dogma, there was some concern about what constituted worshipping. Given the theological hairsplitting this was leading to, we decided that, in order to actually violate this commandment, you'd have to sculpt an image and believe that it represented a god of some sort. Seeing the Golden Arches and craving a Big Mac wouldn't count as a violation.
    Not that we thought it would come up, but we decided to count any killing as a violation of the injunction against killing people. We wouldn't distinguish between garden variety homicides, killing in self-defense, and people offed in a "just" war. We also decided that this referred to direction action. You yourself had to kill a dude. Being an American at a time when America was at war didn't make you automatically a violator of the rule.
    Bearing false witness was another sticky wicket. Some will tell you that this specifically refers providing false information in a legal setting and that the injunctions against generic lying appear elsewhere in the Bible. We decided, after much deliberation, that we'd take the commandment to be a generic rule about lying in or out of a legal context. I could not, however, convince my students that omissions constituted lying. The commandment, as far as my students were concerned, demanded you tell the truth and nothing but the truth, but it wasn't necessarily required that you tell the whole truth. I was outvoted. I did point out that this might put them in trouble with regards to honoring their mothers and fathers. They said that they worry about that when they got in that situation.
    Finally, oddly, coveting caused two problems. The first was easily rectified: several students were under the impression that the word "covet" was just a synonym for the word "steal" and they weren't sure why there were two commandments against theft. The second was trickier: Is it cool to covet something that your neighbor doesn't own? For example, let's say your schoolie (the students decided to consider all humanity as their neighbors – a generous gesture that makes the commandments a lot hard to follow than if you considered them as applicable to only the dudes who live next to you) has a hot boy or girlfriend. The situation in "Jesse's Girl" is clearly a no-no. But will you be breaking the commandment if you decide that you merely want something like what Jesse and his girl have. You don't want Jesse's girl so much as you want what Jesse and his girl have while, at the same time, you have no desire that Jesse and his girl should stop having what they have. We debated this one for some time and came to the conclusion that you have to specifically covet the neighbor's thing to violate this. Coveting something that is like your neighbor's thing wouldn't count. Personally, I thought this was a cop out and simply further proof that Calvinist aren't raising their kids like they used to. But, again, I was outvoted.

    With the ground rules set, we spent two weeks gathering data.

    I did great on certain commandments. I didn't hold any other gods before God (sorry Thor, what have you done for my lately). I managed to not carve any statues that I then worshipped as a god. I didn't kill anybody through any direct actions of my own. There's a big fat blank in the adultery row. There was suitably respectful behavior towards my 'rents. No stealing.
    Still, I racked up quite a few black marks. Under the new freelance regime, keeping the Sabbath holy is a luxury I just can't afford. (See how helpful that phrase is?) We really could only break that rule once in the timeframe of the experiment and I did break it.
    I racked up quite a few of God's name in vain violations. It would have been worse if it weren't for my tendency to leapfrog straight to the more profane language and the influence of W.C. Fields on my father. In the first case, I'm more likely to drop the f-bomb than ask God to metaphorically damn something. In the second, my father was in the habit of using W.C. Fields's famous evasions of the Commandment #3 around his children. Consequently, his children use those evasions the way others use the Lord's name vainly. Without really intending it as an evasion, I'll use the phrase "Godfrey Daniel."
    The two big killers for we were lying and coveting. Dude, I'm like a champion of lying and coveting. If there was a lying and coveting Olympics, I 'd be captain of the American Lying and Coveting Team. Mostly the lies had were of the little-white grade fabrications. They were the sort of thing you say to get out of a social obligation without hurting anybody's feelings, stuff like that. The coveting mainly has to do with real estate.

    Apparently, I'm far from alone. Coveting and lying were the biggies on the student tallies as well. They fared considerably worse in the honoring the parents department, suggesting that parents are simply easier to honor when you don't actually have to deal with them. Musical downloads killed their theft stats.
    I'm happy to report the class managed not to kill anybody or commit any adultery. We also avoid putting any other gods before God and we're 100% graven image free.
    Unlike their sinful teacher, the students successfully managed to avoid labor on the Sabbath. There was a hint of the suggestion that working on the weekend is not only sinful, but dumb. There is, I should point out, no injunction to honor your Sunday school teacher.

The Internets

    Speaking of "lying" – so, out of curiosity, I've been tracking down dudes I run across on Shelfari to their home web pages. Mostly blogs. I've found that readers on Shelfari tend to "double up" coverage of their reading habits. They'll post books that they've read on Shelfari and also review these books on their blogs and vanity pages. Weirdly, the data presented in both places rarely matches up. And I'm not talking about slight differences in the wording of reviews. There are often fundamental differences about whether or not a book was completely read or what format (book versus audio DVD, for example) was consumed don't match up. I would ascribe this to error – perhaps they were not aware you could indicate audio versions – except that many of these cats and kittens do indicate what format they consumed.

    Most often, this is a sort of "sin of omission." Somebody on their blog will indicate that they didn't bother reading all the way through a book, but on Shelfari it will appear on the "shelf" along with books he or she has read. To be fair, it's not clear that a book on your "shelf" must be read. That assumption is supported by the fact that books on shared shelves are labeled "books we've read." Further, there are areas for books one intends to read and books one is currently reading. You could, I guess, argue that placing an unfinished book on your "shelf" doesn't constitute a lie and there is no expectation that you've completely read said book, but this seems somewhat disingenuous given that the site itself clearly supposes just that.

    As for the format thing, I think this is the strangest bit at all. Without getting to abstract, I understand that the definition of a "book" is somewhat malleable. For example, I find it weird that some folks but comic books up on their Shelfari shelves. They don't indicate their month magazine reading, but, for some reason, comics are different. But this, I feel, is an arguable point. It is reading material and you read it, so if you want to count it, that's your bee's wax. But audio books strike me as a fundamentally different beast. They are, by definition, not reading material. You listened to it, not read it. Personally, I don't think it should appear in a set of "read" books. Though, this isn't even the point. The real question is, why would you say in one place that you listened to book and then, in another, say you read it – and, this is the odd thing, give readers easy access to both places? (I'm thinking of a kitten who had all of Proust on her shelf, but blogged about listening her way through Search. What odd is that, for other books, books that seem to me to be of less intellectual heft, she's got no problem indicating the audio.) I don't get why you'd confuse the issue and give the impression of being full of bullshit.

    I'm over thinking this.  I blame being home so much. It's making me an obsessive shut-in.

Song title: "We're All in This Together" by Old Crow Medicine Show