David Bodanis is author of E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation and Electric Universe. He has written an outstanding and informative essay on the origin and significance of the Ten Commandments. Here is an snippet from Prospect. Regardless of what you believe, you can -- and should -- read the entire essay here.
[S]ometimes [Christopher Hitchens] gets things very wrong, and his attitude to the ten commandments—one he shares with many modern atheists—is one such mistake. They represent little more, he argues, than the rantings of an angry, vain and vengeful God. Who would possibly want to follow their "vague pre-Christian desert morality," which shows every sign of being invented by a "Bronze Age demagogue"?
. . . Hitchens is responding to the mythical story of the commandments found in the standard religious accounts: the Koran and the old testament. But if he looked at them as a historian or an anthropologist, he might take a more sympathetic view of this extraordinary list—which has bequeathed to us the weekend, the principle of innocent until proved guilty, the Sunni/Shia split and much else besides.
Moses, of course, dominates the biblical account. On Mount Sinai, amid storms and booming trumpet blasts, it's he who brings down the perfect tablets, direct from God. Yet this is not the sole source of understanding of the commandments' power. Something quite extraordinary was also happening in real political history at the time. Clues scattered in the Bible, archaeological digs and other sources show that the commandments, at least at the beginning, were quite unlike anything a Bronze Age demagogue would have proposed. They weren't designed to keep a people in servile, superstitious passivity. In fact, they were a progressive creed: helping a band of escaping refugees to find freedom in a new land.
Take a few minutes to read the essay.
My name is Dan Porter. I have always believed in God. And I have always been a Christian, which means I have always believed, at some level of understanding, Christian assertions about Christ. But during all of my adult life—I am now 65—I have struggled with many seeds of doubt brought on by modern science, objective history, the question of why a loving God would allow so much suffering in the world and difficulties with seemingly conflicting moral precepts. 
I still agree with Hitchens - not much proof here. All speculation again.
Posted by: Chris P | March 01, 2009 at 06:58 PM