While only two things fill me with reverence and admiration about Immanuel Kant, I am greedier and bow also before nature's wonderful strength and ingenuity. It really took me decades to realize that the Nusle Valley carved out the course of the Botička, but then I marveled even more at what such a brook can do. Not to mention the colorful palette of life I discover. Yesterday I read that the sea red mullet is a fish with wings and feet, on which it has taste buds; using those it infallibly finds prey on the sea floor, so it is followed by a crowd of hungry predators. To me, this is like a banana queue in socialism. The monitor lizards have iron in their tooth enamel since dinosaur times, so they have teeth as sharp as Mackie Messer. The semi-aquatic lizards can remain underwater for an extraordinary time thanks to air trapped in their airways. Dogs share food. Allegedly, at the top of the animal kingdom is the human being. Most sciences dealing with humans forget that, however high up, it is still only an animal that differs from its chimpanzee brothers in Tanzania by just two percent of DNA. It is also worth adding that feet are now present through activation of a limb gene that all other fish have too, and the taste buds on them also through activation of the corresponding gene, and we can be grateful these buds are on our tongue and not our soles.
Rivers not only carve out, but also create, and so in very ancient times the Euphrates and Tigris deposited onto the world map the entire Arabian Peninsula, on which the “fertile crescent” flourished, which was worth it for many of our ancestors to settle. It was an interesting melting pot of races, starting with Mongolian immigrants who called themselves the Engi, but others called them Sumerians; then there were also the dark-haired Semites, whom the Sumerians called the “Urdu people,” Akkadians and Amorites, Elamites, Chaldeans, and then came the Aryans, so empires and cultures alternated there for millennia. All of this is now summarized under the term Babylon. As things there got mixed up, there were also plenty of people who proclaimed that peace is better than constant warfare and destruction. But peace is not as peace is (for example Horymír); the best kind is peace in the Assyrian manner. That is when the father who guards it steps in: kings were seen as shepherds who, by spreading horror and fear, supported world peace. They express the superiority of the servant of Ashur over other kings and over the whole world and deny equality to other kings or gods... Although foreign princes did not initially have to give up their own religion, the destruction of state structures and deportation of populations to other parts of the empire ended in complete assimilation into the empire. The inhabitants conquered by Assyria became Assyrians through their subordination, loyalty, and obedience… The king had the primary duty to expand the borders of Ashur's land through the use of military force. The empire, through violent means, breaks up the local power structures of conquered states: by deportation, by achieving language uniformity and orderly land administration, so that all are Assyrians. Ideology serves to impose order, authority, and the economic exploitation of a chaotic and unsuccessful periphery by the center. In such a state formation, laws bestowed by the gods are needed, and with them many officials. The number of magicians who can read the gods' writing in the night sky is always limited, even though they too have impulses to multiply. But officials multiply faster than rabbits in Australia. It was precisely how their numbers gradually increased that ultimately destroyed every empire. Collections of laws thus change without having to pass through parliaments. It meant nothing to Hammurabi that he had his laws carved on a stele; time covered it in sand. It was also found that he was not the first and that him the law code of Ur-Nammu had preceded him. However, the first known normative work was issued by the Sumerian ruler Urukagina in the 24th century BCE. Among other things, for example, he prohibited a woman from belonging to two men, and also banned extortion. In that work was also the slogan “Let not the mighty do harm to widows and orphans,” which was later adopted by several rulers. This work is generally not considered a law code. It has not survived to our day.
In the land of Ur, suddenly one Abraham gathered himself and his entire family and set out with sheep toward Palestine. He belonged to the Semites, and they mostly gravitated toward monotheism. Abraham chose the purely masculine Lord Yahweh from all possibilities and made a covenant with him. He could also have chosen Baal, or Ishtar (Isis), but he took a man on the journey. The man promised to multiply him if he circumcised his foreskin. So he did it with relish. What happened after that is described on the following pages. Although I am a believing creature, or perhaps precisely because of that, I grant Yahweh weak moments as well. One unfolds at all the floods, and the second at the Holocaust. Now I would rather wish that Yahweh is not asleep! Right now, with the people he made a covenant with, Yahweh is playing poker.
Radkin Honzák October 2024
Contents
- Prologue
- You Shall Have No Other Gods
- You Shall Not Take the Name of God in Vain
- Remember to Keep the Sabbath Day Holy!
- Honour Your Father and Your Mother
- Thou shalt not kill
- Thou shalt not commit adultery
- Thou shalt not steal
- Thou shalt not bear false witness
- Thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s wife
- Thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s property
- Epilogue
Title: The Decalogue of Radkin Honzák Author: Radkin Honzák, Jan Dražan Publisher: Nakladatelství Zeď, s.r.o., Preslova 2213/5 Prague 5 — Smíchov Year of publication: 2024 First edition ISBN: 978-80-88445-26-5