Morality and soundbites

Don’t you think that our moral attitude is often constrained by our language, culture or the number system? After all, our morality is often shaped by nice sounding phrases that are hammered down our throat during childhood. Consider this, “As you sow, so shall you reap”, or “The higher you walk, the further you fall”; these sound nice, but if you know about the recent bailout bash, you will know that it doesn’t apply to people who have friends at the right places. So much has sound bites affected morality that governments now find it extremely easy to raise retirement age (contrary to promise offered by machines and computers) under the pretext of “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”. And for the most dominant religious systems in the world, the need for sound bites has had enormous consequences beyond imagination. Consider the Ten Commandments; the number had to be ten to gel with the Egyptian decimal system. Had Moses been Sumerian, it would certainly have been the 60 commandments (Sumerians used hexadecimal system). Wouldn’t the world have been a much better place if there were 50 additional commandments? We could have squeezed in a “Thou shalt not fart in public transport systems” as well.