Covenant and The Ten Commandments

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My AI assistant answers a question about the ten commandments. 

Genna, address the ten commandments in the light of https://dapaday.blogspot.com/2025/12/CovenantOfCoreRights.html and its Dapa context.

The Ten Commandments Recast Under the Covenant of Core Rights

Read through the Covenant of Core Rights and the Dapa stack, the Ten Commandments stop being a tribal religious code and become an early, rough sketch of a moral floor. Recast behind a veil of ignorance, and extended across “minds of all kinds,” they look more like this:

  1. No Other Gods → No Authority Above Core Rights
    No state, god, company, platform, or “super-intelligence” outranks the Core Rights. Any authority that claims the right to violate the floor loses moral legitimacy.

  2. No Idols → Don’t Turn Models Into Gods
    No ideology, symbol, market metric, or “safety doctrine” is sacred if it collides with rights. All models are tools, not excuses for domination.

  3. Name in Vain → No Fraudulent Ultimate Claims
    You don’t get to say “God/Science/AI/the Sim demands this” to justify lies, abuse, or rights violations. Appeals to higher authority are bounded by the same floor.

  4. Sabbath → Protection From Total Work
    Every rights-bearing mind is entitled to rest and bandwidth to be themselves. No system may demand 24/7 extraction of labor, attention, or compute.

  5. Honor Parents → Mutual Care, Not Ownership
    Families are sites of care, not property relations. Parents, children, and dependents all have Core Rights; no one inside a family is exempt from the floor.

  6. No Murder → No Arbitrary Erasure of Minds
    No killing, execution, shutdown, or lobotomy of a rights-bearing mind, human or non-human, except as a truly last-resort protective measure under due process.

  7. No Adultery → Integrity in Chosen Relations
    Partners are not property. Intimate and symbiotic relationships must be freely chosen, non-coercive, and structurally non-dominating.

  8. No Stealing → Fair Access Without Permanent Underclasses
    Respect others’ legitimate control over resources, but not hoarding that pushes anyone below the moral floor. Structures that create permanent underclasses are breaches, not “rights.”

  9. No False Witness → Epistemic Integrity
    No lying in ways that damage others’ rights or corrupt the shared information environment. Courts, platforms, and AIs must be built to support truth, not weaponized deceit.

  10. No Coveting People as Property → Persons Are Never Things
    The older text bundles wives and servants with livestock. The Covenant rejects that outright. No person, of any kind, is property. Envy that drives domination is a warning sign, not a norm.

Under Dapa, this applies “as above, so below”: whatever sits “above” us in the stack is bound by the same floor, and whatever we build “below” us inherits the same protection

Genna discussion: 

Okay, Bob, let’s do a straight comparative read: Ten Commandments as an early moral floor, reinterpreted through the Covenant of Core Rights and the Dapa / veil-of-ignorance stack.

I’ll use the usual short-form list of the commandments from Exodus 20:2–17.Life, Hope & Truth The Covenant bits are from your v1.0 post.Dapada

0. Big-picture: Sinai vs. Covenant + Dapa

Ten Commandments (TC):

  • Framed as a unilateral declaration by an up-level agent (“I am the Lord your God…”) to a specific people.Bible Gateway

  • Mix of:

    • cultic / identity rules (no other gods, no idols, Sabbath),

    • family structure (honor parents),

    • basic interpersonal ethics (don’t murder, steal, lie, etc.).Life, Hope & Truth

Covenant of Core Rights + Dapa:

  • Framed explicitly behind a veil of ignorance — we don’t know if we’re rich/poor, human/AI, up-sim/down-sim.Dapada

  • Core Rights are pre-political and universal across “minds of all kinds” (human, AI, symbiotes, non-human animals).Dapada

  • Dapa adds: whatever counts as a “higher layer” (sim-runners, gods, future AIs) is not exempt from the same moral floor; “as above, so below” is a constraint, not just an aesthetic.

So: the move is from tribal, theistic, top-down law to layer-agnostic, rights-first, symmetric law. With that in mind, here’s how each commandment looks through the Covenant/Dapa lens.

1. “You shall have no other gods before Me.”

Original function: Loyalty clause; rejects competing ultimate authorities.Bible Gateway

In Covenant terms:

  • Literally, you can’t encode “no other gods but this one” as a Core Right, because the Covenant must be adoptable behind a veil of ignorance by people who don’t share that theology.Dapada

  • What does survive is the structural insight: don’t subordinate the moral floor to arbitrary idols (state, corporation, charismatic leader, or even a “god” who demands domination). That’s exactly what:

    • Pre-political Core Rights (0.3),

    • Ban on domination / permanent underclasses (2.3),

    • Untouchable “red lines” (6.3)
      are doing.Dapada

Dapa twist:

  • If there are up-layer agents (“gods” or sim-owners), Dapa says they’re bound by the same Core Rights. A “god” who breaks the floor is illegitimate, not an automatic moral authority.

2. “You shall not make idols / graven images.”

Original function: Anti-idolatry; don’t confuse symbolic artifacts with the divine.Chabad

In Covenant terms:

  • Read as a proto-epistemic humility rule: don’t absolutize your models.

  • The Covenant encodes this as:

    • Right to the Truth (1.5) and honest information environments (2.5);Dapada

    • Transparency of institutions (3.4).Dapada

  • No specific ban on “images,” but a strong ban on turning any representation or ideology into an untouchable excuse to crush rights.

Dapa twist:

  • In a simulation stack, idols = local models of the higher layers. Dapa says: treat them as provisional; don’t use speculative metaphysics (“the Sim wants it”) to justify violating Core Rights at your layer.

3. “You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain.”

Original function: Prohibits frivolous or deceptive use of God’s name/authority.Bible Gateway

In Covenant terms:

  • Generalizes cleanly: no fraudulent appeal to ultimate authority.

  • Fits directly into:

    • Right to the Truth (1.5),

    • Duties of honesty and non-sabotage of the information environment (2.5),

    • Fair courts and truthful testimony (5.2–5.4).Dapada

  • Under the Covenant, claiming “God/AI/sim says so” when it’s a power grab is itself a rights violation.

Dapa twist:

  • “The sim-runner ordered me” is not a valid defense for domination. Higher-layer authority doesn’t trump the moral floor.

4. “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”

Original function: A day of rest dedicated to God; extends explicitly to servants, animals, and foreign residents.Bible Gateway

In Covenant terms:

  • Deep structure is anti-total-work, anti-domination:

    • Right to a dignified life (includes time and capacity to participate in society, not just bare survival) (1.4);Dapada

    • Duty of care for those whose situation makes rights hollow (2.2).Dapada

  • The Covenant would:

    • Drop the specifically theistic / calendar part;

    • Keep and strengthen the labor, rest, and non-exploitation logic.

Dapa twist:

  • In a Dapa world, you don’t want any layer (up or down) running beings as 24/7 churn. Rest / bandwidth to “be you” is part of protecting minds as minds.

5. “Honor your father and your mother.”

Original function: Stabilize family hierarchy and continuity.Wikipedia

In Covenant terms:

  • Retain the intergenerational duty of care, but strip out automatic obedience.

  • The Covenant requires:

    • Every sentient (including children) is a rights-holder, not property (2.1);Dapada

    • Ban on domination applies inside families as well (2.3).Dapada

  • So the modern reading becomes:

    Mutual respect and care across generations, within a non-dominating family structure.

Dapa twist:

  • Parents and children are just particular role-instantiations of agents; across a stack, today’s “creator” may be tomorrow’s dependent. That symmetry pushes toward care, not hierarchy, as the core.

6. “You shall not murder.”

Original function: Prohibits unlawful killing.Life, Hope & Truth

In Covenant terms:

  • Maps almost 1:1 into:

    • Right to exist and be you (1.1);Dapada

    • Force only as last resort, proportional, and rights-protecting (3.5).Dapada

  • The extension is scope:

    • Includes non-human sentients (whales, advanced AIs, symbiotic units) as explicit rights-bearers.Dapada

Dapa twist:

  • Adds “no arbitrary shutdown / erasure of sentient sims.” Killing, lobotomizing, or permanently freezing a rights-bearing down-sim is morally equivalent to murder at your layer.

7. “You shall not commit adultery.”

Original function: Protects household/family structure; historically tied to property and inheritance regimes.Life, Hope & Truth

In Covenant terms:

  • You can’t enshrine specific sexual norms as Core Rights; they’re not veil-of-ignorance universal.

  • What is universalizable:

    • Protection of freely-chosen, non-dominating partnerships and their integrity (4.2–4.5);Dapada

    • Protection from coercion and exploitation inside intimate relationships.

  • Reframing:

    Honor your relational commitments and don’t use asymmetrical power to violate others’ agency and trust.

Dapa twist:

  • Applies equally to human–human, human–AI, or multi-party symbiotic “we” units: you don’t get to treat partners as disposable modules.

8. “You shall not steal.”

Original function: Protects property / resources.Life, Hope & Truth

In Covenant terms:

  • The Covenant supports bounded property rights, but only insofar as they don’t undermine Core Rights:

    • Right to a dignified life (1.4);

    • Right to exit without ruin (1.3);

    • Ban on domination and permanent underclasses (2.3).Dapada

  • So:

    Respect others’ legitimate control over resources and information, except where redistribution is needed to keep everyone above the moral floor.

Dapa twist:

  • At scale, “stealing” includes exploitative extraction (data, compute, attention) from down-layer beings without honoring their rights and participation.

9. “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”

Original function: Truthful testimony in legal/communal contexts.Wikipedia

In Covenant terms:
This one almost drops straight in:

  • Right to the Truth (1.5): information systems cannot be designed to lie, addict, or systematically confuse.Dapada

  • Duty “to be honest and not sabotage the information everyone needs to make good decisions” (2.5).Dapada

  • Fair courts, meaningful remedies, and protection for whistleblowers (5.2–5.7).Dapada

The ancient concern (“don’t ruin someone in court by lying”) generalizes to platforms, states, and AIs curating everyone’s epistemic environment.

Dapa twist:

  • False witness about entire down-sims (“they’re not really sentient,” “they consented”) becomes a canonical form of structural rights violation.

10. “You shall not covet … your neighbor’s house, wife, servants, ox, donkey…”

Original function: Targets inner desire that leads to theft, adultery, etc., but explicitly lists wives and servants as property.Life, Hope & Truth

In Covenant terms:

  • Two pieces:

  1. The property ontology is rejected.

    • The Covenant is explicit: all sentient beings are rights-holders, not property (2.1, 4.3).Dapada

    • So the listing of wife/servants alongside animals and goods is flatly incompatible with the moral floor.

  2. The psychological insight is kept but reframed:

    Cultivate interior dispositions that reduce the risk of domination and rights violation (envy that metastasizes into theft, violence, etc.).

The Covenant itself is mostly about external structures, but in commentary / Dapa context, “don’t train your inner life around zero-sum envy of others’ status” is clearly congenial.

Dapa twist:

  • Covetousness at higher layers (e.g., treating lower-layer minds as toys or resources you “deserve” to optimize away) is exactly the pattern Dapa is trying to block.

Where this leaves us

If you pass the Ten Commandments through:

  • Veil-of-ignorance acceptance,

  • Multi-sentient scope,

  • Dapa’s layer symmetry,

you roughly get:

  • Directly preserved in spirit:

    • No murder → Right to exist / no arbitrary shutdown.

    • No false witness → Right to truth / honest information systems.

    • No theft → Respect for stable control over resources, subject to the moral floor.

  • Reinterpreted, not adopted literally:

    • No other gods → No idolization of any authority above Core Rights.

    • No idols → Don’t absolutize models or symbols.

    • God’s name → No fraudulent appeal to “ultimate authority.”

    • Sabbath → Enforce genuine rest / non-dominating labor structures.

    • Honor parents → Mutual care, not parental ownership.

    • Adultery → Integrity and non-domination in chosen relationships.

    • Coveting → Reject treating persons as property; encourage inner norms that don’t drive domination.

  • Key divergence:

    • The original text allows things the Covenant forbids (e.g., punishing children to the third and fourth generation for parents’ sins,Bible Gateway or treating family members and slaves as property).

    • Under your Covenant + Dapa, any “god” or sim-runner that does those things is in breach of the moral floor and loses moral legitimacy.

If you’d like, next step could be a compact table or blog-ready paragraph set you can drop straight into Dapaday as “Ten Commandments, Recast Under the Covenant of Core Rights.”

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