This essay argues that the real meaning of the Ten Commandments is nothing other than a prohibition against the seven deadly sins. This essay takes each one of the Ten Commandments and shows which one of the seven deadly sins it pertains to, such that the Ten Commandments tell us what we should do, and the seven deadly sins tell us what we should not do.

The book also makes the case that many people miss the true meaning of religious texts because they take scripture literally but not seriously, and so think it is a crazy story about fanciful things like, for example, five loaves of bread feeding five thousand people, when God intends for us to take scripture seriously but not literally, and to look for deeper metaphors in the sacred texts. Those metaphors translate stories of burning bushes and other arcane symbols into deeply meaningful life lessons about right and wrong, like the moral that what God provides (metaphorically represented by loaves and fishes) will be enough to keep every faithful person satisfied (represented by it feeding five thousand people), instead of taking every statement in the Bible at completely literal face value, and thinking that, for example, it is really about bread feeding people and not about the grace of God being enough to keep people happy, and thereby failing to see the true meaning of the Bible as intended by God.

To take the Bible literally is to see only the physical objects narrated in the story, whereas to parse its meaning through metaphor is to see its spiritual meaning; and nothing, in my opinion, could be more properly religious than to see past the physical and to be able to see that which is spiritual. Yet the Bible is a religious story, therefore one should make every effort to interpret it in a religious way, which means, to see the spirit of the text, and not merely the body of the text, in other words, to see the meanings of the stories, and not merely the bodies referred to in the text. This is a difficult task for many people, however, because to see past the obvious and to see the deeper meaning requires a certain type of wisdom, which is, perhaps, the wisdom of God.

Many people pretend that they are religious because they have memorized the Bible and can recite it chapter and verse and they talk about it a lot and listen to others talk about it and they pretend like they dedicate their lives to it, yet, if they only know the literal meaning and they have not parsed how it refers to ethics and morality in a real and serious way, if they have not thought about it and puzzled out what it really means, then they do not know what it means at all, despite having read it a thousand times and being able to recite it from memory. One can memorize any text and be able to repeat it without knowing what the words mean, as for example one can memorize a phrase in a foreign language and repeat it over and over again, but if one does not know what it means, if one does not know the meanings to which the symbols refer, then one does not know it.

My principle of Biblical interpretation is that the Bible is not random or arbitrary; the Bible makes sense, therefore the correct reading of a Biblical story is one in which the story makes sense. God would not put words into a sacred text for no reason, so we are entitled to assume that the words hold a meaning that is relevant for those of us alive today, and that it is not merely a fictional historical narrative of events 3000 years ago but that it tells us what God wants us to do today, in other words, its meaning defines our ethics and morality; our task, then, is to figure out what that meaning is.

And if you say, but the Bible does not really make any sense, my answer is, read this essay, and you will see that it does make sense.