I am talking here strictly about principles - not about God, or Jesus, or Christianity, or any other religion. I am simply inviting you to take a rational look at the core values enunciated in those 10 simple rules for living, which have served civilisation for millennia and which still serve those who are prepared to try to live by them.
Take, for instance, the Fourth Commandment, the one about observing the Sabbath Day as a day of rest for everyone, on the basis that six days' work a week is enough for anyone and we should have at least one day a week for rest and recreation.
The Sundays in which I grew up were just that - days of rest for all save those who were in occupations which required us to work, but for which we were given another day off instead.
They were days for family get-togethers, trips to the beach, picnics, gardening and lawn-mowing, maintenance around the house, big Sunday dinners and afternoon naps.
As the years went by, sporting events and other entertainments were gradually permitted, but the pubs and the shops stayed closed.
Yet today for most of us Sunday is just like any other day. That's sad, not because I think Sunday should in some way be sacred, but because we have been deprived of the leisure time a shut-down Sunday provided.
So I believe that one of the core values we should have a new look at is the value (indeed, the necessity) of adequate leisure time in which to rest and refresh our minds and bodies, do what we want to do and not what someone else wants us to do, and to develop and enrich our relationships with one another in our families, among our friends, neighbours and our community at large.
And I suggest that if we returned to a six-day business week, productivity would soar, retail turnover would suffer not one whit, and we would be much the richer and stronger for it.
Now, how about the Fifth Commandment, the one that says we should honour our fathers and our mothers (and implicit in that, I think, is to respect our elders in general and those to whom we as a community have given authority - schoolteachers, police officers and so on).
Learning to, and having to, defer to adults was once part of the discipline of childhood, and if we were to accept again the core value of letting children be children until they mature naturally, we would soon see the beneficial effects in our education system, crime rates, mental health, sporting achievement, to name just a few.
The Sixth to Ninth Commandments exhort us not to murder, commit adultery, steal or bear false witness (lie and cheat). I know that murder, adultery (and fornication), theft and lying and cheating have always been with us - and always will.
But that is no reason not to remind ourselves, and to teach our children, that these are core values, that to disobey them is hazardous to ourselves and deeply harmful to others, and that if they are indulged in there is invariably a penalty to pay.
And that brings us to the Tenth Commandment, the one that says we should not be covetous (jealous and greedy). Now for my money this is the core value which we transgress more than any other, yet it is the last one most of us will ever admit to.
But just imagine what the nation would be like if most of us all of a sudden stopped coveting our neighbours' wives, husbands, sons, daughters, money, businesses, houses, cars, boats, clothes, jewellery "or anything that is your neighbour's".
Why, it might even lead us to give credence to a couple of other core values: (1) money isn't everything; and (2) it is better to give than to receive.
