Beyond the Burning Bush: The Philosophers’ Decalogues

        -- J.M.M. Wilson III, PhD

 

A book about rules—where they come from, why they bind us, and how they can still set us free.

 

What happens after the burning bush goes dark?

 

For millennia, human beings have lived by rules said to descend from gods, kings, traditions, or reason itself.

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From Moses on Sinai to modern constitutions, commandments have structured our moral lives, stabilized societies, and defined the boundaries of good and evil. But rules are never neutral. They liberate and constrain, protect and oppress, clarify and conceal. They are the scaffolding of civilization—and the shadow that civilization casts.

 

Beyond the Burning Bush is a sweeping philosophical journey through humanity’s most influential moral architectures, presented in a radically accessible form: decalogues—ten distilled imperatives that capture how each thinker understood life, freedom, responsibility, and power.

 

This is not a book of commandments to obey. It is a book of frameworks to interrogate

 

.Spanning ancient myth, Eastern wisdom, Western philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, economics, theology, and contemporary thought, the book gathers more than 200 thinkers across cultures and centuries—from YHWH, Moses, the Buddha, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, and Jesus, to Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Arendt, Foucault, Rawls, Butler, Žižek, and beyond. 

 

Each entry offers:•a a concise contextual overview•a • a ten-point philosophical “decalogue”•a representative quote•and a guide to further reading.  The result is a living atlas of human normativity: how societies decide what counts as right and wrong, who gets to speak the law, how rules are enforced, resisted, revised, or broken—and why evil only becomes possible once rules exist at all.

 

At the heart of the book lies an unsettling but straightforward claim: Animals cannot be evil because they do not live by rules. Humans can—because we do.

 

From the Garden of Eden to modern bureaucracies, from divine revelation to algorithmic governance, Beyond the Burning Bush traces how moral consciousness emerged, why shared rules became necessary as societies grew, and how philosophers have repeatedly tried to rescue freedom from both chaos and tyranny.

 

This is a book for readers who:•sense that moral certainty has collapsed but refuse relativism•want to understand power, law, and legitimacy without slogans•are curious how Eastern and Western traditions converge and diverge•are navigating a world where authority is shifting—from prophets to philosophers to machines.

 

Use it as a reference, a companion, a provocation, or a compass.

 

Read it linearly, thematically, or at random.

 

Argue with it.

 

Ignore it.

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Return to it.

 

The burning bush once spoke with fire and voice.

 

Today, rules speak through institutions, ideologies, and code.

 

The question remains the same: By what authority do we live—and by what courage do we choose otherwise?

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Beyond the Burning Bush: The Philosophers’ Decalogues is an invitation to think clearly about the rules that govern us—and to decide which are worth keeping.