from Dana Gallagher:

I am a young Christian. I've been baptized, raised, and confirmed in the same church, and my experiences there have been among the most formative of my life.

Yet, as it is for so many people, my relationship with organized religion is complicated. The higher power that my soul recognizes and the one presented from the pulpit can be difficult to reconcile.

Over time I've learned not to fight the distance between them, but simply to let my faith guide me. And it's my faith that inspires, even requires, me to re-think the Ten Commandments.

According to the Bible, God wrote the Ten Commandments twice. Moses got so fed up with his environment and the people around him that he broke the first set of tablets, and God had to make him some new ones.

With the challenges that we've faced in 2009, the first week of 2010 seems a good time to engage in some tablet-breaking of our own. But instead of destroying, let's be constructive.  Let's update God's guidelines for the coming decade – or longer.

What if the commandments appealed to the best in us and what each of us is capable of, rather than assuming that the only thing keeping us from being lecherous, murderous, backstabbing thieves is endless guilt and the threat of hell?

With that in mind, welcome to my list of 10 for 2010:

I: Love yourself unconditionally . Christ asks us to “love thy neighbor as yourself.” Notice the pre-condition here: to embrace others, you must first make peace with who you are. So much of the hatred we direct towards others is spillover from the disdain we feel for ourselves. Love your whole, perfectly imperfect self.

And when you mess up, recognize that this is a part of the human journey. Feeling remorse is more than natural. It's your spirit saying that your higher self believes you can do better. You can't experience redemption if you don't make mistakes. Forgive yourself, but equally important, pledge to do better. It's the only way forward.

II: Love others unconditionally . Unconditional love is hard to contain, and if you're able to cultivate it in yourself it's likely to extend to the people around you. At the same time, it can be all too easy to shrink into ourselves until our hearts and minds narrow down to a lonely world of one.

Make a conscious effort to recognize the beautiful and, yes,  complicated individuals with whom you share this life. For better or worse, we really are in this together.

III: Don't confuse loving with shoving . If your particular form of love comes with a big, leather-bound set of beliefs, kindly refrain from smacking innocent bystanders over the head with it. Pushing your beliefs on others isn't faith; it's insecurity.

IV: Corruption happens . The Bible has undergone many translations and revisions, often made by people whose intentions were not the purest.

No matter what any Sunday sermon or production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” would have you believe, Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute. None of the Gospels refers to her as such, and her bad reputation can be traced to a speech given by Pope Gregory the Great in 591 AD. The Vatican finally issued a quiet retraction in 1969; so quiet that many Christians simply never heard it.

With so much of Christianity being based on the Word, it's worth taking a closer look and finding out what the Word actually says. There are lots of good books on the subject — Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why , by Bart D. Ehrman, Junia: The First Woman Apostle , by Eldon Jay Epp and the soon to be released A nd God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning , by Joel M. Hoffman, PhD, to name just a few.

V: Keep your laws on your own naughty bits .  It's strange to obsess over someone else's sexual behavior, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. Everyone is not, however, entitled to force those opinions on other people (see III).

Tend to your own naughty bits, please. Just as self-hatred often manifests as hatred of others, sexual repression often rears its ugly head as judgment and punishment of the sexual behavior of others. Show your body some love and maybe it won't be so concerned about what everyone else is doing with theirs.

VI: Challenge the “bros before hoes” approach to religion . There is just no good reason to insist that women hold a “separate but equal” role in the church. As we all learned during South Africa's apartheid years, “separate but equal” is a euphemism for subservience.

As with white supremacy, so with male superiority: most of the Christian arguments for it rely on sketchy Biblical quotes (see IV).  The rest can be boiled down to the schoolyard logic of “girls are stupid.” It's 2010, and it's time to grow up already.

VII: Be not afraid of scientists . I refer here to actual research-conducting, fact-checking, history-acknowledging scientists, not to dogmatists who jettison or distort any information that doesn't align with their worldview.

Real scientists do the life affirming work of finding ways to repair the damage we've inflicted on the planet, advancing medicine and shedding light on our place within the universe. Yet they're often subject to suspicion, oppression and hostility by members of the Christian community.

It's time to make amends. Doing so does not make you an atheist any more than attending Sunday services strips a scientist of her passion for discovery.

VIII: Polar bears are God's creatures, too . Just because there were only two polar bears on the Ark doesn't mean there are only supposed to be two on the planet. We all have a responsibility to take care of the Earth and the life that goes with it. Let's keep working to leave it in better shape than we found it.

IX: Keep your candle lit . Hope fuels our faith when it looks as though there isn't any love, unconditional or otherwise, to be had. Each of us has a unique light to offer the world. Why else would our Creator have bothered to bring us into it?

X: Know when to be humble . So we don't have it all figured out. So what? The wonderful thing about being one small part of a much bigger, much greater piece of work is that we don't need to have all the answers. That's the Almighty's role. Our role might very well be to stop and listen after we've made nine brazenly big points.

What are yours?