We do not, however, tell others of this rational basis for the murder prohibition; we declare, on the contrary, that God is its author. Thus, making bold to divine his intentions, we find that he has no wish, either, for men to exterminate each other. By acting thus we invest the cultural prohibition with a quite peculiar solemnity, but at the same time we risk making its observance dependent on belief in God. If we retract this step, no longer saddling God with our own wishes, and content ourselves with the social justification for the cultural prohibition, then we renounce, it is true, its hallowed nature, but we also avoid endangering its existence. And we gain something else as well. Through some kind of diffusion or infection the character of sanctity and inviolability, of other-worldliness, one might say, has been extended from some few important prohibitions to all other cultural institutions and laws and ordinances. And often the halo becomes these none too well; not only do they invalidate each other by making conflicting decisions according to the time and place of their origin; even apart from this they betray every sign of human inadequacy. One can easily recognize among them things which can only be the product of shortsightedness and apprehensiveness, the expression of narrow interests, or the result of inadequate hypotheses. The criticism to which one must subject them also diminishes to an unwelcome extent people’s respect for other and more justified cultural demands. As it is a delicate task to decide what God has himself ordained and what derives rather from the authority of an allpowerful parliament or a supreme judicial decision, it would be an indubitable advantage to leave God out of the question altogether, and to admit honestly the purely human origin of all cultural laws and institutions. Along with their pretensions to sanctity the rigid and immutable nature of these laws and regulations would also cease. Men would realize that these have been made, not so much to rule them, as, on the contrary, to serve their interests; they would acquire a more friendly attitude to them, and instead of aiming at their abolition they would aim only at improving them. This would be an important advance on the road which leads to reconciliation with the burden of culture.