What does this commandment mean to you? Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. I'm just curious because I had a conversation on an airplane a while back with a lady that said she didn't do this. In the middle of our conversation she said, "OMG" like 10 times.
Im a practicing catholic and i say it at times, but there is no malice or bad intent when i say it. You have to be careful of how extreme you get. I had a friend that started out as a moderate but then got so extreme that she said that rock music was the music of the devil. When someone gets this way and their eyeballs start popping out in a daze be careful of them lol.
To understand this you have to take it back to what "vain" was in the Hebrew version it was written in. According to the strong's dictionary there is several meanings, but most all of them deal with lying, uselessness, or desolating/evil. When taken in that context, I believe it is meaning that you shouldn't lie about who God is, we shouldn't belittle what he has done for us, and we should stay away from referring to God as anything except being holy.
Means nothing to me, I don't believe there's a god to offend. One could argue it means god's name shouldn't be invoked for trivial nonsense. Like asking god to help you (or your chosen team) win a football game, or to damn someone over a petty disagreement.
I think it is talking about prayer. Don't invoke God's assistance or tout God's deeds for your own self aggrandizement. But of course, I am not a follower of the Bible so I really don't care too much.
God is a title and not his/her name, is it? They were probably talking about Yahweh. /sings Feeling Hot, Hot, Hot, replacing "Ole" with "Yahweh".
A very good point and kind of what I was getting at. I think it has to do with prayer, as in asking Yahweh for miracles or even just small favors like giving your tribe a magical food from the sky and plagues on your enemies. You really shouldn't do that sort of thing lightly or just to make yourself look good. Many different groups of people have regarded the name Yahweh and indeed the Hebrew language as imbued with divine power. If you are one of those people this would probably make sense to you. Hell, I have met voodoo practitioners this makes sense to I don't know how much of that any politician really believes though. I personally just wish some of them acted like they had a bit of common sense once in a while.