>either they acknowledge the ten commandments as
>commandments (rather than suggestions) or they don't. If they can't
>accept the fundamental tenets of Christianity, then I can't for the
>life of me see what possible basis they have for claiming to be
>"Christians".
But the ten commandments aren't the fundamental tenets of Christianity. It's about throwing off the old law. That's what Zizek means by the Christian legacy. This is him in a Bad Subjects interview from 2002 (with someone we all know and love asking the questions).
BS: You've also left some of your readers scratching their heads over the positive things you've been writing about Christianity lately. What is it in Christianity you find worthy?
Zizek: I'm tempted to say, "The Leninist part." I am a fighting atheist. My leanings are almost Maoist ones. Churches should be turned into grain silos or palaces of culture. What Christianity did, in a religiously mystified version, is give us the idea of rebirth. Against the pagan notion of destiny, Christianity offered the possibility of a radical opening, that we can find a zero point and clear the table. It introduced a new kind of ethics: not that each of us should
http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2002/59/zizek.html