What does it forbid?

Worshipping anything besides God, above all. Then killing the innocent, adultery, theft, intoxicants, gambling, usury, slander, betrayal, oppression (Qur'an 17:22–39). Each prohibition protects something.

There is no list of prohibitions and no ritual law. Secular ethics condemns cruelty, dishonesty, and exploitation; Clifford added a distinctive prohibition of its own — it is wrong, always and everywhere, to believe on insufficient evidence.

One thing, strictly: claiming to know what you cannot show. Everything else agnostics forbid themselves — cruelty, dishonesty, exploitation — they forbid on grounds borrowed from ordinary morality, and they say so.

The Ten Commandments' list — idolatry, murder, adultery, theft, false witness, coveting — which Jesus pushed to the heart: hatred counts as murder, lust as adultery (Matthew 5:21–28). The letters add greed, drunkenness, and sexual immorality; in the tradition's ranking, the deadliest sin is pride.

Idolatry, murder, theft, adultery, false witness, and oppression of the weak; halakha adds forbidden foods, work on the Sabbath, and — heavily stressed — malicious speech (lashon hara). The stranger, the widow, and the orphan stand under explicit protection.

For everyone, the Five Precepts: no killing, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, no false speech, no intoxicants. Monks and nuns take on hundreds more rules; «right livelihood» also rules out trading in weapons, living beings, meat, intoxicants, and poison.

Classical law names five "great sins" — killing a brahmin, drinking liquor, theft, violating the guru's wife, and keeping company with those who do — alongside broad prohibitions on harming living beings, lying, and stealing. In lived practice the strongest taboos for many Hindus are killing cows, eating beef, and violence against ascetics and pilgrims.

The 'five thieves' within: lust, anger, greed, attachment, and pride. Sikhs initiated into the Khalsa are further bound by four strict prohibitions — cutting the hair, tobacco and intoxicants, meat from ritual slaughter, and adultery.

It mainly forbids the state, not the citizen: no established religion, no religious tests for office, no compulsion of conscience, no discrimination by creed. Citizens are forbidden only what protects others — coercion and violence over belief.

There is no ritual code of prohibitions. Humanism condemns whatever damages human dignity and welfare: cruelty, dishonesty, exploitation, discrimination, and the coercion of conscience.

Publicly, it forbids what harms others: force, fraud, theft, coercion of conscience, censorship, and arbitrary discrimination — with cruelty, in Shklar's phrase, put first among the vices. Self-regarding conduct, however disliked, is not the state's business.

It has no code of ritual prohibitions, but its condemnations are firm: violence against women, sexual harassment and coercion, discrimination, forced marriage, denial of education, and treating persons as property.

Treason above all — aiding the nation's enemies, betraying its secrets, desecrating its symbols. Civic versions also condemn putting party, class, or self above country; ethnic versions have added harsher bans, such as marrying or mixing outside the group, which civic nationalists reject.