[[Christian]] critics of the Noahide laws contend that insisting upon a basic set of moral laws is contrary to [[religious pluralism]]. Some believe that their existence implies that [[Jew]]s may set up a legal system that would effectively outlaw Christianity. The Jewish community responds by noting that it makes laws and customs for its own members (like all faiths) and does not set up governments to force [[Judaism|Jewish]] beliefs on non-Jews; in contrast, some non-Jewish faiths have carried out such actions in practice. In addition, with their minimal threshold of morality, the Noahide law may be compared to Catholic social teachings, especially [[natural law]] theory.
The major Christian bodies (e.g. the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Protestant Churches) believe the Ten Commandments to be binding on them and would regard the Noahide laws as essentially a subset of these (though the requirement to set up courts, and the dietary regulation, are not explicit in the Ten Commandments). By contrast, most Jewish thinkers consider the Seven Noahide Laws a parallel system of general categories of commandments, each containing many components and details. Some Jewish thinkers regard the determination of the details of the Noahide Law as something to be left to Jewish [[rabbi]]s. This, in addition to the teaching of the Jewish law that punishment for violating one of the seven Noahide Laws includes a theoretical death penalty (Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 57a), is a factor in modern opposition to the notion of a Noahide legal system. Jewish scholars respond by noting that Jews today no longer carry out the death penalty, even within the Jewish community. Jewish law, in contemporary practice, sees the [[death penalty]] as an indicator of the seriousness of an offense; violators are not actually put to death. Some Jewish thinkers believe that penalties are a detail of the Noahide Laws and that Noahides themselves must determine the details of their own laws for themselves. According to this school of thought - see N. Rakover, ''Law and the Noahides'' (1998); M. Dallen, ''The Rainbow Covenant'' (2003)- the Noahide Laws offer mankind a set of absolute values and a framework for righteousness and justice, while the detailed laws that are currently on the books of the world's states and nations are presumptively valid.
