Judeo-Christian values

Now, I don't want to post screeds, but with so many looney neonazi, real
nazi, looney kazoonie leftist diatribes and anti-american vomitons being
peddled around here, I thought to post this interesting series of articles.

   Dennis Prager is I think, a clear thinker, and one needn't agree with
all he says, or believes, but it is in the arena of values, that I find
myself interested in  his take and having read a series that he's still
continuing, I include five articles in a row, regarding the case he
makes for Judeo-Christian values.
   One should note that not having these beliefs, does not consign you
to hell, nor make you anything less or more than one who does accept his
expression about the values and what they come from.
   So no need for holy rolling over this: it's merely a sober, clearer
sighted expression that the hate screeds we've gotten to hear so often
around here, have poisoned so often.
   It's not martial arts what he's discussing, but we're at war, and
this is one of the fundamental things we are at war over.
   That would be the values we pursue.

Mark

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Tuesday, January 4, 2005
Better answers: The case for Judeo-Christian values
Posted: January 4, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Dennis Prager
© 2005 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

With this first column of 2005, I inaugurate a periodic series of
columns devoted to explaining and making the case for what are called
Judeo-Christian values.

There is an epic battle taking place in the world over what value system
humanity will embrace. There are essentially three competitors: European
secularism, American Judeo-Christianity and Islam. I have described this
battle in previous columns.

Now, it is time to make the case for Judeo-Christian, specifically
biblical, values. I believe they are the finest set of values to guide
the lives of both individuals and societies. Unfortunately, they are
rarely rationally explained – even among Jewish and Christian believers,
let alone to nonbelievers and members of other faiths.

So this is the beginning of an admittedly ambitious project. Vast
numbers of people are profoundly disoriented as to what is good and what
is bad. Just to give one example: Take the moral confusion over the
comparative worth of human and animal life.

The majority of American students I have asked since 1970 whether they
would save their dog or a stranger have voted against the stranger.

A Tucson, Ariz., woman in late 2004 sent firefighters into her burning
home telling them that her three babies were inside. The babies for whom
the firemen risked their lives were the woman's three cats.

The best known animal-rights organization, People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals, funded by the best educated in our society, has
launched an international campaign titled "Holocaust on your plate,"
which equates the barbecuing of millions of chickens with the cremating
of millions of Jews in the Holocaust. To PETA and its supporters, there
is no difference between chicken life and human life.

Only a very morally confused age could produce so many people who do not
recognize the immeasurable distance between human and animal worth. We
live in that age.

We do in large measure because values based on God and the Bible have
been replaced by secular values. The result was predicted by the British
thinker G.K. Chesterton at the turn of the 20th century: "When people
stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing – they believe in
anything."

Yes, the moral record of Christian Europe is a mixed one – especially
vis a vis its one, continuous religious minority – Jews. And one has to
be quite naive to believe that belief in God and the Bible guarantees
moral clarity, let alone moral behavior.

But Chesterton was right. The collapse of Christianity in Europe led to
the horrors of Nazism and communism. And to the moral confusions of the
present – such as the moral equation of the free United States with the
totalitarian Soviet Union, or of life-loving Israel with its
death-loving enemies.

The oft-cited charge that religion has led to more wars and evil than
anything else is a widely believed lie. Secular successors to
Christianity have slaughtered and enslaved more people than all
religions in history (though significant elements within a
non-Judeo-Christian religion – Islam – slaughter and enslave today, and
if not stopped in Sudan and elsewhere could match Nazism or communism).

In fact, it was a secular Jew, the great German Jewish poet Heinrich
Heine, who understood that despite its anti-Semitism and other moral
failings, Christianity in Europe prevented the wholesale slaughter of
human beings that became routine with Christianity's demise. In 1834, 99
years before Hitler and the Nazis rose to power, Heine warned:

     A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French
Revolution will seem harmless and carefree. Christianity restrained the
martial ardor for a time but it did not destroy it; once the restraining
talisman [the cross] is shattered, savagery will rise again ...

What is needed today is a rationally and morally persuasive case for
embracing the values that come from the Bible. This case must be more
compelling than the one made for anti-biblical values that is presented
throughout the Western world's secular educational institutions and
media (news media, film and television).

That is what I intend to do. Events in the news will compel columns on
those events, but I do not believe that anything I can do with my life
can match the importance of making the case for guiding one's life and
one's society by the values of the Bible. As a Jew, by "biblical" I am
referring to the Old Testament, but this should pose no problem to
Christian readers, since this is the first part of their Bible as well.
Indeed, as the greatest Jewish thinker, Maimonides, pointed out over 800
years ago, it is primarily Christians who have spread knowledge of the
Jews' Bible to the human race.

I not only welcome responses, I value them – equally from those who
agree and those who disagree. I may be contacted through my website.

Stay tuned.

Dennis Prager, one of America's most respected and popular nationally
syndicated radio talk-show hosts, is the author of several books and a
frequent guest on TV shows such as "Larry King Live," "The O'Reilly
Factor" and "Hannity & Colmes."

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Tuesday, January 11, 2005
The case for Judeo-Christian values: God-based morality

For those who subscribe to Judeo-Christian values, right and wrong, good
and evil are derived from God, not from reason alone, nor from the human
heart, the state or through majority rule.

Though most college-educated Westerners never hear the case for the need
for God-based morality because of the secular outlook that pervades
modern education and the media, the case is both clear and compelling:
If there is no transcendent source of morality (morality is the word I
use for the standard of good and evil), "good" and "evil" are subjective
opinions, not objective realities.

In other words, if there is no God who says, "Do not murder" ("Do not
kill" is a mistranslation of the Hebrew which, like English, has two
words for homicide), murder is not wrong. Many people may think it is
wrong, but that is their opinion, not objective moral fact. There are no
moral "facts" if there is no God; there are only moral opinions.

Years ago, I debated this issue at Oxford with Jonathan Glover,
currently the professor of ethics at King's College, University of
London, and one of the leading atheist moralists of our time. Because he
is a man of rare intellectual honesty, he acknowledged that without God,
morality is subjective. He is one of the few secularists who do.

This is the reason for the moral relativism – "What I think is right is
right for me, what you think is right is right for you" – that pervades
modern society. The secularization of society is the primary reason vast
numbers of people believe, for example, that "one man's terrorist is
another man's freedom fighter"; why the best educated were not able say
that free America was a more moral society than the totalitarian Soviet
Union; why, in short, deep moral confusion afflicted the 20th century
and continues in this century.

That is why the New York Times, the voice of secular moral relativism,
was so repulsed by President Ronald Reagan's declaration that the Soviet
Union was an "evil empire." The secular world – especially its left –
fears and rejects the language of good and evil because it smacks of
religious values and violates their moral relativism. It is perhaps the
major difference between America and Europe. As a New York Times article
on European-American differences noted last year, "Americans are widely
regarded as more comfortable with notions of good and evil, right and
wrong, than Europeans ..." No wonder. America is a Judeo-Christian
society; Europe (and the American Democratic Party) is largely secular.

In the late 1970s, in a public interview in Los Angeles, I asked one of
the leading secular liberal thinkers of the past generation, Pulitzer
Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., if he would say that the
United States was a morally superior society to that of the Soviet
Union. Even when I repeated the question, and clarified that I readily
acknowledged the existence of good individuals in the Soviet Union and
bad ones in America, he refused to do so.

A major reason for the left's loathing of George W. Bush is his use of
moral language – such as in his widely condemned description of the
regimes of North Korea, Iran and Iraq as an "axis of evil." These people
reject the central Judeo-Christian value of the existence of objective
good and evil and our obligation to make such judgments. Secularism has
led to moral confusion, which in turn has led to moral paralysis.

If you could not call the Soviet Union an "evil empire" or the Iranian,
North Korean and Iraqi regimes an "evil axis," you have rendered the
word "evil" useless. And indeed it is not used in sophisticated secular
company – except in reference to those who do use it (usually religious
Christians and Jews).

Is abortion morally wrong? To the secular world, the answer is "It's
between a woman and her physician." There is no clearer expression of
moral relativism: Every woman determines whether abortion is moral. On
the other hand, to the individual with Judeo-Christian values, it is not
between anyone and anyone else. It is between society and God. Even
among religious people who differ in their reading of God's will, it is
still never merely "between a woman and her physician."

And to those who counter these arguments for God-based morality with the
question, "Whose God?" the answer is the God who revealed His moral will
in the Old Testament, which Jews and Christians – and no other people –
regard as divine revelation.

The best-known verse in the Bible is "Love your neighbor as yourself"
(Leviticus 19:18). It is a reflection of the secular age in which we
live that few people are aware that the verse concludes with the words,
"I am God." Though entirely secularized in common parlance, the greatest
of the ethical principles comes from God. Otherwise it is just another
man-made suggestion, no more compelling than "Cross at the green, not in
between."



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Tuesday, January 18, 2005
The case for Judeo-Christian values: Reason without God is morally useless


Those who do not believe that moral values must come from the Bible or
be based upon God's moral instruction argue that they have a better
source for values: human reason.

In fact, the era that began the modern Western assault on
Judeo-Christian values is known as the Age of Reason. That age ushered
in the modern secular era, a time when the men of "the Enlightenment"
hoped they would be liberated from the superstitious shackles of
religious faith and rely on reason alone. Reason, without God or the
Bible, would guide them into an age of unprecedented moral greatness.

As it happened, the era following the decline of religion in Europe led
not to unprecedented moral greatness, but to unprecedented cruelty,
superstition, mass murder and genocide. But believers in reason without
God remain unfazed. Secularists have ignored the vast amount of evidence
showing that evil on a grand scale follows the decline of
Judeo-Christian religion.

There are four primary problems with reason divorced from God as a guide
to morality.

The first is that reason is amoral. Reason is only a tool and,
therefore, can just as easily argue for evil as for good. If you want to
achieve good, reason is immensely helpful; if you want to do evil,
reason is immensely helpful. But reason alone cannot determine which you
choose. It is sometimes rational to do what is wrong and sometimes
rational to do what is right.

It is sheer nonsense – nonsense believed by the godless – that reason
always suggests the good. Mother Teresa devoted her life to feeding and
clothing the dying in Calcutta. Was this decision derived entirely from
reason? To argue that it was derived from reason alone is to argue that
every person whose actions are guided by reason will engage in similar
self-sacrifice, and that anyone who doesn't live a Mother Teresa-like
life is acting irrationally.

Did those non-Jews in Europe who risked their lives to save a Jew during
the Holocaust act on the dictates of reason? In a lifetime of studying
those rescuers' motives, I have never come across a single instance of
an individual who saved Jews because of reason. In fact, it was
irrational for any non-Jews to risk their lives to save Jews.

Another example of reason's incapacity to lead to moral conclusions: On
virtually any vexing moral question, there is no such a thing as a
purely rational viewpoint. What is the purely rational view on the
morality of abortion? Of public nudity? Of the value of an animal vs.
that of a human? Of the war in Iraq? Of capital punishment for murder?
On any of these issues, reason alone can argue effectively for almost
any position.

Therefore, what determines anyone's moral views are, among other things,
his values – and values are beyond reason alone (though one should be
able to rationally explain and defend those values). If you value the
human fetus, most abortions are immoral; if you only value the woman's
view of the value of the fetus, all abortions are moral.

The second problem with reason alone as a moral guide is that we are
incapable of morally functioning on the basis of reason alone. Our
passions, psychology, values, beliefs, emotions and experiences all
influence the ways in which even the most rational person determines
what is moral and whether to act on it.

Third, the belief in reason alone is itself based on an irrational
belief – that people are basically good. You have to believe that people
are basically good in order to believe that human reason will
necessarily lead to moral conclusions.

Fourth, even when reason does lead to a moral conclusion, it in no way
compels acting on that conclusion. Let's return to the example of the
non-Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe. Imagine that a Jewish family knocks on
his door, asking to be hidden. Imagine further that on rational grounds
alone (though I cannot think of any), the non-Jew decides that the moral
thing to do is hide the Jews. Will he act on this decision at the risk
of his life? Not if reason alone guides him. People don't risk their
lives for strangers on the basis of reason. They do so on the basis of
faith – faith in something that far transcends reason alone.

Does all this mean that reason is useless? God forbid. Reason and
rational thought are among the hallmarks of humanity's potential
greatness. But alone, reason is largely worthless in the greatest quest
of all – making human beings kinder and more decent. To accomplish that,
God, a divinely revealed manual and reason are all necessary. And even
then, there are no guarantees.

But if you want a quick evaluation of where godless reason leads, look
at the irrationality and moral confusion that permeate the embodiment of
reason without God – your local university.

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Tuesday, February 8, 2005
The case for Judeo-Christian values, part 4

Would you first save the dog you love or a stranger if both were
drowning? The answer depends on your value system.

One of the most obvious and significant differences between secular and
Judeo-Christian values concerns human worth. One of the great ironies of
secular humanism is that it devalues the worth of human beings. As
ironic as it may sound, the God-based Judeo-Christian value system
renders man infinitely more valuable and significant than any humanistic
value system.

The reason is simple: Only if there is a God who created man is man
worth anything beyond the chemicals of which he is composed.
Judeo-Christian religions hold that human beings are created in the
image of God. If we are not, we are created in the image of carbon
dioxide. Which has a higher value is not difficult to determine.

Contemporary secular society has rendered human beings less significant
than at any time in Western history.

First, the secular denial that human beings are created in God's image
has led to humans increasingly being equated with animals. That is why
over the course of 30 years of asking high-school seniors if they would
first try to save their dog or a stranger, two-thirds have voted against
the person. They either don't know what they would do or actually vote
for their dog. Many adults now vote similarly.

Why? There are two reasons. One is that with the denial of the authority
of higher values such as biblical teachings, people increasingly make
moral decisions on the basis of how they feel. And since probably all
people feel more for their dog than they do for a stranger, many people
without a moral instruction manual simply choose to do what they feel.

The other reason is that secular values provide no basis for elevating
human worth over that of an animal. Judeo-Christian values posit that
human beings, not animals, are created in God's image and, therefore,
human life is infinitely more sacred than animal life.

That is why people estranged from Judeo-Christian values (including some
Christians) support programs such as "Holocaust on Your Plate," the PETA
(People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) campaign that teaches that
there is no difference between the slaughtering of chickens and the
slaughtering of the Jews in the Holocaust. A human and a chicken are of
equal worth.

That is why a Tucson, Ariz., woman last year screamed to firefighters
that her "babies" were in her burning house. Thinking that the woman's
children were trapped inside, the firemen risked their lives to save the
woman's three cats.

Those inclined to dismiss these examples as either theoretical (the
dog-stranger question) or extreme (the Tucson mother of cats) need to
confront the very real question of animal experimentation to save human
lives. More and more people believe as PETA does that even if we could
find a cure for cancer or AIDS, it would be wrong to experiment on
animals. (The defense that research with computers can teach all that
experiments on animals teach is a lie.) In fact, many animal-rights
advocates oppose killing a pig to obtain a heart valve to save a human life.

Belief in human-animal equivalence inevitably follows the death of
Judeo-Christian values, and it serves not so much to elevate animal
worth as to reduce human worth. Those who oppose vivisection and believe
it is immoral to kill animals for any reason, including eating, should
reflect on this: While there are strong links between cruelty to animals
and cruelty to humans, there are no links between kindness to animals
and kindness to humans.

Kindness to animals has no effect on a person's treatment of people. The
Nazis, the cruelest group in modern history, were also the most
pro-animal-rights group prior to the contemporary period. They outlawed
experimentation on animals and made legal experimentation on human beings.

The second reason that the breakdown of Judeo-Christian values leads to
a diminution of human worth is that if man was not created by God, the
human being is mere stellar dust – and will come to be regarded as such.
Moreover, people are merely the products of random chance, no more
designed than a sand grain formed by water erosion. That is what the
creationism-evolution battle is ultimately about – human worth.

One does not have to agree with creationists or deny all evolutionary
evidence to understand that the way evolution is taught, man is rendered
a pointless product of random forces – unworthy of being saved before
one's hamster.

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Tuesday, February 15, 2005
The case for Judeo-Christian values, part 5


Before continuing to make the case for Judeo-Christian values, it is
time to answer a question frequently posed by Jews and Christians as
well as others: How can there be such a thing as Judeo-Christian values
when Judaism and Christianity have different, sometimes mutually
exclusive, beliefs?

The most important answer is that beliefs and values are not the same
things.

Of course, Judaism and Christianity have some differing beliefs. If they
had the same beliefs, they would be the same religion. The very term
"Judeo-Christian" implies that the two are not the same. The two
religions have some differing beliefs and occasionally even some
different values.

For example, Christianity believes in a Trinity that Judaism does not
believe in. That is a major theological difference, but it has no impact
on values. Likewise, Christianity believes that the Messiah has come,
whereas Judaism believes that he has not yet come. As a Jewish
theologian, I am fascinated by theological differences among religions.
But I am far more preoccupied with real-life issues of good and evil,
and that is where Judeo-Christian values come in.

Both religions are based on the Old Testament, which Judaism and
Christianity hold to be divine or divinely inspired. Clearly, then, they
will share values – unless one holds that the New Testament rejects Old
Testament values. But that is untenable since, in addition to
Christianity believing the Old Testament is God's word, Jesus was a
believing and practicing Jew. He would not practice a religion whose
values or Bible he rejected.

One way to understand Judeo-Christian values, therefore, is as values
that emanate from a Judeo-based Christianity. Christians have always had
the choice to reject the Jewish roots of Christianity (which, when done,
enabled Christian anti-Semitism), to ignore those roots, or to celebrate
and embrace them. American Christians have, more than any other
Christian group, opted for the latter.

For much of Christian history, the majority of Christians either ignored
or denied the Jewish origins of Christianity and the Jewishness of Jesus
and the Apostles. That is how many Christians were able to rationalize
their anti-Semitism, and that is why Europe self-identified as
"Christian," not as "Judeo-Christian" as America has.

It is also true that as the centuries passed, some values differences,
not merely theological ones, did arise. But it is the greatness of
Judeo-Christian values that they combine the best of both religious
traditions and cast aside some of their weaker aspects.

For example, the Christian emphasis on faith above works led often to
faith without works. Meanwhile, the Jewish emphasis on works above faith
has led to many Jews abandoning God and valuing only works – meaning,
more often than not, the embracing of destructive secular radical faiths.

Judeo-Christian values combine the two religions' strengths – the Jewish
emphasis on moral works in this world with the Christian emphasis on
keeping God at the center of one's values and works.

Another example is the American Christian's ability to remain
God-centered and hold onto traditional beliefs while fully participating
in modern society. This has not generally been the case in Jewish life.
Over the centuries, God-centered and Torah-believing Jews retreated from
mainstream society. They did so because: 1) anti-Semitism forced Jews
into ghettos; 2) Jewish ritual laws increasingly restricted contact with
non-Jews; and 3) Jews are a people, not just a religious group.

On the other hand, Jewish rituals have kept Judaism and the Jews alive
while the abandonment of ritual (for example, Sabbath observance) has
hurt Christianity. And Jewish peoplehood has ensured action on behalf of
persecuted fellow Jews while Christians usually did little on behalf of
persecuted fellow Christians – as, for example, those many Christians
terribly persecuted under communism; the Copts in Egypt; the Maronite
Catholics in Lebanon; and the Christians of Sudan.

In sum, despite whatever differences they have, Jews and Christians need
each other and Judaism and Christianity need each other. The
Judeo-Christian values system has become a uniquely powerful moral
force. Among its many achievements is that it is the primary contributor
to America's greatness.