Light Brings Salt
Volume 3, Issue 07 February 13, 2005
Dedicated to the Systematic Exposition of the Word of God
Better
answers: The case for
Judeo-Christian
values
Dennis
Prager
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 non-believers 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
The best known animal
rights organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 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because values based on God and the Bible have been replaced by secular values.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
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
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
with
Christianity's demise. In 1834, 99 years before Hitler and the Nazis rose to power, Heine warned:
A drama will be enacted
in
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.
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
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
In the late 1970s, in a
public interview in
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
If you could not call
the
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
©2005 Creators Syndicate, Inc.