Light Brings Salt
Volume 3, Issue 08 February 20, 2005
Dedicated to the Systematic Exposition of the Word of God
The case for Judeo-Christian
values: Part 2
by Dennis Prager
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
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. Did those
non-Jews in
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 [missing] purely rational viewpoint.
What is the purely rational view on the morality of abortion? Of public nudity? Of the value of an
animal versus that of a human? Of the war in
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
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.
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 People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) 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
Those inclined to
dismiss these examples as either theoretical (the dog-stranger question) or
extreme (the
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.
©2005 Creators
Syndicate, Inc.
Applause in the Airport? Beyond the Beer Commercial ... It
Happens ... It Really Happens
By Matt Friedeman, PhD
(AgapePress) - Rick from
At any rate, Rick (he asked us not to use his full name) called to
talk about his experience coming back recently from the fields of war. His
words (and they are worth your time reading, only lightly edited): "I heard
you talking about the Super Bowl commercial. I'm a Marine, a re-con Marine. I
just got back from overseas, the second week of December, actually. I was
injured overseas, so that's why I'm home now.
"But the whole time I was [there, in recovery] we watched the
news to see what's going on. And we saw the protests, and we saw what the media
was saying about what's going on, and we were worried about what we were
actually going to face when we came home. We didn't know what to expect, to be
honest with you. From the news media we were seeing, the whole country was
basically telling us we're a bunch of jerks.
"I thank God that the troops that are there don't see the
news coverage. I thank God every day, because there'd be ten times the number
getting killed, just because it would so un-motivate
[sic] them.
"Back to the story: there were seven other soldiers that came
home with me that day. We flew into JFK, and we were talking on the way back:
What's going to happen? What will we be facing? Is it going to be like the
"We get into JFK, we step out of the breezeway into the main
terminal, and directly in front of us was an elderly gentleman carrying a bag.
And he immediately stopped, set his bag down, and the
first thing we all thought was, 'Oh, Lord, here we go already.' He just stopped
and looked at us for a second, and then tears came to his eyes and he saluted
us."
"And -- I'm breaking up now [editor's note: with tears] --
every one of us just started crying like babies. Everybody in the terminal -- I
kid you not, at least two to three hundred people -- just started clapping,
spontaneously. To me, it was so much worth what we were doing, to realize that
people over here actually get what we were doing. We weren't over there because
it's fun. We're over there doing a job."
"When I saw the Super Bowl commercial, I just started bawling
like a baby again because that was something totally unexpected. We had no idea
that people actually appreciated what we're doing, from what we see on the
news. We thought we were going to come back and get eggs thrown at us. It was
so refreshing to know that what we were seeing on the news is just a bunch of
garbage that's being concocted by the media, that 99.9 percent of the country
doesn't believe that way."
"I have a couple of more months of recovery. I got hit with a
concussion and have some internal damage, but I'm feeling up, doing well, and
hopefully I can get back over there with my boys."
It caused some tears in this talk show host's eyes to know there
were tears in his. Appreciation, smiles, handclaps -- they can go a long way
when a nation is at war, regardless of what the media and some Europeans might
think.