Dennis Prager On Our Cultural Civil War

Dennis Prager wrote a profound, brilliant and seminal editorial piece carried in Article, Opinion, published on April 27, 2021. He writes about our cultural war; the headline of the article is: "PRAGER: The American civil war is over Judeo-Christian values." Below I will quote from his article, and then comment on what he writes. I select intermittently what I am most interested in. Dennis: "Conservatives often speak of Judeo-Christian values and how the current civil war in the United States and the rest of the West is essentially a battle between those values and the left, which rejects Judeo-Christian values. They are right. But they rarely explain what Judeo-Christian values are. Yet, without an explanation, mentioning Judeo-Christian values is useless." My response: there is a vicious cultural, civil war raging right now between traditionalists in America and the West versus leftists and secular humanists. It is a fight to the finish and there is little common ground left. I would add, as others like Ben Shapiro, have pointed out, that the brilliant rational and philosophical heritage, given the West by the ancient Greeks, is now under attack by the Left too. Dennis likely would not disagree with that addition, but, as a Jewish intellectual and theist, his religious outlook is paramount for him. He is correct in explaining what Judeo-Christian values are. Dennis: "First, a word about the term. some Jews and Christians find the term confusing, if not objectionable, since Judaism and Christianity have different theologies. But no one speaks of Judeo-Christian theology, only of Judeo-Christian values" My response: I had never thought of this distinction before, and it is a penetrating insight. The theologies diverge but not the shared values. Dennis: "Judeo-Christian values are essentially another term for biblical values. Judaism and Christianity are both based on the Old Testament--its God, its Ten Commandments, its admonition to love one's neighbor as oneself, to love God, to lead a holy life, etc. Christians also believe in the New Testament, but only an opponent of Christianity would argue that the New Testament negates the values of the Old." My response: For Dennis to clarify that Judeo-Christian values are synonymous with the term biblical values is a helpful reminder for traditionalists like I am to affirm the source of these shared values, and the New Testament does flow from the Old Testament almost seamlessly. Here Dennis lays out those Judeo-Christian values: "Here they are: 1. Objective moral standards come from God. As I have written and spoken about in a PragerU video and elsewhere, if there is no God who declares murder wrong, murder can be subjectively wrong but not objectively wrong. So, while there can certainly be nonbelievers who hold murder, stealing and other actions wrong, without God, those are opinions, not moral facts. Without God of the Bible, there are no moral facts." My response: I am not sure epistemologically that we humans possess a clearly communicable definition of what objective moral standards are or can intellectually and linguistically capture precisely what absolute truth is, but this metaphysical and epistemological moderate will concede that Dennis Prager's moral and theological claims to know objective truth about values and God are close enough to being probably true, that we should live by what he recommends, for the most part. God exists, and almost perfectly objective moral standards come from God. My minor subjective skepticism about Dennis's absolute moral and theological assertions are not strong enough, nor are they meant, to undermine that promotion of goodness, holiness and the worship of God, that this wise and good intellectual advocates. I believe that living in accordance with near moral facts, practiced by all sorts of religious believers and followers of good deities, should suffice to make this world a better, if not perfect place to live. Yes, Dennis, moral facts do come from God. Dennis: "2. God judges our behavior, and we are therefore accountable to God for our behavior. Outside of a religious worldview, there is no higher moral being to whom we are morally accountable." My response: I agree wholeheartedly with what he writes here. God is our judge, and we are accountable to God for our behavior. Moral goodness necessarily flows out from God's loving spiritual goodness, so if humans abandon God as they often do, then they will sink down into amorality and then immorality. Godlessness is the forerunner of satanism overtaking the whole society. Dennis: "3. Just as morality derives from God, so do rights. All men are 'endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights' declares the Declaration of Independence." My response: God is Logos, or Divine, Rational Consciousness, the Creator and Lawgiver of the natural laws that regulate and operation the natural and human worlds. Unlike Dennis, this Mavellonialist, declares that the Mother and Father are married, and that they are Supreme Individualists. Rights are innate to each individual and his natural desire to live his life anticipating the development of and external expression of his natural rights, demonstrated as he maverizes over a lifetime. Because the Divine Couple, Individuators Both, created operate with and enjoy developing their Rights, then of course their human children will inherit to natural gift of rights to assert and operate with in the world out there, while they exist. And these rights become encoded formally in our political system and Constitution here in America, but they predate that heritage, as gifts to humans and Americans, and all humans, from on high. Dennis: "4. The human being is uniquely precious. While the Bible repeatedly forbids cruel behavior to animals (cutting or tearing off the limb of a living animal to eat it as a means preserving the rest of the animal to eat while working in the field), only human beings are created in God's image." My response: To proclaim that humans are uniquely precious, and created in God's image, is to avow that each human has unique dignity and worth, and these elevating remarks are among the most pro-individualist stances ever announced in any faith. All of this while Judaism and Christianity remain altruist in their ethics. The famous Biblical underpinning of the require for mercy, justice and gentle treatment, implicitly applies to all humans, and even to animals that are not to be maltreated. Dennis: "5. The world is based on divine order, meaning divinely ordained distinctions. Among these divine distinctions are: God and man, man and woman, human and animal, good and evil, and nature and God." My response: This list of distinctions seems ambiguous to me, and troubles me a bit. Are the first-named beings of higher worth, esteem, rank or being owned deference and obedience, as commanded by God, by the second-named beings in each dual set of distinctions? That may have been God's intention, or perhaps it is merely a way of ontologically pointing out important pairs of opposites at work in the universe. God, humans, and good are ranked higher by God than man, humans or evil. Man and nature should not be ranked higher than woman or God, so this may indicate that these metaphysical pairs of dualism are just being noted as existing and competing and cooperating, not that the first one enjoys higher priority than the second one in the eyes of God. Still, God made the world and set in place divine order so that heaven, nature and human society operate in accordance with natural law. The dualistic pairs are primordial and inescapable structures of reality, so, not matter which side of the dualism that one leans towards, both sides need to be respected and balanced in the life of a loving, balanced, good, rational moral agent. Dennis: "6. Human beings are not basically good. Therefore, the most important moral endeavor is making good people. Religious Jews and Christians understand that the greatest battle in life is with one's nature. For the opponents of Judeo-Christian values, the greatest moral battle is not with one's nature; it is with society (specifically, American society)." My response: Perhaps no other set of religions in the world capture so clearly and truthfully, as moral insight at its finest, in highlighting those human beings are not basically good. Prager and the Judeo-Christians nail this unpleasant but liberating sliver of veritableness. The primary and highest priority or job of every parent, of every authority figure, of every rabbi, priest or minister, and is the responsibility of each moral agent born, is to make good persons. Implicit within this injunction to become good by battling and redirecting one's own fell nature is to make each person a good person as an individual. The good person disciplines herself and blames herself, much less than attributing her flaws and failings to other or to society, and here is another sign that individualism is a high Judeo-Christian value as each agent 'mans up" and pressures herself to amount to something good, loving and productive, no matter her natural abilities and environmental hurdles that press her down and hold her back. Note how the opponents of Judeo-Christian values--and note that Satan and Lera oppose those same set of divinely-written and legislated value--insist that the greatest moral battle is not with one's nature but with society. The opponents of Yahweh and Jesus, whether Leftists, Progressives or children of darkness, contend that the moral problem is not personal evil not personally overcome as the solution to the world's troubles, but, instead, any evil felt or possessed by each person is externally manufactured by society. Here again, implicit in Judeo-Christian values is the individualistic ethic: that internal sources of evil, for the individual and for the world, are best identified, isolated and conquered within the heart, mind and soul of each sinner, by that sinner, one soul at a time. It is a collectivist or negatively-altruistic ethic to assign moral problems, for each sinner, as externally impelled upon each sinner, so that the solution to bringing about moral good for each individual, and for all, is at the macro-societal level. Judeo-Christians, again are altruists, not egoists, in their moral theory, and likely would not interpret these remarks by Prager as I have as indications of individualism as ethically desirable in Judeo-Christian values. These Jews and Christians regard collectivism and universal moral-strategies as the finest ways to make good people, but, despite this anticipated disagreement--from Jews and Christians--with my reading of Prager's words under #6, I do not believe that my interpretation is forced or unreasonable. Dennis: "7. Precisely because we are not basically good, we must not trust our hearts to lead us to proper behavior. The road to hell is paved with good hearts. Feelings make us human, but they cannot direct our lives. This alone divides the Bible-based from those on the left." My response: Jews and Christians, I believe, believe that feeling, as the controlling psychological way of perceiving, concluding and deciding as practiced by each willing moral agent are willing the more evil, more foolish and less promising way to live and act. Reasoning and thinking should be the primary means and the controlling psychological way that each moral agent makes decisions. This means of willing will lead, overall, the agent to make better, smarter and more benign decisions. Note that I, unlike Dennis, insist that sentiment-based decisions, as the minority-way of willing how to act, does lead the moral agent to lead good lives, most of the time for most people. If reasoning is godly and from the Bible, and it is, then Yahweh and Jesus are benevolent deities that are supernatural embodiments of the eternal principle of Logos at work in creating and running the cosmos, so that rational principle needs also be at work in the willing of each moral agent, made in God's image. If those immersed in and loyal to the importance of Judeo-Christian values guiding their moral choices are guided mostly by their logic versus Leftists and secularists that make their decisions based upon what they feel, then I believe I am faithful to what Dennis means above. Dennis: "8. All human beings are created in God's image. Therefore, race is of no significance. We all emanate from Adam and Eve, whose race is never mentioned. That many religious people held racist views only testifies to the almost infinite ability to people to distort what is good." My response: All people are created in God's image, so each of us is called to maverize, like God as done, and all are worthy of happiness and good times. To be racist is natural for all of us, but to act upon these primordial, savage views is to live a lie, and to refuse to grow morally into a kind, tolerant adult. Dennis: "9. Fear God, not man. God is the foundation of morality. In the Book of Exodus, Egyptian midwives were ordered by Pharaoh to kill all newborn Hebrew boys. They disobeyed the divine king of Egypt. Why? Because 'the midwives feared God.' In America today, more people fear the print, electronic and social media than God." My response: Yes, we should fear God first and most. We should also fear--while refusing to be paralyzed or intimidated by those that one fears--our fellow humans, for as committed sinners, they may entice us to live in sin full time as they have succumbed to. We do need to fear God more than worldly media outlets. Dennis: "10. Human beings have free will. In the secular world, there is not free will because all human behavior is attributed to genes and environment. Only a religious worldview, which posits the existence of a divine soul--something independent of genes and environment--allows for free will." My response: even the most unaccomplished, undeveloped, mediocre, conformist, passive, hedonistic believers have some free will. Proportionately, as the agent grows in skill and talent, as her expanded, very aware state of advanced consciousness allows her to wield a will so free and powerful that she mostly recognizes right from wrong with a full positions-set to analyze each action. I admire Dennis's unique point that the religious point of view, with its advocate's positing the existence of a divine soul in the psyche of each person, that is where free will is strongest. Among the atheists, is unfree will is announced, where determinism of genetics and environment as controlled by various worldly tyrants--all of this reinforces those sinners do not enjoy free wills very much. Dennis: "11. Liberty. America was founded on the belief that God wants us to be free. On the Liberty Bell is inscribed just one thing (aside from the name of the company that manufactured the bell). It is a verse from the Bible: "Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof." The current assault on personal liberty--unprecedented in American history--emanate from those who reject the Bible as their moral guide (including more than a few Jews and Christians who have joined the assault, having been indoctrinated with anti-religious views in high school and college)." My response: Liberty is about the most important condition in the world for humans to enjoy, and we are far to willing to let government enslave us, or peer pressure, or being tyrannized by our lust, our materialism, our fanatical devotion to some abstraction (the substitute for worshiping God), etc. God wants us to be free, to be spiritually, morally, legally and socially free. If one follows the Bible, one would be inclined to defend our natural right to enjoy liberty. The secular tyrants that seek to imprison us within a nightmare society based on Marxist/postmodernist principles are against God and liberty. Dennis: "When Judeo-Christian principles are abandoned, evil eventually ensues. One doesn't have to be a believer to acknowledge this. Many secular conservatives recognize that the end of religion in the West leads to moral chaos--which is exactly what we are witnessing today and exactly what we witnessed in Europe last century. When Christianity died in Europe, we got communism, fascism and Nazism. What will we get in America if Christianity and Judeo-Christian values die? My response: I agree with Dennis's accurate and dire warning that once good religion and good religious values are abandoned, in Europe and in America, evil and evildoers fill the void. Just at the totalitarian isms of the 20th century wrecked Europe, so to can the loss of religion and good values in America allow a pernicious secularism and demonic, totalitarian hegemony to sweep our fair land.