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 (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We do in large measure because values based on God and the Bible have been replaced by secular values.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 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.

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(2) The case for Judeo-Christian values (townhall.com, 050111)

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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(3) The necessity of Judeo-Christian values (townhall.com, 050118)

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 [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 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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(4) The case for Judeo-Christian values (townhall.com, 050208)

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 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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(5) The case for Judeo-Christian values (townhall.com, 050215)

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.

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(6) Liberal feeling vs. Judeo-Christian values (townhall.com, 050222)

With the decline of the authority of Judeo-Christian values in the West, many people stopped looking to external sources of moral standards in order to decide what is right and wrong. Instead of being guided by God, the Bible and religion, great numbers -- in Western Europe, the great majority -- have looked elsewhere for moral and social guidelines.

For many millions in the twentieth century, those guidelines were provided by Marxism, Communism, Fascism or Nazism. For many millions today, those guidelines are … feelings. With the ascendancy of leftist values that has followed the decline of Judeo-Christian religion, personal feelings have supplanted universal standards. In fact, feelings are the major unifying characteristic among contemporary liberal positions.

Aside from reliance on feelings, how else can one explain a person who believes, let alone proudly announces on a bumper sticker, that “War is not the answer”? I know of no comparable conservative bumper sticker that is so demonstrably false and morally ignorant. Almost every great evil has been solved by war -- from slavery in America to the Holocaust in Europe. Auschwitz was liberated by soldiers making war, not by pacifists who would have allowed the Nazis to murder every Jew in Europe.

The entire edifice of moral relativism, a foundation of leftist ideology, is built on the notion of feelings deciding right and wrong. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

The animals-and-humans-are-equivalent movement is based entirely on feelings. People see chickens killed and lobsters boiled, feel for the animals, and shortly thereafter abandon thought completely, and equate chicken and lobster suffering to that of a person under the same circumstances.

The unprecedented support of liberals for radically redefining the basic institution of society, marriage and the family is another a product of feelings -- sympathy for homosexuals. Thinking through the effects of such a radical redefinition on society and its children is not a liberal concern.

The “self-esteem movement” -- now conceded to have been a great producer of mediocrity and narcissism -- was entirely a liberal invention based on feelings for kids.

The liberal preoccupation with whether America is loved or hated is also entirely feelings-based. The Left wants to be loved; the conservative wants to do what is right and deems world opinion fickle at best and immoral at worst.

Sexual harassment laws have created a feelings-industrial complex. The entire concept of “hostile work environment” is feelings based. If one woman resents a swimsuit calendar on a co-worker’s desk, laws have now been passed whose sole purpose is to protect her from having uncomfortable feelings.

For liberals, the entire worth of the human fetus is determined by the mother’s feelings. If she feels the nascent human life she is carrying is worth nothing, it is worth nothing. If she feels it is infinitely precious, it is infinitely precious.

Almost everything is affected by liberal feelings. For example, liberal opposition to calling a Christmas party by its rightful name is based on liberals’ concern that non-Christians will feel bad. And for those liberals, nothing else matters -- not the legitimate desire of the vast majority of Americans to celebrate their holiday, let alone the narcissism of those non-Christians “offended” by a Christmas party.

And why do liberals continue to endorse race-based affirmative action at universities despite the mounting evidence that it hurts blacks more than it helps? Again, a major reason is feelings -- sympathy for blacks and the historic racism African-Americans have endured.

Very often, liberals are far more concerned with purity of motive than with moral results. That’s why so many liberals still oppose the liberation of Iraq -- so what if Iraqis risk their lives to vote? It’s George W. Bush’s motives that liberals care about, not spreading liberty in the Arab world.

Elevating motives above results is a significant part of liberalism. What matters is believing that one is well intentioned -- that one cares for the poor, hates racism, loathes inequality and loves peace. Bi-lingual education hurts Latino children. But as a compassionate person -- and “compassionate” is the self-definition of most liberals -- that is not the liberal’s real concern. His concern is with an immigrant child’s uncomfortable feelings when first immersed in English.

Reliance on feelings in determining one’s political and social positions is the major reason young people tend to have liberal/left positions -- they feel passionately but do not have the maturity to question those passions. It is also one reason women, especially single women, are more liberal than men -- it is women’s nature to rely on emotions when making decisions. (For those unused to anything but adulation directed at the female of the human species, let me make it clear that men, too, cannot rely on their nature, which leans toward settling differences through raw physical power. Both sexes have a lot of self-correcting to do.)

To be fair, feelings also play a major role in many conservatives’ beliefs. Patriotism is largely a feeling; religious faith is filled with emotion, and religion has too often been dictated by emotion. But far more conservative positions are based on “What is right?” rather than on “How do I feel?” That is why a religious woman who is pregnant but does not wish to be is far less likely to have an abortion than a secular woman in the same circumstances. Her values are higher than her feelings. And that, in a nutshell, is what our culture war is about -- Judeo-Christian values versus liberal/leftist feelings.

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(7) Hate evil (townhall.com, 050301)

Do you hate evil?

Much of humanity doesn’t. But if you embrace Judeo-Christian values, you must.

A core value of the Bible is hatred of evil. Indeed, it is the only thing the Bible instructs its followers to hate -- so much so that love of God is equated with hatred of evil. “Those who love God -- you must hate evil,” the Psalms tell us.

The notion of hating evil was and remains revolutionary.

The vast majority of ancients didn’t give thought to evil. Societies were cruel, and their gods were cruel.

Nor did higher religions place hating evil at the center of their worldviews. In Eastern philosophy and religion, the highest goal was the attainment of enlightenment (Nirvana) through effacing the ego, not through combating or hating evil. Evil and unjust suffering were regarded as part of life, and it was best to escape life, not morally transform it.

In much of the Arab and Muslim world, “face,” “shame” and “honor” define moral norms, not standards of good and evil. That is the reason for “honor killings” -- the murder of a daughter or sister who has brought “shame” to the family (through alleged sexual sin) -- and the widespread view of these murders as heroic, not evil. That is why Saddam Hussein, no matter how many innocent people he had murdered, tortured and raped, was a hero to much of the Arab world. As much evil as he committed, what most mattered was his strength, and therefore his honor.

As for the West, with notable exceptions, Christians did not tend to regard evil as the greatest sin. Unbelief and sexual sin were greater objects of most Christians’ animosity. Over time, however, many Christians came to lead the battle against evil -- from slavery to communism. And today, it is not coincidental that America, the country that most thinks in terms of good and evil, is the country that most affirms Judeo-Christian values.

In the contemporary Western world, most people who identify with the Left -- meaning the majority of people -- hate war, corporations, pollution, Christian fundamentalists, economic inequality, tobacco and conservatives. But they rarely hate the greatest evils of their day, if by evil we are talking about the deliberate infliction of cruelty -- mass murder, rape, torture, genocide and totalitarianism.

That is why communism, a way of life built on cruelty, attracted vast numbers of people on the Left and why, from the 1960s, it was unopposed by most others on the Left. Even most people calling themselves liberal, not leftist, hated anti-communism much more than they hated communism. When President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” liberals were outraged -- just as they were when President George W. Bush called the regimes of North Korea, Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq an “axis of evil.”

Ask leftists what they believe humanity must fight against, and they will likely respond global warming or some other ecological disaster (and perhaps American use of armed force as well).

In fact, the Left throughout the world generally has contempt for people who speak of good and evil. They are called Manichaeans, moral simpletons who see the world in black and white, never in shades of grey.

As the leading German weekly magazine, Der Spiegel, recently wrote: “Mr. Bush’s recent speeches have made no retreat from the good vs. evil view of the world that the Europeans hate.”

Patrice de Beer, an editor of the leading French newspaper, Le Monde, wrote that in the European Union: “The notion of the world divided between Good and Evil is perceived with dread.”

Entirely typical of the Left’s view of good and evil is this series of questions posed on the leftist website Counterpunch by Gary Leupp, professor of history and of comparative religion at Tufts University: “Questions for discussion. Was Attila good or evil to invade Gaul? Saddam good or evil to invade Kuwait? Hitler good or evil to invade Poland? Bush good or evil to invade Iraq? Are ‘good’ and ‘evil’ really adequate categories to evaluate contemporary and historical events?”

Western Europeans and their American counterparts loathe the language of good and evil and correctly attribute it to religious -- i.e., Judeo-Christian -- values. Among those values is fighting evil and “burning evil out from your midst.” And to do that, you have to first hate it. Because if you don’t hate evil, you won’t fight it, and good will lose.

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(8) Judeo-Christian values are larger than Judaism or Christianity (townhall.com, 050315)

Some Jews and Christians object to the term “Judeo-Christian.” How can there be Judeo-Christian values, they argue, when Judaism and Christianity differ? In a previous column, I explained that one should not confuse theology with values. Theological differences are not the same as value differences.

Nevertheless there are some value differences between the religions.

But that is precisely the greatness of Judeo-Christian values: They are greater than the sum of their parts. That is why in this series of essays I have been making the case for Judeo-Christian values, not for all Christian values and not for all Jewish values.

The combination of Jewish Scripture (the Old Testament) and Christian thought and activism – as worked out mostly in America and mostly by Judeo-based Christians – has forged something larger and more universally applicable than either Judaism or Christianity alone.

Let me give two examples of specifically Jewish and Christian values that are not Judeo-Christian values.

As Judaism developed, it developed a legal system (Halakha) that increasingly aimed to separate Jews from non-Jews. One purpose was to keep Jews from incorporating pagan practices and values into the one monotheistic religion. Over time, however, it was also a result of the constant decimation of the Jewish people by antisemites. Jews, for good reason, feared disappearing. Thus survival – in part through avoiding social contact with non-Jews – became the primary concern of Jewish life, not influencing the world. Whatever the reasons, Judaism retreated from the world. Judeo-Christian values bring Jewish values back into the world.

An example of a Christian value that is not Judeo-Christian is Christianity’s traditional emphasis on faith above works and on an exclusive credo. Many Christians, including those who forcefully advocate Judeo-Christian values, believe that one must profess faith in Christ in order to be saved, that no amount of good deeds a person may perform, even if that person also has a deep belief in God (the Father), suffices in God’s eyes. And though Catholicism has emphasized works along with faith, for most of Church history, the importance of works was restricted to Catholics. Non-Catholics, no matter how good, were often denied salvation and frequently persecuted solely for their different faith (e.g., Huguenots and Jews).

Until the twentieth century, European Christianity, as embodied in the Church, de-emphasized its Jewish roots, and it usually persecuted Jews (though never ordered, indeed opposed, their physical annihilation – annihilation required a secular ideology, Nazism). No Christian state referred to itself as “Judeo-Christian.” That identity arose with the Christians of America, who from the outset were at least as deeply immersed in the Old Testament as in the New.

The American Christian identified with the Jews rather than saw himself as simply superseding them.

These American Christians chose a Torah verse – “Proclaim liberty throughout the land” – for their Liberty Bell; learned and taught Hebrew; adopted the Jewish notion of being chosen to be a light unto the nations; saw their leaving Europe as a second exodus; had every one of its presidents take the oath of office on an Old and New Testament Bible – and while every president mentioned God in his inaugural address, not one mentioned Jesus.

Of course, most Protestant Christians who hold Judeo-Christian values continue to believe that there is no salvation outside of faith in Christ. But precisely because they do hold Judeo-Christian values, they work hand in hand with others whose faith they deem insufficient or incorrect (e.g., Jews and Mormons). So while they theologically reject other faiths, evangelical Christians are the single strongest advocates of Judeo-Christian values.

They are what can be called “Judeo-Christians.” Since they founded America, such Christians have recognized the critical significance of the Jewish text – the Old Testament – which forms the foundation of Judeo-Christian values. It provided the God of Christianity, their supra-natural Creator, the notions of divine moral judgment and divine love, the God-based universal morality they advocate and try to live by, the Ten Commandments, the holy, the sanctity of human life, the belief in a God of history and that history has meaning, and moral progress. All these and more came from the Jews and their texts.

But while the Jews provided the text, the Christians brought the text and its values into the world at large and applied them to a society composed of Jews, Christians, atheists, and members of other religions.

Those Judeo-Christian values have made America the greatest experiment in human progress and liberty and the greatest force for good in history.

And they are exportable. In fact, they are humanity’s only hope.

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(9) Choose life (townhall.com, 050329)

There are good people on both sides of the Terri Schiavo tragedy, but chances are that if you affirm Judeo-Christian values, you have opposed pulling the feeding tubes from the severely brain damaged woman’s body.

Why? Because if there is anything that Judeo-Christian values stand for, it is choosing life and rejecting death. As the Torah puts it, “I have put before you today life and death, and you shall choose life.”

Even believing Jews and Christians are not fully aware of how much the rejection of death-oriented Egypt underlies the values and practices of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible held sacred by Judaism and Christianity.

Egyptian civilization was steeped in death. Its bible was the Book of the Dead, and its greatest monuments, its very symbols, the pyramids, were gigantic tombs. One of the Torah’s first tasks was to destroy the connection between civilization (and, of course, religion) and death. That is the reason, I am convinced, for the absence of overt mention of the afterlife in the Old Testament -- it was greatly concerned with getting humanity preoccupied with life. With a few noble exceptions, preoccupation with the afterlife has led to denigration of life. The Islamic terrorists and the cultures that support them are only the most recent examples.

One of the greatest insights of Sigmund Freud, who, his atheism notwithstanding, was perhaps the greatest mind of the 20th century, was that human beings have a Death Instinct, a death wish that is as strong as the Life Instinct. He wrote this decades before Nazism and the Communist genocides of the 20th century proved his point.

Yet, he was only saying in psychoanalytical terminology what Moses had said in Deuteronomy thousands of years earlier.

The Torah began this transformation with its constant emphasis on rejecting everything Egypt stood for. The ban on eating or even owning bread during the seven days of Passover, the holiday commemorating the exodus from Egypt, the central Old Testament event after Creation, was primarily a symbolic rejection of Egypt. As noted in the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Egyptians essentially invented bread as we know it. “The Egyptians apparently discovered that allowing wheat doughs to ferment, thus forming gases, produced a light, expanded loaf, and they also developed baking ovens.” (Fermented) bread symbolized Egypt as apple pie or hot dogs might represent America. Moreover, fermentation is likened to sin and death in both Jewish and Christian understandings of the Bible.

The Torah also banned Jewish priests from coming into contact with corpses. I know of no other religious system that banned its holiest members from any contact with the dead. This, too, was to separate life -- the role of the priest was to consecrate life -- from death; and most of all, to separate Israelite values from those of Egypt, where priests were regularly involved in religious activities revolving around death.

The Torah’s ban on sexual intercourse during menstruation is also a separation of that which represents life (intercourse) from that which represents death (menstruation). Biblically, menstruation had nothing to do with women being “unclean.” In fact, nearly the entire body of Torah instruction (found especially in Leviticus, the least known of the Five Books) concerning what is incorrectly translated as “unclean” or “impure” is actually about that which is touched by death. Substitute “touched by death” for “impure” or “unclean,” and you will have a far better understanding of the text.

The somewhat better known ban on eating meat together with milk, emanating from the law in the Torah -- stated three times -- that prohibits the boiling of a kid in its mother’s milk, is another example of separating life and death. Meat (i.e., a dead mammal) represents death; and milk, the life-giving food of mammals, represents life. (Jewish tradition only later added chicken, a non-mammal, to the list of mammals not to be eaten with milk; and major Talmudic rabbis did eat chicken with milk.)

The biblical and Judeo-Christian transformation of human thinking from death- to life-orientation has been a staggering accomplishment -- even though it has obviously not been entirely successful even in the contemporary Western world. The cavalier attitude about human life expressed among the leading opponents of Judeo-Christian values -- such as PETA, which equates barbecuing chickens with cremating Jews; the Princeton “ethicist” Peter Singer who believes that parents can commit infanticide under various conditions; those in the non Judeo-Christian West who lack a moral problem with abortion for whatever reason; modern film and art that portray death as kitsch; and the secular culture’s contempt for those who call themselves ‘pro-life’ or believe that Terri Schiavo had a right to live -- are all examples of the contemporary attempt to undo the life wish of Judeo-Christian values and affirm the natural death wish that resides in the human soul.

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(10) The Left’s battle to restore chaos (townhall.com, 050405)

It is difficult to overstate the depth of the differences between the Judeo-Christian view of the world and that of its opponents, most particularly the Left. For example, it involves the very question of whether there is order to the world.

Basic to the biblical worldview is the proposition that God made order out of chaos -- order expressed largely through separation and differences. God separated light from dark and created day and night; separated the waters and created land; and so on.

Differences reflect the divine order, while attempts to abolish those differences represent a denial of that order and a yearning for primeval chaos, moral and otherwise.

Here are some of the differences that are central to the Judeo-Christian worldview that are under attack today:

Good and evil: Central to the Judeo-Christian value system is that good and evil are polar opposites and “Woe unto those who call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah). Opponents of Judeo-Christian values have made war on moral absolutes, on God-based moral values.

This has been attempted through moral relativism (“What I think is good is good for me, what you think is good is good for you”); opposition to moral judgments (“Who are you to call the Soviet Union ‘evil’?”); multiculturalism (“No culture’s values are any better than any other’s”); substituting psychological categories for moral ones (such as routinely labeling violent murderers “sick” rather than evil); dividing the world into the powerful and the weak rather than the good and bad; and through Marxism and all its leftist and liberal materialism-based offshoots that have substituted economic criteria for moral ones (“Poverty causes crime”; or as constantly heard since 9-11, poverty breeds terrorists, the point made by George McGovern recently at a symposium on world poverty at Princeton University).

God and man: God is God and man is man. There is an infinite gulf between man and God, and God is infinitely higher than man. For the Left, man is God and God is man (these were the very words used by Marx and Engels). Each man is the source of values and the measure of all things, unaccountable to any God.

Man and woman: “And God created Adam [i.e., the human being], male and female He created them” (Genesis).

This is the area of the greatest current cultural battle. The biblical view is that man and woman are entirely distinct beings, and human order in large part rests on preserving that distinctiveness. The Left is working to abolish this distinction. That is what its battle for the “transgendered” is about. “GLBT” means “Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered.” Transgendered is not transsexual. A transsexual has simply changed sexes, but he or she does not obliterate the sexes’ distinctiveness. The transgendered, on the other hand, remains a member of his or her sex but acts out gender-roles belonging to the other (such as the man who wears a dress in public).

The Left advocates much more than merely homosexuality-heterosexuality equality. It is for obliterating the notion of fixed sex, of male and female. That is why in the last 10-20 years the word “sex” -- always used to describe male or female -- has been replaced by “gender.” Sex is objective and fixed; gender is subjective and malleable. Thus some universities -- the institution in the vanguard of removing Judeo-Christian values -- are eliminating men’s and women’s bathrooms, as they imply a sex distinctiveness that is unacceptable to opponents of Judeo-Christian sex distinctions.

Two laws in the Torah provide further evidence of the biblical desire to retain male-female distinctiveness. The first is the ban on men wearing women’s clothing and on women wearing what is distinctive to men; the second is the wording of the ban on male homosexual behavior: “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman” (my translation). Sexual intercourse between men obliterates the ultimate male-female distinction.

Holy and profane: A major separation in the Judeo-Christian values system is between the holy and the profane. Applied to speech, this means, for example, that cursing is regarded far less seriously in those parts of society estranged from Judeo-Christian values. Applied to sex, this means that sexual intercourse has a dimension of holiness unknown to the Left, which regards it as a volitional and health issue.

One characteristic of the Left is its general disdain for the very concept of the holy. No one better expresses this disdain than the chief writer on culture for the New York Times, who regularly heaps contempt on religious people’s sensitivities in this area. Worthy of particular ridicule are those who thought that the baring of Janet Jackson’s breast on national television during half-time at the 2004 Super Bowl, and cursing and vulgarity on the public airwaves, are worth getting upset about.

Human and animal: A final example of a Judeo-Christian distinction being obliterated in the secular world is man-animal. For the Bible, man is created in God’s image, animals are not. Indeed, the best way to describe holiness is the movement from the animal-like to the God-like. One of the great human tasks, according to the biblical worldview, is to separate oneself from the animal -- to emulate the holy, not the animal. On the other hand, in the contemporary secular world, every attempt is made to show how similar humans are to the “other animals.”

By erasing the distinctions that make for an ordered universe, those working to dismantle Judeo-Christian values are working, consciously or not, to restore chaos.

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(11) Moral absolutes (townhall.com, 050503)

Nothing more separates Judeo-Christian values from secular values than the question of whether morality -- what is good or evil -- is absolute or relative. In other words, is there an objective right or wrong, or is right or wrong a matter of personal opinion?

In the Judeo-Christian value system, God is the source of moral values and therefore what is moral and immoral transcends personal or societal opinion. Without God, each society or individual makes up its or his/her moral standards. But once individuals or societies become the source of right and wrong, right and wrong, good and evil, are merely adjectives describing one’s preferences. This is known as moral relativism, and it is the dominant attitude toward morality in modern secular society.

Moral relativism means that murder, for example, is not objectively wrong; you may feel it’s wrong, but it is no more objectively wrong than your feeling that some music is awful renders that music objectively awful. It’s all a matter of personal feeling. That is why in secular society people are far more prone to regard moral judgments as merely feelings. Children are increasingly raised to ask the question, “How do you feel about it?” rather than, “Is it right or wrong?”

Only if God, the transcendent source of morality, says murder is wrong, is it wrong, and not merely one man’s or one society’s opinion.

Most secular individuals do not confront these consequences of moral relativism. It is too painful for most decent secular people to realize that their moral relativism, their godless morality, means that murder is not really wrong, that “I think murder is wrong,” is as meaningless as “I think purple is ugly.”

That is why our culture has so venerated the Ten Commandments -- it is a fixed set of God-given moral laws and principles. But that is also why opponents of America remaining a Judeo-Christian country, people who advocate moral relativism, want the Ten Commandments removed from all public buildings. The Ten Commandments represents objective, i.e., God-based morality.

All this should be quite clear, but there is one aspect of moral relativism that confuses many believers in Judeo-Christian moral absolutes. They assume that situational ethics is the same thing as moral relativism and therefore regard situational ethics as incompatible with Judeo-Christian morality. They mistakenly argue that just as allowing individuals to determine what is right and wrong negates moral absolutes, allowing situations to determine what is right and wrong also negates moral absolutes.

This is a misunderstanding of the meaning of moral absolutes. It means that if an act is good or bad, it is good or bad for everyone in the identical situation (“universal morality”).

But “everyone” is hardly the same as “every situation.” An act that is wrong is wrong for everyone in the same situation, but almost no act is wrong in every situation. Sexual intercourse in marriage is sacred; when violently coerced, it is rape. Truth telling is usually right, but if, during World War II, Nazis asked you where a Jewish family was hiding, telling them the truth would have been evil.

So, too, it is the situation that determines when killing is wrong. That is why the Ten Commandments says “Do not murder,” not “Do not kill.” Murder is immoral killing, and it is the situation that determines when killing is immoral and therefore murder. Pacifism, the belief that it is wrong to take a life in every situation, is based on the mistaken belief that absolute morality means “in every situation” rather than “for everyone in the same situation.” For this reason, it has no basis in Judeo-Christian values, which holds that there is moral killing (self-defense, defending other innocents, taking the life of a murderer) and immoral killing (intentional murder of an innocent individual, wars of aggression, terrorism, etc.).

But situational ethics aside, the key element to Judeo-Christian morality remains simply this: There is good and there is evil independent of personal or societal opinion; and in order to determine what it is, one must ask, “How would God and my God-based text judge this action?” rather than, “How do I -- or my society -- feel about it?”

That different religious people will at times come up with different responses in no way negates the fact that at least they may be pursuing moral truth. In secular society, where there is no God-based morality, there is no moral truth to pursue. The consequences may be easily seen by observing that the most morally confused institution in America, the university -- where good and evil are often either denied or inverted -- is also its most secular.

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(12) The Jews have a mission (townhall.com, 050510)

Ask believing Christians -- probably from as young as 8 years of age -- what their mission as Christians is, and it is overwhelmingly likely they will answer, “to bring people to Christ” or “spread the Gospel.”

Ask any non-Christian what the Christian mission is, and you will get the same answer. Just about everyone, Christian or non-Christian, knows the Christian mission.

Now ask any Jew, religious or secular, “What is the Jewish mission?” and the most likely response will be: “What do you mean?”

Most religious Jews rarely talk about a Jewish mission. Rather, they are preoccupied with survival: of the Jewish religion (observance of religious laws) and of the Jewish people. Most non-religious Jews who identify as Jews are preoccupied with survival of the Jewish people. And most Jews with a weak or no Jewish identity identify with no Jewish mission or with a secular one.

In fact, the only large body of Jews with a mission are the Jews with the least Jewish religiosity. Such Jews have been disproportionately involved in secular ideologies such as Marxism, socialism, feminism, environmentalism, gay rights, animal rights and every other ideology of the Left.

Why? There are three major reasons:

1. The original religious impulse that started the Jewish people and sustained them for thousands of years has not died among Jews; it has simply been transformed into secular causes.

2. Jews often had terrible experiences under European Christianity and (though less murderous) under Islam, and therefore came to equate secularism with their liberation from oppression.

3. European nationalism excluded Jewish participation. In no country except the United States have Jews felt fully a member of the national group in which they lived. Therefore, Jews came to fear and loathe nationalism and developed a religious fervor for everything international.

The bottom line is that the less Jewish a Jew is, the more he is likely to feel he has a mission to humanity, and the more Jewish he is, the less likely he is to feel such a mission.

This is a tragedy of immeasurable proportions. It is tragic for humanity because the people who brought the Bible and its Ten Commandments to the world are often the most active in seeking its removal from the world. It is tragic for the Jews because Jews who abandon Judaism and substitute leftist values for Jewish ones (or equate them, which is the same thing) work against Jewish survival. And the Jews who do practice Judaism and are oblivious to any mission to humanity render Judaism irrelevant.

The Jews’ mission is as it always has been -- to bring the world to ethical monotheism. Ethical monotheism means there is one God and therefore one moral standard that He has revealed, and He holds all humans accountable to it. This is the point of Jewish chosenness. God chose a people -- a particularly small undistinguished people (chosenness has never implied inherent superiority) -- to make the world aware of the God of ethical demands and moral judgment. Jews have never been required to bring the world to Judaism, but they were chosen to bring the world to God and to the values found in the Torah and the rest of the Old Testament.

Were Jews true to their mission, they would stand alongside Christians who work to bring the Torah’s values to the world.

Jews should therefore be in the forefront of those spreading Judeo-Christian values. Some are, but most, religious and secular, are not.

The Jews are like the biblical Jonah, the Jew asked by God to carry a message to the great city of Nineveh. Jonah had no desire to embark on this mission and ran away onto a ship of decent non-Jewish sailors. God brought a terrible storm, and Jonah realized that the storm was caused by his running away from his divine mission. He was thrown overboard, and the seas calmed.

Most Jews are still running away from their divine mission and causing storms in many places as a result. Only by bringing the ethical monotheist message to mankind, and working with like-minded Christians to do so, will the world’s seas ever calm down.

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(13) Secularism and the meaningless life (townhall.com, 050524)

As I have noted on occasion, there are three values systems competing for world dominance: Islam, European style secularism/socialism and Judeo-Christian values. As the competition in America is between the second two (in Europe, Judeo-Christian values are dying while Islam is increasing its influence), my columns on Judeo-Christian values have concentrated on differences between Judeo-Christian and secular values.

Perhaps the most significant difference between them, though one rarely acknowledged by secularists, is the presence or absence of ultimate meaning in life. Most irreligious individuals, quite understandably, do not like to acknowledge the inevitable and logical consequence of their irreligiosity -- that life is ultimately purposeless.

Secular and irreligious individuals raise two immediate objections:

1. Irreligious people, including atheists, are just as likely to have meaningful lives as any religious person. They need neither God nor Judaism nor Christianity nor any other religion to have meaning.

2. Secular and irreligious are not the same as atheistic; many secular individuals believe in God and therefore whatever meaning accrues from having a belief in God, they, too, have. They do not need religion or Judeo-Christian values to give their lives meaning.

The first objection denies a fact, not a subjective judgment: If there is no God who designed the universe and who cares about His creations, life is ultimately purposeless. This does not mean that people who do not believe in such a God cannot feel, or make up, a purpose and a meaning for their own lives. They do and they have to -- because the need for meaning is the greatest of all human needs. It is even stronger than the need for sex. There are people who lead chaste lives who achieve happiness, while no one who lacks a sense of purpose or meaning can achieve happiness.

Nevertheless, the fact that people feel that their lives are meaningful -- as a parent, a caregiver, an artist, or any of the myriad ways in which we feel we are doing something meaningful -- has no bearing on the question of whether life itself is ultimately meaningful. The two issues are entirely separate. A physician understandably views his healing of people as meaningful, but if he does not believe in God, he will have to honestly confront the fact that as meaningful as healing the day’s patients has been, ultimately everything is meaningless because life itself is. In this sense, it is far better for an individual’s peace of mind to be a poor peasant who believes in God than a successful neurosurgeon who does not.

If there is no God as Judeo-Christian religions understand Him, life is a meaningless random event. You and I are no more significant, our existence has no more meaning, than that of a rock on Mars. The only difference between us and Martian rocks is that we need to believe our existence has significance.

Now to the second objection, that you don’t need religion or Judeo-Christian values, just a belief in God or, as is more popular today, in “spirituality” to imbue existence with meaning. Theoretically, one can posit the existence of the God of Judeo-Christian religions without actually believing in any of those religions or in any of their holy works. There is, however, some absurdity in believing in the God made known through texts whose authenticity one rejects. “I believe in the God made known to the world solely through the Old Testament but not in the Old Testament” is not logically compelling.

Whatever the logical inconsistencies or theoretical arguments in either direction, the fact remains that while secular individuals can believe that their own lives have meaning, secularism by definition denies that life has meaning. The consequences have been devastating to mental health and to social order.

Among these have been increased unhappiness and depression, increased reliance on drugs and numbing entertainment to get people through life, moral confusion, belief in nonsense (such as Marxism, fascism, communism, male-female sameness, pacifism, moral equivalence of good and bad societies, and much more), and perhaps most ubiquitous, political meaning as a substitute for religious meaning.

Given that the need for meaning transcends all other human needs, its absence must create havoc individually and societally. In government, secularism is a blessing; but most everywhere else it is not.

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(14) The arrogance of values (townhall.com, 050531)

I am arguing in this series of columns titled, “The Case for Judeo-Christian Values,” that Judeo-Christian values -- as developed and expressed specifically, though not only, in America -- constitute the finest value system in the world. If you care about goodness, justice and compassion prevailing in an often evil, unjust and cruel world, you should hope that Judeo-Christian values predominate on earth.

Is such an attitude, that there is a best value system, arrogant -- or even chauvinistic or racist?

Let’s first deal with the charge of “racism.” It is difficult to overstate the absurdity of this charge. How can values that are universal -- i.e., for people of all races -- be racist? The charge is meaningless since people of all races affirm Judeo-Christian values. In fact, outside the United States, whites, being largely secular, are the race least likely to affirm these values.

What about “arrogant” or “chauvinistic”?

Though not as obviously so, these charges are equally meaningless.

If one does not deem one’s value system superior to others (at least the others that one is aware of), it is not a value system. It is a series of personal habits that one happens to prefer. Moreover, it is very hard to find anyone who upon a moment’s reflection really believes that his values are not superior.

Do those who believe in freedom believe that freedom is not a superior value to tyranny? Do those who believe in human equality believe that this value is not superior to the belief that one race is superior? Is the “honor killing” of daughters a value equal to that of allowing daughters to marry whomever they want? The list is almost endless.

The very implication of a “value” is that it is superior to any other. If you value monogamy, you are saying it is superior to polygamy. If you value tolerance, you are saying that tolerance is superior to intolerance.

All people are equal, but that does not mean that all values are equal. The statement, “All people are equal,” is itself a value, one which holds that human equality is superior to any value that demeans or denies the intrinsic worth of other human beings.

But many of the best educated (and therefore least intellectually clear) will counter, why can’t people hold that their values are superior only for themselves?

The answer is that it is not only a misuse of the term “value,” it betrays a complete misunderstanding of the concept. To return to the examples offered above, do those who believe that freedom is superior to tyranny believe that freedom is only superior for them? Can you imagine someone arguing: “I happen to value the ability to speak, write, worship and assemble freely as a value for me, but I do not believe that such freedom is better for anyone else”?

I am arguing that the Judeo-Christian value system as developed on the basis of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) and developed largely by Christians, and especially in America, is the best value system ever devised. I believe it is superior to all other value systems with which I am familiar. I believe that as a moral system for a society, it is superior to that of the secular/socialist values that dominate Europe and the left in America, and to any other religion. And as I argued in Part VIII, Judeo-Christian values are even larger than Judaism or Christianity alone.

Is this insulting to members of these groups? Of course not. Is it in an insult to Republicans that Democrats think their party has better values?

The reason this is not insulting is that decent and intelligent people understand that better values do not mean that all those who carry the same name as those values are better people. I think Judeo-Christian values are superior, but I would have to be a fool to believe that all Jews and Christians -- or even all people who say they subscribe to Judeo-Christian values -- are better than everyone else. All human beings must be judged according to their behavior, not according to the value system they are associated with.

I fully acknowledge that there is a real danger of arrogance associated with having values. The moment you believe in a value, you believe that value is superior to some or all other competing values. And this can lead to arrogant thinking: “Everyone with my values is wonderful; everyone else isn’t. And I have nothing to learn from people with other value systems.”

That is why those who adhere to Judeo-Christian values must carry them with genuine humility. There are wonderful people in every religion and wonderful people who are atheists, and there are awful people in Judaism and Christianity and among individuals who claim to hold Judeo-Christian values.

But it is simply intellectual cowardice to deny that one’s value system implies anything but its superiority to some or all other values.

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(15) We are not just animals (townhall.com, 050614)

People who do not believe in God or religion can surely lead ethical lives. But they cannot lead holy lives. By definition, the ideal of the holy, as understood by Judaism and Christianity and that unique amalgam known as Judeo-Christian values, needs God and religion.

Here is the best way I know of to explain holiness in Judeo-Christian religions: There is a continuum from the profane to the holy that coincides with the dual bases of human creation -- the animal and the divine.

The human being can be said to be created in the image of God and in the image of animals. We are biologically animals, and we are spiritually, morally and theologically God-like (at least in our potential). God is the most holy; and animals, as helpful, loyal and lovable as many are, are at the opposite end of the holiness continuum. This is in no way an insult to animals. Saying dogs and lions are not holy is no more degrading to them than saying men are not women or women are not men. That is how they are created.

There is actually a secular way to understand this. If we saw a person eating food with his face in a bowl, we would think, “He eats like a pig” or “He eats like an animal.” That is an insult to a person -- because humans are supposed to elevate their behavior above the animal (this is a goal of Judeo-Christian and just about every other major religious tradition). But it is no insult to an animal. When an animal eats face-first out of a bowl, we hardly think ill of it; but when a person mimics animal behavior, we do think lower of that person. So, even non-religious society has imbibed some of the view that acting like an animal is not how a human being should generally act.

Now, to better understand this, one needs to appreciate that holiness is not a moral category. There is nothing immoral in eating with one’s face inside a bowl. It is unholy to do so, but not immoral or unethical.

It is crucial to understand the difference between the moral and the holy. Even many religious people blur the distinction by labeling unholy actions immoral actions. And that has often given religion a bad name because thinking secular people know that some actions called immoral by the religious are not necessarily immoral.

This is particularly true in the sexual arena, where many religious people characterize unholy behavior as immoral behavior -- so much so that the very word “immoral” has come to be equated with sexual sin.

Much consensual adult behavior that Judeo-Christian values would prohibit is unholy rather than immoral. For example, non-marital sex between consenting adults violates the Judeo-Christian code of holiness, but not necessarily its code of morality (if there were coercion or trickery, it would, of course, be immoral). The only holy sex in Judeo-Christian religions is between a husband and wife. All other sex is unholy. But not necessarily immoral.

All immoral actions -- such as stealing and murder -- are, of course, unholy. But not all unholy actions (like eating with one’s face in a bowl) are immoral.

Nevertheless, just because holy and moral are not identical does not mean the holy is not monumentally significant. Elevating human behavior above the animal and toward the divine is one of the greatest achievements humans can accomplish. If we really did behave like animals in the sexual arena (like the famous bunny rabbit, for example), society would eventually collapse.

Speech is another example. In our increasingly secular world, fewer and fewer attempts are made by people to elevate their speech. That is why public cursing is now much more prevalent. In most ballparks and stadiums, one hears language shouted out that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Sanctifying speech is another religious value; it is not a secular value. Whenever I see a vehicle with an obscene bumper sticker, I am sure of only one thing: The owner of that vehicle does not regularly attend religious services.

The consequences of the death of the holy are ubiquitous. Secular Europe is far readier to feature nudity on public television than is Judeo-Christian America, and it is far more accepting of people walking around nude in public at beaches. The Judeo-Christian problem with public nudity among consenting adults at a beach or even at a nudist colony is not that these people are necessarily acting immorally (they may not be touching one another or even sexually arousing each other); it is that they are acting like animals. Clothing gives human beings dignity; it elevates them above the animals whose genitals are always uncovered (the first thing God made for man and woman is clothing).

And that is what the Judeo-Christian value system ultimately yearns for -- the elevation of human conduct to the God-like, rather than allowing us to behave like fellow animals.

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(16) Nature must not be worshipped (townhall.com, 050621)

It is almost impossible to overstate how radically different Old Testament thought was from the thought of the rest of its contemporary world. And it continues to be, given how few societies affirm Judeo-Christian values and how much opposition to them exists in American society, the society that has most incorporated these values.

Among the most radical of these differences was the incredible declaration that God is outside of nature and is its creator.

In every society on earth, people venerated nature and worshipped nature gods. There were gods of thunder and gods of rain. Mountains were worshipped, as were rivers, animals and every natural force known to man. In ancient Egypt, for example, gods included the Nile River, the frog, sun, wind, gazelle, bull, cow, serpent, moon and crocodile.

Then came Genesis, which announced that a supernatural God, i.e., a god who existed outside of nature, created nature. Nothing about nature was divine.

Professor Nahum Sarna, the author of what I consider one of the two most important commentaries on Genesis and Exodus, puts it this way: “The revolutionary Israelite concept of God entails His being wholly separate from the world of His creation and wholly other than what the human mind can conceive or the human imagination depict.”

The other magisterial commentary on Genesis was written by the late Italian Jewish scholar Umberto Cassuto, professor of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “Relative to the ideas prevailing among the peoples of the ancient East, we are confronted here with a basically new conception and a spiritual revolution . . . The basically new conception consists in the completely transcendental view of the Godhead . . . the God of Israel is outside and above nature, and the whole of nature, the sun, and the moon, and all the hosts of heaven, and the earth beneath, and the sea that is under the earth, and all that is in them -- they are all His creatures which He created according to His will.”

This was extremely difficult for men to assimilate then. And as society drifts from Judeo-Christian values, it is becoming difficult to assimilate again today. Major elements in secular Western society are returning to a form of nature worship. Animals are elevated to equality with people, and the natural environment is increasingly regarded as sacred. The most extreme expressions of nature worship actually view human beings as essentially blights on nature.

Even among some who consider themselves religious, and especially among those who consider themselves “spiritual” rather than religious, nature is regarded as divine, and God is deemed as dwelling within it.

It is quite understandable that people who rely on feelings more than reason to form their spiritual beliefs would deify nature. It is easier -- indeed more natural -- to worship natural beauty than an invisible and morally demanding God.

What is puzzling is that many people who claim to rely more on reason would do so. Nature is unworthy of worship. Nature, after all, is always amoral and usually cruel. Nature has no moral laws, only the amoral law of survival of the fittest.

Why would people who value compassion, kindness or justice venerate nature? The notions of justice and caring for the weak are unique to humanity. In the rest of nature, the weak are to be killed. The individual means nothing in nature; the individual is everything to humans. A hospital, for example, is a profoundly unnatural, indeed antinatural, creation; to expend precious resources on keeping the most frail alive is simply against nature.

The romanticizing of nature, let alone the ascribing of divinity to it, involves ignoring what really happens in nature. I doubt that those American schoolchildren who conducted a campaign on behalf of freeing a killer whale (the whale in the film “Free Willy”) ever saw films of actual killer whale behavior. There are National Geographic videos that show, among other things, killer whales tossing a terrified baby seal back and forth before finally killing it. Perhaps American schoolchildren should see those films and then petition killer whales not to treat baby seals sadistically.

If you care about good and evil, you cannot worship nature. And since that is what God most cares about, nature worship is antithetical to Judeo-Christian values.

Nature surely reflects the divine. It is in no way divine. Only nature’s Creator is.

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(17) Without man, the environment is insignificant (townhall.com, 050628)

One major conflict between the Judeo-Christian value system and the various secular ones competing with it revolves around the answers to these questions: Is nature created for man or is man merely a part of nature? Or, to put it in other words, does the natural environment have any significance without man to appreciate it and to use it for his good?

The Judeo-Christian responses are clear: Nature has been created for man’s use; and on its own, without man, it has no meaning. Dolphins are adorable because human beings find them adorable. Without people to appreciate them or the role they play in the earth’s ecosystem to enable human life, they are no more adorable or meaningful than a rock on Pluto.

That is the point of the Creation story -- everything was made in order to prepare the way for the creation of man (and woman, for those whose college education leads them to confuse the generic “man” with “male”). God declared each day’s creation “good,” but declared the sixth day’s creation of man as “very good.”

Critics find three biblical notions about nature unacceptable: that man shall lord over it; that it was created solely for man and therefore has no intrinsic value; and that it is not sacred.

I discussed the last notion -- that God is outside, not within, nature -- in Part XVI.

As regards man “subduing and conquering nature,” this was one of the revolutionary ideas of the Old Testament that made Western medical and other scientific progress possible. For all ancient civilizations, nature (or the equally capricious and amoral gods of nature) ruled man. The Book of Genesis came along to teach the opposite -- man is to rule nature.

Only by ruling and conquering nature will man develop cures for nature’s diseases. We will conquer cancer; cancer will not conquer us. And only rational beings, not irrational gods of nature, can do so. Judeo-Christian values are the primary reason science and modern medicine developed in the West. A rational God designed nature, and rational human beings can therefore perceive it and, yes, conquer it.

The notion that it is secularism, not Judeo-Christian values, that enabled scientific inquiry constitutes perhaps the greatest propaganda victory in history. Virtually every great scientist from Sir Isaac Newton to the beginning of 20th century saw scientific inquiry as the study of divine design.

As for the modern secular objection to the Judeo-Christian notion of man as the pinnacle and purpose of nature, one can only say woe unto mankind if that objection prevails. When man is reduced to being part of the natural world, his status is reduced to that of a dolphin. It is one of the great ironies of the contemporary world that humanists render human life largely worthless while God-centered Jews and Christians render human life infinitely sacred. Man’s worth is entirely dependent on a God-based view of the world. Without God, man is another part of the ecosystem, and often a lousy one at that.

So let’s say what cannot be said in sophisticated company: Nature was created as the vehicle by which God created the human being, and in order to give emotional, aesthetic and biological sustenance to mankind. Nature in and of itself has no purpose without the existence of human beings to appreciate it. In the words of the Talmud, every person should look at the world and say, “The world was created for me.”

Does this mean that the biblical view of nature gives man the right to pollute the earth or to abuse animals? Absolutely not. Abusing animals is forbidden in the Torah: The ban on eating the limb of a living animal, the ban on placing two animals of different sizes on the same yoke and the ban on working animals seven days a week are just a few examples. To cause gratuitous suffering to an animal is a grave sin. As for polluting the earth, this, too, is religiously prohibited. If the purpose of nature is to ennoble human life and to bear witness to God’s magnificence, by what understanding of this concept can a religious person defend polluting nature?

We are indeed to be responsible stewards of nature, but for our sake, not its.

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(18) Murderers must die (townhall.com, 050719)

One should not confuse Jews or Christians with Judeo-Christian values. Many Jews and many Christians, including many sincerely religious ones, take certain positions that are contrary to Judeo-Christian values (which I have defined at length: In a nutshell, they are Old Testament values as mediated by Christians, especially American Christians).

One clear example is the death penalty for murderers. Many Jews and Christians believe that all murderers should be kept alive, that it is not only wrong to take the life of any murderer; it is actually un-Jewish or un-Christian.

Jews opposed to capital punishment cite the Talmud (the second most important religious text to Jews), which is largely opposed to capital punishment; Christians opponents cite Jesus on loving one’s enemies, for example; and Catholic abolitionists cite the late Pope John Paul II and the many cardinals and bishops who, though not denying all of the Church’s teachings on the permissibility of the state to take the life a murderer, largely oppose capital punishment.

Yet, the notion that a murderer must give up his life is one of the central values in the Old Testament. Indeed, taking the life of a murderer is the only law that is found in all Five Books of Moses (the Torah). That is particularly remarkable considering how few laws there are at all in the first Book, Genesis.

When God creates the world, He declares a fundamental value and law to maintain civilization: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God He created him.” And the law is repeated in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

When all murderers are allowed to keep their lives, murder is rendered less serious and human life is therefore cheapened. That is not only the Judeo-Christian biblical view. It is common sense. The punishment for a crime is what informs society how bad that crime is. A society that allows all murderers to live deems murder less awful than one that takes away the life of a murderer.

There are those who argue that precisely because they so value human life, they oppose the taking of a murderer’s life. They argue that you cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing. But that is the same as arguing that you can’t teach that stealing is wrong by taking away a thief’s money or that you can’t teach that kidnapping is wrong by kidnapping (i.e., imprisoning) kidnappers.

To the Torah, the first source of Judeo-Christian values, murder is the great sin; the immoral shedding of human blood (as opposed to the moral shedding of human blood in self-defense or in a just war) pollutes the world. That is why the Torah legislated that even an animal that killed a human should be put to death. The purpose was not to punish the animal -- animals do not have free choice, hence cannot be morally culpable. And it was hardly to teach other animals not to kill. It was because a human life is so valuable, it cannot be taken without the taker losing its life.

But, some will object, the Torah decrees the death penalty for many infractions, yet we don’t put to death people who practice witchcraft, commit adultery or other capital infractions -- why those who murder?

There are two answers.

First, the only capital crime mentioned before there were any Jews or Israel (in Genesis when God creates the world) is murder. Other death penalties applied specifically to the people of Israel when they entered the Land of Israel -- a special code of behavior for a special time in a special place. And virtually none of those were carried out. The primary purpose of declaring a sin worthy of capital punishment was not actually to execute the sinner, but to declare how serious the infraction was when a society was establishing itself as the first based on ethical monotheism. Capital punishment for murder, on the other hand, was obviously intended for all time and for all people -- it is independent of the existence of Jews and declared to be fundamental to the existence of a humane order.

Second, all the other death penalties are laws. The death penalty for murder is not only a law; it is a value. Laws may be time bound. Values are eternal. Thus, the Christians who believe in the divinity of the Torah are not bound to the Torah’s dietary laws (such as not eating pork and shellfish); but they are bound to the value of taking the life of murderers.

Finally, the Old Testament is preoccupied with justice. And allowing one who has unjustly deprived another person of life to keep his own is the ultimate injustice.

There are many good reasons to be wary of taking the lives of murderers -- such as insufficient evidence, corrupted witnesses, distinguishing between premeditated murder and a crime of passion -- but love of life or a commitment to biblically based values are not among them.

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(19) The challenge of the transgendered (Townhall.com, 050802)

From a Judeo-Christian values perspective, each part of GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered) liberation has problems -- because Judeo-Christian values affirm the heterosexual ideal. But the last part of GLBT is actually the most troubling.

Most people do not understand why the transgendered threaten Judeo-Christian values. The cultural Left does, which is why “transgendered” is always included.

Transgendered is not the same as transsexual. In theory, Judeo-Christian values have no problem with a transsexual -- someone who has undergone a sex change -- if that person then behaves in ways associated with his or her new sex.

On the other hand, a transgendered individual is a person of one sex who dresses (or otherwise behaves) as a member of the other sex -- actions that directly conflict with core Judeo-Christian values.

It is remarkable that activists on behalf of gay and lesbian acceptance always include the transgendered. What, after all, do the transgendered, who are usually heterosexual men, have to do with gays and lesbians?

The answer is that activists understand that their primary goal -- equating same-sex sexual behavior with man-woman sex -- can only be accomplished if other Judeo-Christian and Western sexual norms are also rejected.

That is why the very word “sex,” when referring to male or female, has been changed to “gender.” And society at large has accepted this linguistic change as if it were insignificant. The change on application forms, for example, from “Sex: M or F” to “Gender: M or F” has gone unnoticed. But it is a huge change. In the sexual activists’ world, “sex” is fixed and objective; “gender” is fluid and subjective.

Thus, a man’s genitalia and secondary male sexual characteristics notwithstanding, if he feels like expressing the woman in him, he should not only be allowed but encouraged to dress in public like a woman. Society should have no more say on whether a man should be allowed to wear a dress in public than what color tie a man should wear in public. That is why the Democrats in California passed a law that forbids employers from firing a man who cross-dresses at work.

Now, why is this important, not to mention opposed by Judeo-Christian values?

One of the major values of the Old Testament, the primary source of Judeo-Christian values, is the notion of a divinely ordained order based on separation. What God has created distinct, man shall not tamper with.

As examples, good is separate from evil (attempts to blur their differences are known as moral relativism and are anathema to Judeo-Christian values); life is separate from death (in part a reaction to ancient Egypt, which blurred the distinction between life and death); God is separate from nature (see part XVI); humans are separate from animals (see part XV); and man is separate from woman. Blurring any of these distinctions is tampering with the order of the world as created by God and leads to chaos. So important is the notion of separation that the very word for “holy” in biblical Hebrew (kadosh) means “separate,” “distinct.”

This helps to explain one of the least known and most enigmatic laws of the Torah, the ban on wearing linen and wool together in the same piece of clothing (sha’atnez). Linen represents plant life, and wool represents animal life. The two are distinct realms in God’s creation.

And that is why the Torah bans men from wearing women’s clothing.

“God created the human being, male and female He created them” is how Genesis describes the creation of man and woman. Blurring that distinction is playing God, and doing so in a highly destructive manner.

If a man gets a sexual thrill out of wearing women’s undergarments in the privacy of his bedroom, that is not society’s concern. It may be his religion’s concern, and, religious or not, it may be his female partner’s concern (one wonders how many women married to cross dressing men are pleased by the sight of their man in a bra and panties). But it is not society’s concern, which is why anyone who cares about protecting the right to privacy should have been horrified by the American news media’s reporting about the private cross-dressing habits of a nationally known sportscaster.

However, when a man does this in public, he has publicly blurred the man-woman distinction, and society has the right -- and the duty, if it cares about Judeo-Christian values or simply cares about not confusing children as to sexual identity -- to say this violates a norm that society does not wish violated.

The war waged by cultural radicals at universities, in state legislatures and in courtrooms against the very distinction between male and female is one of their most significant attempts to undo the Judeo-Christian foundations of American and Western culture. And they know it. That’s why fighting to blur gender distinctions is so important to them.

Now the rest of society needs to understand why not allowing that to happen is so important.

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(20) There is no viable alternative: Judeo-Christian values Part XX (townhall.com, 050809)

In most of these essays making the case for Judeo-Christian values, I have contrasted Judeo-Christian values only with leftist values: secularism, liberalism, socialism, humanism, environmentalism.

I have done so for two reasons.

First, secular and leftist values are the dominant values of most of the world’s elites. If the editors of the major newspapers of the world assembled, they would agree on almost every moral and social issue. The same holds true for the world’s academics, whether from America, Latin America, Europe or Asia.

Second, secular/leftist values are the only viable alternative to Judeo-Christian values.

At this moment, there are three ideologies competing for humanity’s acceptance: secular and leftist, Judeo-Christian and Islam.

But Islam is not currently in the battle for men’s minds. Outside (and even inside) the Muslim world, it gains power largely through force. There are non-Muslims who convert to Islam out of sheer conviction, but in general, when Islam gains a foothold or actually attains power in a non-Muslim society, it is either through force or threats of force -- e.g., Sudan, Thailand, the Philippines, Nigeria; or through a large immigration of Muslims -- e.g., Western Europe. Its contemporary spread is not due to the power of its intellectual appeal, let alone the record of its contemporary social and moral achievements.

There was a time when Islam appealed to non-Muslims’ intellects, and it may one day again. But today, it competes with Judeo-Christian values and leftist ones primarily because of the power of its numbers and of its violent elements.

In our time, only secular/leftist values compete with Judeo-Christian ones on the intellectual battlefield. There really are no other viable doctrines to guide mankind at the beginning of the 21st century. And this is unfortunate. For one thing, despite my belief in the superiority of Judeo-Christian values, competition is always healthy. For another, I am worried that a vast segment of mankind does not have any strong moral code.

One theoretical alternative is Eastern religion. Having studied Buddhism under a prominent Buddhist, I came to respect Buddhist and related Eastern thought. Some of its insights (such as having few or no expectations) have benefited me greatly, and I cite them in my book on happiness.

But Buddhism and related Eastern value systems are not contenders for shaping humanity. On the practical level, Buddhism is losing ground to secularism even in Asia. And in the West, a minuscule percentage of the population takes it seriously and in a form often so Westernized as to be unrecognizable to its Asian practitioners. On a philosophical level, Buddhism is more of a philosophy designed to enable the practitioner to achieve enlightenment than a societal way of life to combat evil and promote good.

Then there is -- or was -- Communism, Marxism, Marxism-Leninism and Stalinism. They seduced much of the West’s intelligentsia, just as leftist ideas do today. That seduction is what led George Orwell to write that some ideas were so stupid only intellectuals could believe them. But since the collapse of the Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, they hold much less attraction than they once did. Some in Hollywood still idolize Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara is chic among the morally neutered, but Marxism is not a viable alternative for humanity.

So we are we left with Judeo-Christian values and secular left values. The latter, as noted, hold sway among the world’s elites. But they are personally so unfulfilling and morally so confused that they cannot work. Western Europe will hopefully awaken to this fact as its socialist economies fail and as it realizes that you cannot fight faith (radical Islam) with no faith (secularism).

That leaves Judeo-Christian values.

It is urgent that the case be made. Much of humanity has little by way of a religious/moral foundation. Many of the more than a billion Chinese, for example, have some ancestral emotional ties to Confucianism, but with each passing year, those ties weaken. And a combination of strident nationalism and a rapacious money-making ethic are replacing it. That is a frightening amoral combination.

The Judeo-Christian value system is not only the best value system for humanity; it is the only viable one. If we do not promote it, moral chaos will ensue. And we can’t promote it if we don’t know what it is.

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(21) The rejection of materialism (townhall.com, 050823)

Dennis Prager

The primary reason Karl Marx hated religion -- specifically Judaism and Christianity -- was that he regarded it as the “opiate of the masses.”

This attitude has permeated all leftist views of religion since Marx: Religion keeps people from making revolutions to materially better their lives. This is the source of the animosity toward religion on the Left (including the “religious Left” -- leftists who change Judaism or Christianity to fit their values).

To understand this, one must understand the essence of Marxism and its offshoots.

The Marxist worldview is based on a materialist understanding of life. In popular jargon, “materialism” means an excessive love of material things. But philosophically, “materialism” means that the only reality is matter, that there is no reality beyond the material world.

That is why, for example, to most leftists it is a great wrong that amid Latin American poverty, the church would build expensive cathedrals. In their view, all that gold and treasure should be spent on the poor. To a person with Judeo-Christian values, on the other hand, while feeding the hungry is a primary value, there are many other values, including the need to feed the soul. Moreover, the fact that many of the world’s poor people would prefer having a cathedral to distributing whatever money selling such edifices would provide has disturbed the Left since Marx. To a materialist, the notion that poor people would place non-material concerns over material ones is absurd, if not perverse.

The recent best seller “What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,” by liberal author Thomas Frank, perfectly illustrates this point. The theme of his book is that Americans of a lower economic status who vote Republican do so against their own (economic) interests. When I dialogued with the personable Mr. Frank on my radio show, he seemed incapable of understanding that many millions of Americans consider the Left’s attempt to redefine marriage, for example, more important than the alleged economic advantages of voting Democrat.

Because religious people have values that transcend the material, Marx called religion the opiate of the masses: It keeps the masses from making social revolution by keeping them happy with non-material concerns and non-material rewards.

The further left one goes, the more significant social revolution becomes. It does for two reasons:

First, devoid of religious meaning in their lives, for many on the Left, social change -- or as it is known today, “social justice,” the term for left-wing social change -- has become their substitute religion and provider of meaning.

Second, given that the only reality is material, any denial of materialism’s supremacy disturbs the Left. The true leftist objects to the notion of poorer people leading happy lives. For the heirs of Marx, which is what the Left is, the “good” is not so much a moral, let alone a spiritual, category, as it is an economic one. Hence the left’s preoccupation with economic inequality, taxing the rich, etc.

Now, of course, Judeo-Christian values care about material progress. In fact, it was the Bible that gave the idea of progress to the world. It was the Jewish prophets of the Old Testament who first enunciated the divine obligation to care for the poor and the helpless. But such concerns were never the only Judeo-Christian values, and the “poor” in biblical nomenclature were truly destitute, not at all analogous to those classified as “poor” in America. Overwhelmingly, the “poor” of America live in a home with two or more rooms per person and air conditioning, and own a car, refrigerator, stove, clothes washer and dryer and microwave. They have two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player and a stereo, and obtain medical care (even without health insurance). Nearly half actually own their own homes.

The Left regards itself as morally elevated because of its preoccupation with materialism. Yet religious Americans who reject materialism are far more likely than left-leaning parents in the same socio-economic condition to sacrifice materially in order to have one parent be a full-time parent. And Judeo-Christian values explain why a religious woman is far more likely to sacrifice materially by giving birth to, rather than aborting, an unplanned child.

Even freedom is a higher value to one who holds Judeo-Christian values. That is why the materialist leftist world so often celebrated and continues to celebrate communist regimes. Those regimes may have rendered their societies prisons, but they (at least in theory) reduced material inequality.

That is why the founders of America, the place where Judeo-Christian values have flourished, inscribed a verse from the Torah, the primary source of Judeo-Christian values, on the Liberty Bell: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

Freedom, too, has no material value.

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(22) The feminization of society (townhall.com, 050913)

Dennis Prager

As a result of the repudiation of Judeo-Christian values, we are witnessing the ascendance of the feminine in Western society.

There are two reasons for this. One is the overriding belief in equality, which to those who reject Judeo-Christian values means sameness. Judeo-Christian values emphatically affirm the equality of the sexes. In fact, given that the creation story in Genesis proceeds from primitive to elevated, the last creation, woman, can easily be seen as the most elevated of the creations. Every man knows how much a good woman helps him transcend his animal nature.

Judeo-Christian values do not conflate equality with sameness. But the Left rejects any suggestion of innate sexual differences. That is why the president of Harvard University nearly lost his job for merely suggesting that one reason there are fewer women in engineering and science faculties is that the female and male brains differ in their capacities in these areas. A secular liberal who advocates affirmative action based on sex, Harvard’s president nevertheless also has -- or had, until his humiliation at the hands of his faculty -- a belief in seeking truth.

And the truth is that men and women are profoundly different.

One of these differences is that women generally have a more difficult time transcending their emotions than men. There are, of course, millions of individual women -- such as Margaret Thatcher -- who are far more rational than many men; but that only makes these women’s achievements all the more admirable. It hardly invalidates the proposition.

Far more common than Margaret Thatcher’s rationality was the emotionality of the women jurors in the Menendez brothers’ trials. All six women jurors in the Erik Menendez trial voted to acquit him of the murder of his father (all six males voted guilty of murder). A virtually identical breakdown by sex took place in the Lyle Menendez trial for the murder of their mother. The women all had compassion for the brothers despite their confessions to the shotgun murders of their parents.

To say that the human race needs masculine and feminine characteristics is to state the obvious. But each sex comes with prices. Men can too easily lack compassion, reduce sex to animal behavior and become violent. And women’s emotionality, when unchecked, can wreak havoc on those closest to these women and on society as a whole -- when emotions and compassion dominate in making public policy.

The latter is what is happening in America. The Left has been successful in supplanting masculine virtues with feminine ones. That is why “compassion” is probably the most frequently cited value. That is why the further left you go, the greater the antipathy to those who make war. Indeed, universities, the embodiment of feminist emotionality and anti-Judeo-Christian values, ban military recruiters and oppose war-themed names for their sports teams.

A sentiment such as “War is not the answer” embodies leftist feminine emotionality. The statement is, after all, utter nonsense, as many of the greatest evils -- from Nazi totalitarianism and genocide to slavery -- were quite effectively “answered” by war. (Virtually every car I ever have seen display the bumper sticker “War is not the answer” was driven by a woman.)

The response of one of the leading women professors who attended Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ talk aptly illustrates this point. As The Boston Globe reported, Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “walked out on Summers’ talk, saying later that if she hadn’t left, ‘I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.’” It is difficult to imagine a male MIT professor, even another leftist, walking out of a lecture and saying that he had to lest he vomit or faint.

In the micro realm, the feminine virtues are invaluable -- for example, women hear infants’ cries far more readily than men do. But as a basis for governance of society, the feminization of public policy is suicidal.

That is one reason our schools are in trouble. They are increasingly run by women -- women with female thinking moreover. Such thinking leads to papers no longer being graded with a red pencil lest students’ feelings be hurt; to self-esteem supplanting self-discipline as a value; to banning games such as dodge ball in which participants’ feelings may get hurt; to discouraging male competition; to banning peanut butter because two out of a thousand students are highly allergic to peanuts.

In a masculine society governed by Judeo-Christian values (which include a masculine-depicted and compassionate God), feminine virtues are adored and honored. In a feminized society, male virtues are discarded.

Then both sexes suffer.

Just one more consequence of the war against Judeo-Christian values.

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First fight yourself, then society (townhall.com, 050920)

Dennis Prager

When my older son was about 8 years old, I was putting him to bed one night and asked him what he learned that day in school. Normally he would answer, as nearly all boys do, by saying, “Nothing.” But that night he had an answer.

“I learned I have a yetzer hara,” he told me. As a student at a religious Jewish school, he was using the Hebrew term for the desire to do what is wrong. It is basic Jewish theology that the human being has two innate drives -- one for good and one for bad -- and that life is a constant battle with the bad drive. While Christian theology uses different terms, such as “sinful nature,” both traditions believe that the greatest battle for a better world is usually with oneself.

This is another significant way in which the Judeo-Christian value system differs from the dominant value system -- that of the Left -- in the contemporary West. Whether the ideology calls itself radical, leftist or liberal, its primary emphasis is on “social justice,” i.e., making society more just. Now, of course, Judeo-Christian values also seek to create a just society. Any system rooted in the Old Testament prophets and teachings of Jesus is going to be preoccupied with how to make a just society.

The differences lie elsewhere. There are two major ones.

The first is that the Left frequently defines “social justice” differently than Judeo-Christian values do. For most on the Left, “social justice” means social equality and social fairness. It is not fair that some people have more than others. This is why the Left believes that courts should be far more than umpires when adjudicating justice: they should be promoting fairness and equality.

The other difference, the focus of this column, is that leftist ideologies are so preoccupied with “social justice” that they generally ignore personal character development.

Judeo-Christian values believe the road to a just society is paved by individual character development; the Left believes it is paved with action on a macro level.

That is one reason the Left is far more interested than the Right, i.e., religious Jews and Christians and secular conservatives, in passing laws, whether through legislation or through the actions of judges. That is how the Left believes you make a better society. There is, incidentally, a second reason the Left passes so many laws: As the Left breaks down the self-discipline of Judeo-Christian religions, more and more laws are needed simply to keep people from devouring each other.

That the Left is more concerned with social change than individual change and the Right is more concerned with individual than social activism can be seen in many areas.

Many parents, for example, measure their child’s character by the child’s social activism, not by his or her behavior toward fellow students. If the child has walked for AIDS, or marched for breast cancer, or works on “environmental issues,” the child is deemed -- and the child deems himself -- a fine person. That he or she might mistreat less popular kids in class is not considered.

There are, of course, religious Jews and Christians who do not lead decent lives and there are leftists who do. But leftist ideals, being overwhelmingly macro, will always be more appealing to the less decent who want to feel good about themselves. That helps explain those Hollywood celebrities who lead narcissistic, hedonistic personal lives but nevertheless feel very good about themselves by raising money for “peace” or by demonstrating against global warming.

I first became aware of this vast discrepancy between “social activism” and personal ethical behavior when I saw the personal behavior of the “pro-peace,” anti-war, activists at my graduate school (Columbia University) in the early 1970s. They demonstrated for world peace but led personally narcissistic lives. Their theoretical altruism was all macro. Meanwhile, most of the religious students were preoccupied with personal character issues.

Why? Because Judeo-Christian values have always understood that the world is made better by making people better. On occasion, of course, a great moral cause must be joined. For example, it was religious Christians who led the fight to abolish slavery in Europe and America. But in general, the way to a better society is through the laborious and completely non-glamorous project of making each person more honest, more courageous, more decent, more likely to commit to another person in marriage, more likely to devote more time to raising children, and so on.

That is why all those peace studies institutes and courses are morally meaningless. Only by people learning to fight their yetzer hara will peace reign on earth.

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