The Bible vs. Heart. By Dennis Prager. Real Clear Politics, April 2, 2013. Also find it here.
Prager:
I offer
the single most politically incorrect statement a modern American – indeed a
modern Westerner, period – can make: I first look to the Bible for moral
guidance and for wisdom.
I say
this even though I am not a Christian (I am a Jew, and a non-Orthodox one at
that). And I say this even though I attended an Ivy League graduate school (Columbia),
where I learned nothing about the Bible there except that it was irrelevant,
outdated and frequently immoral.
I say
this because there is nothing – not any religious or secular body of work –
that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western
civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world.
It was
this book that guided every one of the Founding Fathers of the United States,
including those described as “deists.” It is the book that formed the foundational
values of every major American university. It is the book from which every
morally great American from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to the Rev.
(yes, “the Reverend,” almost always omitted today in favor of his secular
credential, “Dr.”) Martin Luther King, Jr., got his values.
It is
this book that gave humanity the Ten Commandments, the greatest moral code ever
devised. It not only codified the essential moral rules for society, it
announced that the Creator of the universe stands behind them, demands them and
judges humans’ compliance with them.
It gave
humanity the great moral rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
It
taught humanity the unprecedented and unparalleled concept that all human
beings are created equal because all human beings – of every race, ethnicity,
nationality and both male and female – are created in God’s image.
It
taught people not to trust the human heart, but to be guided by moral law even
when the heart pulled in a different direction.
This is
the book that taught humanity that human sacrifice is an abomination.
This is
the book that de-sexualized God – a first in human history.
This is
the book that alone launched humanity on the long road to abolishing slavery.
It was not only Bible-believers (what we would today call “religious
fundamentalists”) who led the only crusade in the world against slavery, it was
the Bible itself, thousands of years before, that taught that God abhors
slavery. It legislated that one cannot return a slave to his owner and banned
kidnapping for slaves in the Ten Commandments.
Stealing
people, kidnapping, was the most widespread source of slavery, and “Thou shall
not steal” was first a ban on stealing humans and then on stealing property.
It was
this book that taught people the wisdom of Job and of Ecclesiastes,
unparalleled masterpieces of world wisdom literature.
Without
this book, there would not have been Western civilization, or Western science,
or Western human rights, or the abolitionist movement, or the United States of
America, the freest, most prosperous, most opportunity-giving society ever
formed.
For
well over a generation, we have been living on “cut-flower ethics.” We have
removed ethics from the Bible-based soil that gave them life and think they can
survive removed from that soil. Fools and those possessing an arrogance
bordering on self-deification think we will long survive as a decent society
without teaching the Bible and without consulting it for moral guidance and
wisdom.
If not
from the Bible, from where should people get their values and morals? The
university? The New York Times editorial page? They have been wrong on
virtually every great issue of good and evil in our generation.
They
mocked Ronald Reagan for calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” More than
any other group in the world, Western intellectuals supported Stalin, Mao and
other Communist monsters. They are utterly morally confused concerning one of
the most morally clear conflicts of our time – the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab
conflict. The universities and their media supporters have taught a generation
of Americans the idiocy that men and women are basically the same. And they are
the institutions that teach that America's founders were essentially moral
reprobates – sexist and racist rich white men.
When
the current executive editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, was
appointed to that position she announced that “In my house growing up, The
Times substituted for religion.” The quote spoke volumes about the substitution
of elite media for religion and the Bible in shaping contemporary America.
The
other modern substitute for the Bible is the heart. We live in the Age of
Feelings, and an entire generation of Americans has been raised to consult
their heart to determine right and wrong.
If you
trust the human heart, you should be delighted with this development. But those
of us raised with biblical wisdom do not trust the heart. So when we are told
by almost every university, by almost every news source, by almost every
entertainment medium that the heart demands what is probably the most radical
social transformation since Western civilization began – redefining marriage,
society’s most basic institution, in terms of gender – it may be wiser to trust
the biblical understanding of marriage rather than the heart’s.
My
heart, too, supports same-sex marriage. But relying on the heart alone is a
terribly flawed guide to social policy. And it is the Bible that has produced
all of the world’s most compassionate societies.
This,
then, is the great modern battle: the Bible and the heart vs. the heart alone.
