Dennis Prager is a brilliant advocate for conservatism. We agree with him on political issues.

But he is religious.

He writes, and we comment:

Conservatives often speak of Judeo-Christian values and how the current civil war in the United States and the rest of the West is essentially a battle between those values and the Left, which rejects Judeo-Christian values.

They are right.

But they rarely explain what Judeo-Christian values are. Yet, without an explanation, mentioning Judeo-Christian values is useless.

So, let me do that now.

First, a word about the term. Some Jews and Christians find the term confusing, if not objectionable, since Judaism and Christianity have different theologies. But no one speaks of Judeo-Christian theology, only of Judeo-Christian values.

See our critical discussion of “Judeo-Christian values” here.

Judeo-Christian values are essentially another term for biblical values. Judaism and Christianity are both based on the Old Testament—its God, its Ten Commandments, its admonition to love one’s neighbor as oneself, to love God, to lead a holy life, etc. Christians also believe in the New Testament, but only an opponent of Christianity would argue that the New Testament negates the values of the Old.

Here they are:

1) Objective moral standards come from God. As I have written and spoken about in a PragerU video and elsewhere, if there is no God who declares murder wrong, murder can be subjectively wrong but not objectively wrong. So, while there can certainly be nonbelievers who hold murder, stealing, and other actions wrong, without God, those are opinions, not moral facts. Without the God of the Bible, there are no moral facts.

No. People do not want to be hurt, robbed, or killed. For a society to make laws discouraging people from hurting robbing and killing is common sense, and such laws were made before any religion laid down moral rules as divine injunction. 

Besides which – and in answer to all following points – no god ever spoke to a human being. All religious moral laws are human-made. 

2) God judges our behavior, and we are therefore accountable to God for our behavior. Outside of a religious worldview, there is no higher being to whom we are morally accountable.

We need no “higher being” to judge us. We are responsible for what we do and bear the consequences of our behavior. As we say in our “Articles of Reason” (see under Pages in our margin), “justice may be elusive, but judgment is inescapable”.  

3) Just as morality derives from God, so do rights. All men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” declares the Declaration of Independence.

If your “rights” are violated, will “God” come to your aid? Rights are granted by man-made law, and justice must be sought in accordance with laws. 

4) The human being is uniquely precious. While the Bible repeatedly forbids cruel behavior to animals … only human beings are created in God’s image.

Presumably he means “God’s moral image”. In theJewish scriptures, God is vengeful and cruel to the innocent (“unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me”), puts temptation in the way of his creatures and then punishes them for succumbing to it (Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil), capricious (alternately making Pharaoh relent over the release of his Hebrew slaves and then “hardening his heart” again and keeping them, time after time), permits Satan to inflict terrible suffering on human beings to test their faithfulness to him (Job). And in history, the Jewish God allows millions of his “chosen people” to be tortured to death (the Holocaust).  And the Christian God, according to his scriptures, made humankind eternally indebted to him for sacrificing himself for them – for which at the same time, and as a double burden of guilt, they must be held to blame. So – no.  In both the Jewish and Christian bibles, the divinities set no model of good behavior.    

5) The world is based on a divine order, meaning divinely ordained distinctions. Among these divine distinctions are: God and man, man and woman, human and animal, good and evil, and nature and God.

Distinctions – as between man and woman – exist by nature. That God is distinct from nature is true enough. He exists only in human minds as a supernatural being. Humanity made God, not God humanity. There is no reason to believe that nature exists because a supernatural being made it. 

6) Human beings are not basically good. Therefore, the most important moral endeavor is making good people. Religious Jews and Christians understand that the greatest battle in life is with one’s nature. For the opponents of Judeo-Christian values, the greatest moral battle is not with one’s nature; it is with society (specifically, American society).

We agree that “human beings are not basically good”. But we say that self-interest requires their decent behavior and most people understand this. The law helps to make people good. It is fear of others and fear of the law that prompt restraint, not biblical values.  

7) Precisely because we are not basically good, we must not trust our hearts to lead us to proper behavior. The road to hell is paved with good hearts. Feelings make us human, but they cannot direct our lives. This alone divides the Bible-based from those on the left.

It is a false dichotomy, the religious on the one side, “the left” on the other. Millions of Leftists are religious Christians and Jews.   

8) All human beings are created in God’s image. Therefore, race is of no significance. We all emanate from Adam and Eve, whose race is never mentioned. That many religious people held racist views only testifies to the almost infinite ability of people to distort what is good.

This confirms that it is “God’s moral image” that is meant. The various races are characterized by physical differences.    

9) Fear God, not man. Fear of God is a foundation of morality. In the Book of Exodus, Egyptian midwives were ordered by the Pharaoh to kill all newborn Hebrew boys. They disobeyed the divine king of Egypt. Why? Because “the midwives feared God”.  In America today, more people fear the print, electronic and social media than fear God.

We advise a sensible fear of the media. And of kings and other tyrants.

10) Human beings have free will. In the secular world, there is no free will because all human behavior is attributed to genes and environment. Only a religious worldview, which posits the existence of a divine soul—something independent of genes and environment—allows for free will.

Whether we actually have free will or not, we have to live as if we have it, so to all intents and purposes, we have it. It has nothing to do with having “a divine soul”. 

11) Liberty. America was founded on the belief that God wants us to be free. On the Liberty Bell is inscribed just one thing (aside from the name of the company that manufactured the bell). It is a verse from the Bible: “Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land Unto All the Inhabitants thereof.” The current assaults on personal liberty—unprecedented in American history—emanate from those who reject the Bible as their moral guide (including more than a few Jews and Christians who have joined the assault, having been indoctrinated with anti-religious views in high school and college).

We reiterate that millions of Leftists are religious. Belief in the supernatural does not logically bring liberty. Often quite the contrary (examples: the Inquisition’s Spain, Calvin’s Geneva).   

When Judeo-Christian principles are abandoned, evil eventually ensues.

In the name of the Hebrew god in ancient times, and in the name of Christianity for many hundreds of years,  great evil was done – mass slaughter, extreme cruelty, which surely are evils. 

One doesn’t have to be a believer to acknowledge this. Many secular conservatives recognize that the end of religion in the West leads to moral chaos—which is exactly what we are witnessing today and exactly what we witnessed in Europe last century. When Christianity died in Europe, we got Communism, fascism, and Nazism. What will we get in America if Christianity and Judeo-Christian values die.

Communism, fascism, Nazism are also religions, without gods or with them. (Many Nazis worshipped Nordic gods.) 

We are getting evil rule in America by many who say they are Christians. Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi claim to be  “good Catholics”. 

Leftism is a child of Christianity. (See our articles here and here.) 

In conclusion: “Judeo-Christian values” or religious beliefs of any sort are not a cure for America’s calamity.  

In totalitarian style, the notorious liar and Trump-persecutor Rep. Adam Schiff …

… secretly subpoenaed the phone records of a number of private citizens from telephone companies. He did not provide notice to these individuals in advance that their phone records were being sought. He did not subpoena the phone records directly from the citizens. Instead, he subpoenaed the phone companies for the records, preventing any opportunity for the private citizens to seek court review, as would happen in any other case in where the government is seeking this kind of information about any citizen.

Judicial Watch brought the case for the victims to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

In response to a House attorney’s argument that the materials be kept secret to protect the privacy of the targets of the subpoenas, one of the appellate judges remarked:

Well, I do think it’s, if not ironic, noteworthy that one of the interests you’ve just put forward is the invasion of privacy when the whole claim of Judicial Watch is that this Committee invaded the privacy of private citizens in the first place.

“The Pelosi/Schiff House asserts it has an unlimited government surveillance power and an unlimited ability to invade the privacy of any American with zero accountability and transparency,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The courts should reject Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi’s corrupt cover-up of the unconstitutional subpoenas that abused the civil rights of then-President Trump, Rudy Giuliani, journalists and other American citizens.”

Among the other phone records subpoenaed were those of Congressman Devin Nunes, journalist John Solomon, Trump attorney Jay Sekulow, and attorney Victoria Toensing.

Ammo Grrrll writes at PowerLine:

We are currently witnessing a vast horde of non-white people who are willing to throw their babies over a high fence and risk life and limb – just to get into what is routinely described by Democrats and Chinese Commies as the most racist hellhole on Planet Earth. Odd fact, that. People of color are racing to get into White Supremacy Central.

Even the Chinese get to call out our putative racism. The Uighurs have yet to weigh in, being too busy as professional organ donors, often before they were finished using the organs. …

We have Joe the Feeble, Terrible, Obviously Demented, Hair-Sniffing Cipher who is also a Pathological Liar, Influence-Peddler AND a wholly-owned subsidiary of China! …

I don’t know if Kamala is also the first co-President (in the Biden-Harris Administration) to fail the Bar Exam or not. But who needs to ace a written exam when you’ve done so well on your Orals? And how excited was America to have her chosen with virtually no qualifications other than being a Woman of Some Vague Non-White Color, and the only woman in America with a worse laugh than Hillary’s?

Well, she garnered upwards of 2-3% of the votes in the DEMOCRAT Primary, so even other people of color clearly rejected her in favor of the demented old white time-server with the crack-head son. Democrats had the opportunity to vote for a rich fake Native American, a rich young man married to another man, a rich fake Mexican with a made-up Spanish nickname, just to name a few of the special kinda sorta Diverse folks that were on offer. And, instead, they stunned the world by picking Joe Biden, a rich old white kleptocrat.

During the Basement Campaign, Joe the Stair Master (and Blank Stare Master) came out like Punxsutawney Phil to nibble on his wife’s hand, to confuse her with his own sister, and to fail to guess the number of his own grandchildren. Hey, grandpas out there, I would bet the ranch (if I had a ranch) that there’s not ONE of you who can’t tell us the number, sex, and probably even the birthdays of each and every one of your grandkids. Not to mention their preferred pronouns! (When very young, it’s mostly just “me, my, and mine”.)

As we begin our eighth year together, let us fervently pray that Joe the Feeblest soon resigns to spend more time with those grandchildren until such time as he can accurately count them. No, Kamala the Kackler will not be any better, but maybe at least she might not try to start a war with Russia over the Ukraine. To the best of my knowledge, she doesn’t have any offspring who pretend to work for and are lavishly paid by any industries in the Ukraine.

And seeing President Kamala cackling away in the Oval Office would be like a dagger in Hillary’s heart. So there’s that…and she would obviously do such a terrible job that even cheating on a scale never seen before could not re-elect her in 2024.

We enjoyed this, but don’t agree with everything the delightful Ammo Grrrll says.

We fear that Kamala Harris will be an even worse figurehead president than Joe Biden. He manages to seem to be thinking. We don’t think she can do even that. She will only cackle and be an embarrassment to the nation.

Conrad Black, apparently a dyed-in-the-wool optimist, writes at American Greatness:

The United States has never in its history been so battered by self-hate and so belittled by angry minorities who, for the most part, should be more thankful to be American. It is an aberration and it will end soon, and perhaps the surest and most dramatic rejection of it will come if America is affronted by China in a way that excites its profound patriotic instincts.

If the Chinese leaders continue to belittle America, and attempt to face it down militarily in Taiwan or elsewhere, they will say, as Japanese Admiral lsoroku Yamamoto may have when congratulated on the success of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which he had opposed: “I am afraid we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled it with a terrible resolve which will soon be turned upon us.”

China will – probably quite soon – invade Taiwan, and take it.

Our forecast is that America – which is to say”Biden”, the oligarchy now ruling the United States – will do nothing to prevent, stop, or avenge the attack.

The Democrats know that they can only win an election by cheating.

John Hinderaker writes at PowerLine:

We have two parties in America: one that wants free, fair and honest elections, with only legal voters casting ballots, and doing so only once, and one that wants ballot harvesting, unverified mail-in voting, unattended drop boxes into which anyone can drop any number of ballots of unknown provenance, and so on. It isn’t hard to see which party has confidence in the power of its ideas to gain the support of most Americans, as long as only actual, living and legal voters cast ballots and only vote once.

God, the three-in-one Lord and King of Christians, is becoming ever more unpopular in America.

Republicans of Earth most Americans have been, but at the same time Monarchists of the Universe. Now that is changing, at increasing speed.

America has continued to be God’s acreage for longer in post-Enlightenment times than any other Anglophone country. Now even here his sway is under threat.

Although there are religious optimists prophesying a church-going revival after the long period of social distancing during the Covid pandemic, others read statistics and reason that a further shrinking of God’s base is more probable.

David Gibson writes at Religion & Politics:

As a stir-crazy nation slowly emerges from the Covid-19 pandemic, debates about what our “new normal” will be like are intensifying. Will the shock of the lockdown bring a transformative moment of social solidarity? Or tear us apart in tribal strife? …

The future of our national religious life is also the subject of growing speculation, with the sunny-side-up view arguing that we are primed for a new “Great Awakening” of the sort that have periodically transformed American culture. …

To many, the prospect of a resurgence in religious observance is an enticing vision, because faith communities can be anchors of social solidarity, which has been steadily eroding for decades.

The data and history tell a different story, however, and, much like the economic outlook, the forecast for religion looks more like recession than resurrection. …

The percentage of Americans who say they belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque is down 20 points over the previous two decades, sitting at an all-time low of 50 percent as of 2018, according to Gallup. Actual church attendance is even lower, while Americans who profess no religious affiliation—the so-called nones—have become the single largest “denomination” in the U.S., according to Pew Research surveys, numbering more than both Catholics and evangelicals.

American Christianity has not been drastically harmful to the nation. (Nor has Covid-19.) But generally, religion has been a destructive force throughout recorded history.

The retirement of God and all gods from the human mind would be a huge benefit, but not enough.

We also urgently need to see a mass abandonment, everywhere in the world, of the godless religion variously named Leftism, Socialism, Communism, Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Progressivism, Marxism, Black Lives Matter, Intersectionality, the Great Reset …

It’s a huge joke. A prank, a jest, a jape – one for the history books. America the Superpower picks a gibbering idiot to be its president.

The Western Journal reports and we abbreviate:

Tongue-tied President Joe Biden offered a word salad in lieu of a coherent statement [on his gun control plan].

He twice referred to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as the “AFT” rather than “ATF.”

He then uttered the following statement:

And I look out there and I see so many members of Congress who have led in this fight. So many of you who have never given up. So many of you who are in — absolutely determined, as Merfin and Ruthers are, to get this done.

He was not in the presence of anyone named “Merfin” or any person or group of individuals called “Ruthers”.

Merfin, for now, is a mystery character in the bad story that is the Biden administration’s first few months. The same goes for Ruthers.

Perhaps the Ruthers were an obscure band Biden came across at some point while lifeguarding in his younger years in Delaware. Maybe Biden’s old youth nemesis CornPop Jackson was their frontman.

Great laughs!

Did Monty Python’s Flying Circus team write the script for this phase of American history?

Or the geniuses who gave the world The Simpsons?

America is no longer the break-away child of Britain that it was. Although it decided against instating a monarch, it took its system of governance from its parent: the rule of law; the election of representatives; armed forces under civil control; the common law; the adversarial system of trial with an impartial bench, a jury of peers, habeas corpus, rules of evidence, assumption of innocence. The system that had evolved through centuries to protect every citizen’s personal freedom and property worked well on the whole in the mother country, and it worked well on the whole in the republic.

But all that is going now. Much of it – the rule of law under which all sane adults must be equally treated, impartial justice, the assumption of innocence – has already gone.

Political activists with far inferior notions of government – imported from the savage heart of Africa, the archaic Middle East, the gangster lands of the old Spanish Empire, satanic bloodsoaked Europe – are exerting their will and changing the republic.

To what?

Will the new America be like Europe (bad), a Latin American banana republic (worse), Soviet Russia (even worse), an Islamic caliphate (extremely bad), or sub-Saharan Africa (utterly appalling)?

It is unlikely to emulate Europe. Sure, the EU is not unattractive to the taste of America’s renovators, what with its baked-in socialism and garnish of Islam. But still, it is white. And the mainly white Democrat Party is implacably against whiteness.

What then?

We will soon know.

And China too is watching.

Last night (Tuesday April 7, 2021), Mark Steyn hosted Fox News Primetime. Fox reports:

“Under the laughably misnamed Department of Homeland Security there’s now an express check-in — Just get a human trafficker to throw you into the country,” [Mark Steyn] said, pointing to video of Mexican traffickers dropping toddlers off of a 14-foot section of border wall constructed under President Donald Trump.

“It’s time for your toddler to start crawling — through the desert,” he said.

Steyn said that for some reason, people on the left see a lax immigration system like the one being instituted as “compassionate”.

“[They] think the government being industrial-scale enablers of some of the most evil people on the planet is progressive and compassionate. It’s not,” he said.

“There is nothing kind about incentivizing human trafficking, which, by the way, is merely a synonym for slavery and the same people who want to tear down the statue if the guy’s family had a plantation 300 years ago are all cool with the global trade in human beings of the 21st century.”

“So, Joe Biden or whoever has got his hand waggling that moth-eaten sock-puppet is consciously enriching these cartels and ensuring that they can expand their operations including more fentanyl to kill Americans and some would-be jihadists now and then.”

Steyn said the U.S. is witnessing what is becoming a “lopsided business partnership between America and coyotes at a time of global pandemic — when almost every national border on the planet, including the northern U.S. Border is closed down”.

Conrad Black, writing at American Greatness, sees much that is wrong and bad with the USA but also much that is right and good.

Not every aspect of the onslaught of self-hate that has broken over America, warped its media, and turned most of the academy—and even apparently, most of its elementary and secondary schools—into centers of reorientation designed to convince Americans their national past is loathsome hypocrisy, is bad.

There were wrongs in America’s past, he says, slavery being the worst of them.

And, he goes on to say, there are wrongs in America’s present that need to be righted – in particular, the justice system:

One of the most nauseatingly persistent American delusions is that the American justice system is one of the best in the world. … It is an appalling, disgraceful, terribly unjust 360-degree cartel for the avaricious legal profession, and on the criminal side, it has been so undermined by the corruption of the plea bargain system that it is essentially the right of prosecutors to suborn false inculpatory testimony with no danger of sanctions for their misconduct.

The result is that the United States has six to 12 times as many incarcerated people per capita as other comparable large prosperous democracies: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Its conviction rates are much higher than almost all of these countries and so are its crime rates. Millions of innocent people are convicted and millions of innocent people are over-sentenced and millions are ground to powder in the conveyor belt to the bloated and corrupt American prison system. Everyone who is acquainted with the facts is aware of this.

The Bill of Rights guarantees of due process, a grand jury as assurance against capricious prosecution, an impartial jury, no seizure of property without just compensation, access to counsel of choice, prompt justice, and reasonable bail have been practically expunged.

That being said, he proceeds to condemn exaggerated criticism and unjustified hatred of America:

But with all that said, the flag-waving, anthem-singing, traditional pride in America was and remains substantially justified. All nations have somewhat delusional self-images and though the American star system elevates many who are not stars, the current eruption of Americophobia is vastly excessive, utterly despicable, cannot remotely be sustained, and is propagated, not just by the faddishly and aggressively ignorant, but also by disturbed and often wicked people.

We agree with him that “Americophobia” is excessive, despicable, ignorant, and propagated by wicked people, but we wonder why he believes that it “cannot remotely be sustained”.

He does not explain how it will fail or be made to fail.

He describes how America remains the mightiest power in the world:

The dictatorships of Latin America, the House of Saud, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Syngman Rhee’s South Korea and many other dubious claimants to the title of champions of freedom … became democracies and the world must never forget nor fail to be grateful for the fact that the United States is chiefly responsible for the spread of democracy and the free market. 

Never forget? What we hear, thanks to the academies and the anti-American media, is that those who remember it see it as a cause, not for gratitude and praise, but for blame and accusation.

Unjustly, of course. And sour hatred and envy of America by outsiders will not reduce America’s might  – or its virtues:

No nation in history has made the effort the United States has to eliminate racial discrimination and to assist minorities bootstrapping themselves up to parity. Whatever liberties may have been taken in national rhetorical puffery, there has never been anything remotely like America’s rise from a few million colonists in two long lifetimes after the Revolutionary War to, as Churchill said in his eulogy of President Roosevelt to a position of “might and glory . . . never attained by any nation in history.” 

But hatred of America by Americans is truly destructive:

The right of educators to teach falsely sourced self-hatred and of the media’s righteous replacement of reporting with subversive and defamatory advocacy is now proclaimed as a long-repressed virtue. It does not fall far short of treason and Joe Biden will pay for his endorsement of the false charge against his country of “systemic racism”. 

Well, it is consoling to be assured that Joe Biden will pay for his calumny. But when? And how?

The United States now has an official regime of lies, supported by an almost worthlessly dishonest media, and scores of millions of Americans have been brainwashed into the false view that they live in an evil country.

This lie will not succeed because everyone in America can see that it is not true.

It will not succeed simply because it is not true? The truth will always prevail in the long run? And the truth being that America is good (or at least far more good than bad) is enough to restore it to freedom? To repair its justice system? To punish Joe Biden?

Conrad Black believes it:

Most Americans are reasonable and fair-minded people most of the time, and their numbers, their patience, and the righteousness of their not-uncritical faith in and love for their country will ultimately prevail. There was no excuse for the secretary of state to turn a meeting with the Chinese on American soil into a confessional for a cringe-worthy recitation of America’s faults. Despite everything, America remains a proud country with much to be proud of, and no person nor any nationality can stand unlimited, unjustified, self-loathing. It will end sooner than we dare think, and it will take down its ghastly and contemptible preceptors with it, including the dismal Pharisees of this administration.

Great! But how will it happen? When?

Tell us please, Conrad Black!