But Dennis Prager, like billions of others, think he’s nice, smart, fair, and honest.

Dennis Prager is a perceptive conservative writer, but unfortunately he’s afflicted with religion.

He writes at Townhall:

If no one goes to prison for actor Alec Baldwin’s accidental killing of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, our society will have failed a crucial moral test.

We will be saying human life is not sacred; that it, in effect, is of little or no consequence.

The killing was, we presume, unintentional (though we do not know for sure, as the possibility remains that someone had motive to load the gun with real ammunition). But that does not mean that no one should be held culpable and punished. Society must regard the taking of human life — even when unintentional — as something terrible.

So if you accidentally fall from a height on top of someone and kill that person, you must be punished? How just is that?

If Alec Baldwin did something wrong, but only if he did something wrong, may he be punished. We don’t like him, but that’s irrelevant, and it is not the Alec Baldwin shooting that we are concerned with here. It is Prager’s and God’s morality.

Prager goes on:

I get this principle from the Bible …

Ah, from the Bible! No surprise then.

… which was, until the last century, the source of America’s and the Western world’s moral values.

To the extent that it was, much injustice resulted. Fortunately there were also laws which in many codes, some much older than the Books of Moses, distinguished crime from accident.

This principle is repeated over and over in the Bible’s first five books (the Torah), the source of all biblical laws. This repetition strongly indicates how seriously the Bible takes this issue.

The five books of Moses are full of God’s capricious and often cruel decisions and actions. One of them, Exodus, has its chief hero, God, fiddling with the mind of the Pharaoh of Egypt so that one moment he’s prepared to let Moses lead the Hebrew slaves out of bondage, and the next moment he isn’t. And this happens over and over again. It’s a tease. Promise given, promise broken. It’s only when God has all the Egyptian boy children in Pharaoh’s city killed  – the Angel of Death enabled to distinguish which household with a boy in it must suffer the loss because God gets the Hebrews to mark a sign with animal blood on their front doors so his messenger passes over their dwellings (which were well away and apart form the Egyptians’ anyway) – that Pharaoh lets Moses lead the slaves away. And even then God “hardens his heart” yet again, so he sends enforcers after them to bring them back.

Now don’t say that’s not dishonorable of God! And how about unjust and cruel to the Egyptian parents? On the whole, not great examples of moral behavior, wouldn’t you say? 

And after the Pharaoh chapters, this supreme moral guide, the Torah, gets even sillier.

We could offer many examples of its silliness, but we’ll stick to Dennis Prager’s text for precepts he considers supremely admirable. They are silly enough:

He writes: 

Example one:

Exodus 21:28: “When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned …”

The obvious question is: Why would the ox be put to death? It is surely not guilty of murder; oxen have no free will. The reason it is put to death is that the killing of a human being cannot go unpunished.

The Jewish Bible scholar, professor Nahum Sarna, wrote:

The execution of the ox was carried out in the presence, and with the participation, of the entire community (the animal was stoned, not merely killed) — implying the killing of a human being is a source of mass pollution and the proceedings had an expiatory function. The killing of a homicidal beast is ordained in Genesis 9:5-6: “For your own life-blood I will require a reckoning: I will require it of every beast … Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in His image did God make man.” The sanctity of human life is such as to make bloodshed the consummate offense, one viewed with unspeakable horror. Both man and beast that destroy human life are thereafter tainted by bloodguilt.

You see? Man is made “in God’s image” therefore the ox must be stoned to death. Okay?

Example Two:

Deuteronomy 19:5: “(If) a man goes with his neighbor into a grove to cut wood; and as his hand swings the ax to cut down a tree, the ax-head flies off the handle and strikes the other so that he dies, that man shall flee to one of these cities and live.”

Again, the Bible describes a homicide that is entirely accidental. But the person who accidentally committed the homicide is not free to live a normal life. He cannot go on with life as if nothing happened. While he is not to be executed, he must flee to one of three “cities of refuge” in ancient Israel. There he may not be killed or otherwise hurt by a member of the killed man’s family. But he is not a completely free man.

So there were sanctuary cities even in those days! To be a punishment, they were probably derelict, crime ridden, filthy, with many living on the streets.

Prager continues:

In my Bible commentary, The Rational Bible, I quote Leeor Gottlieb, a professor of Bible at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University: “The Torah is morally ahead of some modern societies, in which people’s lives go on nearly uninterrupted if they killed unintentionally.”

As the Bible explains five verses later:

Thus blood of the innocent will not be shed, bringing bloodguilt upon you in the land that the Lord your God is allotting to you.

Human bloodshed brings bloodguilt upon the land.

A tremendous lot of human blood, the innocent sort included, is shed on that land in the five books. At least as much as anywhere else in the inhabited world. And much has been shed on it in the three thousand years and more that has passed since Moses died. So bloodguilt is upon it. What is God or man going to do about it?  Rationally now: what?

Ah, there is something that can be done to cure bloodguilt when the cause is not a particular known person. A prayer can be said. An incantation. Apparently it does the trick:

Example three:

Deuteronomy 21:1-4 and 7: “If, in the land that the Lord your God is assigning you to possess, someone slain is found lying in the open, the identity of the slayer not being known, your elders and magistrates shall go out and measure the distances from the corpse to the nearby towns … And they shall make this declaration: ‘Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done. Absolve, O Lord, Your people Israel whom You redeemed, and do not let guilt for the blood of the innocent remain among Your people Israel.’ And they will be absolved of bloodguilt.”

Unlike the previous instance, in which the (unintentional) killer is known, the killer of the slain man found “in the open” is not known. Nevertheless, the community is still held accountable and must ask for forgiveness for not preventing a homicide.

The message is, they should have known the murder was going to be committed. It was immoral of them not to know.

Prager’s last example is not from the five books. But his attitude to what happens is set by the biblical rules.

Example four:

The final example is not biblical but from my radio show. Many years ago, a woman called to tell me about an ostrich raised on her family’s ostrich farm. One day, this ostrich kicked her father to death.

 I asked the woman what was done to the ostrich. “Nothing,” she replied.

Given my biblical background, I was taken aback.

“So you tell people who visit your farm, ‘This is the ostrich that killed my father’?”

“Yes,” she responded.

In my view, that cheapened her father’s life and death.

So Prager would have had the ostrich killed, not because it was a danger to other people which would be rational, but as condign punishment. Because? Because man is made in God’s image. Because human bloodshed brings blood upon the land. Because of mass pollution, and expiation is required to cleanse it. Ideally, the woman should have summoned her neighbors to help stone the ostrich to death.

And this code of behavior, this ancient prescription for the provision of justice, is, according to the sage Gottlieb and to Prager himself, morally advanced!

The Bible has lots of dramatic, exciting, shocking, amusing, puzzling, frustrating, and satisfying stories in it. (We like the one about God refusing Cain’s offer of vegetables, preferring Abel’s meat.) It also has – at least the so-called “Old Testament” has in the King James translation – lots of very beautiful poetry in Isaiah, Job, Psalms, Daniel, Ecclesiastes … Parts of it are a good read,  and it is essential to a proper education.

But it is not a moral guide.

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.  

Is it really possible that at this stage of history, with all the terrifying examples of countries that have had socialist revolutions and become earthly hells, and no example of a single one of them that has not become an earthly hell, the United States is about to choose to have its own socialist revolution?

Are more than half the enfranchised citizens of America about to vote for the transformation of their free and prosperous country into a socialist hell of oppression and poverty?

To put it another way, are they about to vote the Democratic Party into power?

Dennis Prager points out at Townhall how a vote for any Democrat is a vote against America.

“I vote for the man (or woman), not the party” is what millions of Americans say and what, in fact, many do. It is intended as a noble sentiment: “I am not one of those Americans who votes blindly by party; I measure each candidate and then decide which one to vote for.”

They do not appreciate a likable Democrat will do as much harm to our country as any other Democrat.

Since  slavery, there has never been a time when the two major parties differed as much as they do today. Therefore, the notion that one should vote “for the individual, not the party” has never made less sense.

Elected officials vote with their party more often than in principled opposition to it, however fine they may be as individuals. Nevertheless, a great number of Americans still vote for “the individual”.

Obvious examples are Republican “Never Trumpers”.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is one prominent example. He believes in a strong American defense, supported Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from Barack Obama’s agreement with Iran, credits Trump with the Israeli peace agreements with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, saluted Trump’s moving of the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and presumably supports other Trump policies, such as the president’s extraordinary success with regard to the American economy prior to the lockdowns that crushed the economy.

Yet, he so loathes the president that he will vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

He and many other Americans (we will soon know how many) who support the president’s Republican policies will vote for the party that stands for almost everything they oppose because they will “vote for the man, not the party”. 

At this time in American history, to care more about an individual candidate than the party is to support the unraveling of America. It is so irrational as to be incredible.

Voting for any Democrat – whether for mayor, district attorney, state legislature, state governor, the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate or president – is to vote for someone who will enable the left to destroy America as we know it.

That is their wording, not only mine.

Further vital points he makes:

It is to vote for the party that, for the first time in American history, openly identifies with socialism more than with capitalism.

To vote for any Democrat is to vote for the party that believes America is “systemically racist”, that it is rotten to the core, vile from its inception (in 1619, they claim, not 1776).

To vote for any Democrat is to vote for the party that will renew the Obama agreement with one of America’s and the civilized world’s greatest enemies, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It is to vote for undoing every economic policy that led America to its greatest economic boom in memory.

It is to vote for the party whose mayors, governors and district attorneys allow violent riots and seek to “defund” police, a policy even most blacks oppose.

It is to vote for Kamala Harris, the most left-wing member of the U.S. Senate, for vice president and, given Biden’s age and health, perhaps soon president …

… if that senile corrupt old man actually and astoundingly gets elected to the presidency.

It is to vote for the party that:

wants to allow millions more illegal immigrants into America and grant them benefits heretofore reserved for Americans. Democrats don’t use the words “open borders,” but they  support this country-wrecking policy

supports the Green New Deal, or something very close to it, which will further ruin an economy already in ruins from Democrat-supported lockdowns

seeks to nationalize American health care (“Medicare for All”).

supports the unprecedented suppression of free speech by Big Tech and universities.

It is to vote for ruin and misery. 

It is a tragedy that violent mobs are rampaging through the land laying waste our civilization as they go – and no one is stopping them: not the police, not the states governments, not the federal government – and most stunningly disappointing of all, not the president. Not yet, anyway.

President Trump, why are you are not acting to restore law and order?

At Townhall, the conservative online opinion journal, Derek Hunter writes:

There is a disturbing percentage of our fellow Americans doing whatever the hell they want to do with little or no concern for the law. And the law has little or no concern for itself, at least when it comes to those charged with enforcing it.

Across the country, charges are being dropped against rioters and looters. Why? Many of those people in position to prosecute the guilty have no interest in doing so. Hell, many of them ran on the idea of not prosecuting people. What kind of idiot would vote for a district attorney who promised to let people get away with more? Well, from San Francisco to St. Louis, they did just that.

With police ordered to stand down, or pulling back on their own, the mob has gone off the rails. Why shouldn’t you? If your store is raided, hope you have good insurance. If you’re randomly attacked, hope you fall safely. wouldn’t mind it so much if the piles of human garbage being given a pass stayed within the boundaries of the jurisdictions electing these morons to not enforce the law, but the idiots who do cast those ballots inevitably flee to sane areas, those not overrun by mutants like them, because who wants to live in a place where stealing anything valued at less than $1000 is no big deal?

While they flee what they made, they bring what made it with them – their vote. Spreading like a swarm of brain damaged locusts, they run to better areas, sane areas that enforce laws and soon are electing other morons to recreate what they just fled. An army of Ilhan Omars who fled a hell hole only to come to the United States and try to recreate that hell hole here.

Still more fellow travelers were actually lucky enough to have been born here and yet are so devoid of natural intelligence and critical thinking ability that they seek to destroy it too. Curiously, they also want open borders, which is like encouraging shipwreck victims to swim to their lifeboat, only to blow a hole in the side of it the moment new people get on board. I did mention they are insane, didn’t I?

Less sane are the rest of us, watching this happen and expecting Republicans to stand up to it. Who in Congress is drawing attention to this Democratic Party-embraced lawlessness? President Trump spent as much, if not more, time at his campaign rally Saturday reenacting a garbage story about how he’d walked down a ramp at the West Point commencement speech the previous week than warning the American people about what liberals are doing.

It’s so out of control that at this point you’d almost have to be an idiot to follow the law. … There are no consequences to disobeying the law. Want a new TV, just take it. See someone minding their own business while you’re in a bad mood? Beat the hell of out them. If you’re in a Democrat-controlled are, the police aren’t coming. Why in the world would cops stick their necks out when they’re what gets chopped first whenever Democrats need to save a buck or need a target to demonize in order to boost morale?

With police ordered to stand down, or pulling back on their own, the mob has gone off the rails. Why shouldn’t you? If your store is raided, hope you have good insurance. If you’re randomly attacked, hope you fall safely.

The mob is running the show, laws are for suckers. So why are the rest of us following them?

What are we paying taxes for? Democrats in these mob run areas are not only turning a blind eye to lawlessness, they’re cheering it along. But I bet they’d bring down every bit of the law on us if we didn’t pay property or income taxes. A tax protest would be beyond the pale, but break into a store, steal a TV bigger than your car, or pummel someone for not appreciating it with a brick and you’re a hero exercising your First Amendment rights. Don’t cut a check to Big Brother and you’ll find out just how tolerant the left is, even if you say you’re doing it in the name of “social justice”.

All this might not be a sign of “the end of the world”, but it’s the end of something. The people who produce are paying, the people who don’t are benefiting. The people paying the bills are trampled while the mob is cheered and protected. Democrats cheer, Republicans are either mumbling or silent. No country can survive long with circumstances like that. And no government – local, state, or federal – that allows it to continue deserves to.

Also at Townhall, Dennis Prager, a man of good sense who nevertheless believes in “God” asks now, in this crisis of insurrection, “Of what use is religion?”

America is being taken over by violent mobs; a vast amount of destruction and stealing has taken place (with little police intervention and the apathy of our political leaders). Why aren’t all clergy delivering thundering sermons about the Seventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal”? Does it now come with an asterisk? …

And most ominous by far, for the first time in American history, free speech — the mother of all freedoms — is being widely suppressed, not by the government but by the press, the universities, the high schools, the elementary schools, all the giant internet media, Hollywood and virtually every major business in America. Christians and Jews place repentance at the center of their theologies, yet there is no place for repentance if you did or said one insensitive thing — real or alleged — even if it was 20 or more years ago. Yet all we get from American religious leaders on this matter is … silence.

The freest, least racist, most opportunity-providing country in history — “the last best hope of earth,” in Abraham Lincoln’s words — is smeared as “systemically racist”; all white people are declared “racist”; and the statues of the greatest Americans, including George Washington and even Abraham Lincoln, are toppled and/or defaced. And all we get from most American religious leaders is either agreement or silence.

It leads this religious American to ask the question the anti-religious ask: Of what use is religion?

Take the claim that being “colorblind” is racist.

If you are a religious Jew or Christian — let alone a rabbi, priest or minister — do you believe that? Do you believe that the human ideal is not to be colorblind? Do you believe that the ideal is to see every person, first and foremost, as a member of a race? Is that what you learned at seminary? Is that what you have taught from your pulpit all of your life? …

So, why the silence? Why aren’t all rabbis, priests and pastors telling their congregations and telling America — in tweets, on Facebook, in letters to the editor, on television and radio, in opinion pieces — that there is one race, the human race, and that the only antidote to racism is to deny that race determines our worth, not to affirm its significance?

Does an ideology that affirms the significance of race have an honorable pedigree? Has it ever led to anything good? Isn’t that exactly what Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan advocated?

So, how are we to explain this tragic failure of religious Jews and Christians — and their clergy — to speak up against looting (aka stealing) and for freedom, for America, for Western civilization and for being colorblind? …

What is now apparent is that most Jews and Christians fear the left, fear The New York Times, fear being shunned by “friends” on Facebook and mobbed on Twitter more than they fear God.

That’s what this moment comes down to. Jews and Christians who fail this test will not only lose their freedom, lose the great American hope for mankind and lose the West; they will have also lost their souls.

If the only consequence of this rise of lawlessness and destruction were to be the total disillusionment of Jews and Christians with their religion, their realization at last that neither Jehovah nor Jesus is going to do a thing about the wrecking of our civilization, we would not be unhappy. In fact, we would pause in our lament for the loss of our civilization to exult and jubilate!

But only for a moment. Because disillusionment with religion will not be all. Disillusionment with government by the people, with the rule of law, with the liberty that only the rule of law makes possible – for that, lamentation can not be loud and long enough. Though it will do nothing to save us.

What meaning of “meaning” is our subject? Significance. Purpose. 

We took the following sentences from an article by Dennis Prager at Townhall, in which he laments that Americans seem to be more unhappy now than they used to be. He mentions various probable causes, then comes to his main point:

And now we come to the biggest problem of all: the lack of meaning.

Aside from food, the greatest human need is meaning.

Poor people who have meaning can be happy, but wealthy people who lack meaning cannot be.

Nothing has given Americans – or any other people, for that matter – as much meaning as religion. But since World War II, God and religion have been relegated to the dustbin of history.The result? More than a third of Americans born after 1980 affiliate with no religion. This is unprecedented in American history; until this generation, the vast majority of Americans have been religious.

Maybe, just maybe, the death of religion – the greatest provider of meaning, while certainly not the only – is the single biggest factor in the increasing sadness and loneliness among Americans (and so many others).

Dennis Prager believes that religion provides the individual with meaning to his life, and endows all human life with meaning.

What is that meaning?

*

What does Christian doctrine say it is?

This answer comes from CARM (Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry):

What Does the Bible say is the purpose of our lives?

According to the Bible, our purpose, the reason we are here, is for God’s glory.  In other words, our purpose is to praise God, worship him, to proclaim his greatness, and to accomplish his will.  This is what glorifies him.  Therefore, in this we find that God has given us a reason for our existence, a meaning for our existence.  We were created by him, according to his desire, and our lives are to be lived for him so that we might accomplish what he has for us to do. …

Even though things can go wrong in our lives, the ultimate reason we are here is to glorify God – even through the difficulties.  We do this by praising him and trusting him through difficult times.

So: “Our purpose is to praise God.” “The reason we are here is to glorify God.”

Was the universe made so that we self-conscious living beings on this planet will “glorify” the maker?

If such a purpose is supreme, the question arises, why was the maker so counterproductive as to make the viruses, and the adverse conditions of nature, and predators, and the propensities for things to fail, and all the adversities and hindrances that incapacitate us? Why provide a multitude of ways the purpose of all creation can be thwarted?

And again if such a purpose is supreme, why did he, the Purposer, bother to make billions of stars and planets with no living beings on them to do any glorifying whatsoever?

And does that purpose, that meaning, keep Christians happy?

*

What does Islam say?

From Arab news:

Islam is the response to humanity’s search for meaning. The purpose of creation for all men and women for all times has been one: To know and worship God.

Here again is the belief that the universe was made so that we on this planet can know and worship (praise, glorify) its maker.

On this Islam and Christianity agree.

And do they agree that believing it makes a lot of people happy? Are Muslims happy?

*

What does Judaism say?

We find its answer to “What is the meaning and purpose of human life and the existence of the universe?” is not much different from those of Christianity and Islam: glorify, know, worship. (Not surprisingly, as it inspired both the younger religions.) But its expression of the idea is less succinct, more recondite and perplexing, even vague – and as is common with vague ideas, long-winded.

This is from an article in Commentary by the highly respected authority Emil L. Fackenheim (April 1965):

In the eyes of Judaism, whatever meaning life acquires derives from this encounter: the Divine accepts and confirms the human in the moment of [their] meeting. But the meaning conferred upon human life by the Divine-human encounter cannot be understood in terms of some finite human purpose, supposedly more ultimate than the meeting itself. For what could be more ultimate than the Presence of God? The Presence of God, then, as Martin Buber puts it, is an “inexpressible confirmation of meaning. . . . The question of the meaning of life is no longer there. But were it there, it would not have to be answered.” …

So: Human beings – or at least the followers of Judaism – can and do “encounter” God. If a human being does “encounter” – or “meet” – God, his existence has meaning. And the whole of “creation” has meaning because some human beings “encounter” God? Wait, no. The encounter “confirms” meaning. And at the same time abolishes the need for knowing it.

But what meaning does it “confirm”?

In Judaism, however, this “inexpressible confirmation of meaning” does, after all, assume expression; and this is because the Divine-human meeting assumes structure and content. … through the way man is accepted and confirmed as a consequence of this meeting. In Judaism God accepts and confirms man by commanding him in his humanity; and the response called for is obedience to God—an obedience to be expressed in finite human form. …

So obey the God-given Law. That is the purpose of your life. Your own reward is here and now on this earth. 

… The God of Judaism is no Deistic First Cause which, having caused the world, goes into perpetual retirement. Neither is He a Law-giver who, having given laws, leaves man to respond in human solitariness. Along with the commandment, handed over for human action, goes the promise of Divine action. And because Divine action makes itself contingent upon human action, a relationship of mutuality is established. God gives to man a covenant—that is, a contract; He binds Himself by its terms and becomes a partner.

You fulfill your side of the covenant or contract, and God will fulfill his.

… God is long-suffering enough to put up with persistent human failures; and at length it becomes clear that the covenant can survive only if God’s patience is absolute. The covenant, to be sure, remains mutual; and Divine action remains part of this mutuality, as a response to human deeds. But Divine action also breaks through this limitation and maintains the covenant in unilateral love. …  Sin still causes God to punish Israel; but no conceivable sin on Israel’s part can cause Him to forsake her. Divine Love has made the covenant indestructible. …

Then what happened between 1942 and 1945? The all-powerful merciful god plainly did not act as an all-powerful merciful god could be expected to act when his human partner was in extreme need of powerful merciful intervention. Then how can any Jew go on believing in him, let alone worshiping him?

It is incomprehensible. Why didn’t the Holocaust convince the entire Jewish people that their god is either non-existent or evil? 

This month is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The leaders of many nations met in Jerusalem to show sympathy with the survivors of the Nazi genocide. In speech after speech by Christian and Jew, the blessing of “God” is asked for Israel. Why? Because continuing to believe he exists and is good and merciful makes for happiness, even as they stood inside a monument to the slaughtered six million? 

Emil Fackenheim states:    

A meaning at once manifest in history and yet indifferent to poverty, war, and tyranny is unthinkable to the Jewish mind.

So unthinkable that the “Jewish mind” can pretend it didn’t happen?

Apparently so. But why?

Because, you see, “His” divine ways are inscrutable:

But the Jewish search for meaning in history is bounded by a … limitation … Not only is the disclosure of meaning in history fragmentary; the meaning itself is fragmentary. Past and present point not only to a finite future but to one which is absolute and all-consummating as well. Not until an eschatological dimension, a messianic belief, comes into view is the Jewish understanding of meaning in history complete.

The Messiah will come, then all will become clear. It will be the end of history; the eschaton. The whole picture will be seen at last and it will be absolutely glorious.

That was as far as traditional Judaism looked: to the end of time.

Jews were … forced to go beyond acceptance of an undisclosed meaning in history. They had to question meaning in history itself, in the light of historical realities. This questioning, to be sure, did not result in wholesale skepticism, or a despair of meaning in history. But it did result in the belief that meaning has remained incomplete in past history, and must remain so in any future that does not differ qualitatively from the past.

In other words, yes, what has happened to the Jews, and to human beings generally, has largely been pretty bloody nasty, which is precisely why we can expect the future to be  superlatively delightful.

Or not. Maybe the whole picture, the glorious fulfillment, the purpose and meaning of earthly existence will come only in an afterlife. Beyond the Messiah, beyond the eschaton, beyond death –  so later Judaism allowed itself to consider – there may be another life:

The messianic future, while the earliest, is not the only eschatological expectation in Judaism. Beside and beyond it emerges the hope for a “world-to-come”—a hope which, although post-Biblical in origin, was always implicit in the Jewish belief that God gives meaning to individual lives wholly and in their own right. Whereas the Messianic future redeems an incomplete history, the world-to-come redeems the incomplete individual lives which exist in history.

By “incomplete lives” does he mean miserable lives? Lives in which believing does not make for happiness? Lives cut off by murder for religious reasons?

Despite the absence of the belief in life after death from the Hebrew Bible, Orthodox post-Biblical theology quite deliberately embraces it. For the Divine commandment has accepted the individual and therefore any Redemption would remain incomplete—as the Messianic end by itself does—if it did not give completion to the individual. But no more can the Messianic goal of a redeemed future be identified with an Eternity beyond all time. A primordial Divine commanding Love has endowed history with meaning, in that it calls for meaningful human action. The great Divine-human drama of history thus initiated cannot be retroactively destroyed by an end which makes this world merely a place in which to prepare for another, and in itself meaningless. Redemption must consummate both the history in which men work and wait, and the lives of the individuals who work and wait in it.

What is meant by “redemption”?  Some sort of compensation? Or merely “forgiveness” of “sins”?

The two aspects of the eschatological expectation, then, must remain mutually irreducible, even despite the conscious recognition that Eternity must surely supersede all future history. This can be so because the world-to-come remains radically unintelligible. The rabbinic sources confine themselves to saying that it will redeem the whole man whom the Divine commandment has accepted from the beginning—not an immortal soul only, but a resurrected psychosomatic totality.

That is a reference to the belief in bodily resurrection that was held by all but one faction of the Jews (the Sadducees, the party of the priests), when Judea was a province of Rome. The time of “Jesus” who, Christians believe, rose bodily to a physical heaven. To which also his virgin mother was heaved up bodily by angels.

They are well aware that this is past all understanding, and they view silence on the subject as a necessity imposed by the silence of the Bible itself.

They can’t say anything about it because they don’t know anything about it. Yet they know that it will be. They know there is an end, a purpose, a meaning. And that it is good. But not what it is. 

* 

What does Hinduism say?

From the Ohio State University:

According to Hinduism, the meaning (purpose) of life is four-fold: to achieve Dharma, Artha, Kama, and Moksha.

The first, Dharma, means to act virtuously and righteously. That is, it means to act morally and ethically throughout one’s life. However, dharma also has a secondary aspect; since Hindus believe that they are born in debt to the Gods and other human beings, dharma calls for Hindus to repay this debt. The five different debts are as follows: debt to the Gods for their blessings, debt to parents and teachers, debt to guests, debt to other human beings, and debt to all other living beings.

The second meaning of life according to Hinduism is Artha, which refers to the pursuit of wealth and prosperity in one’s life. Importantly, one must stay within the bounds of dharma while pursuing this wealth and prosperity (i.e. one must not step outside moral and ethical grounds in order to do so).

The third purpose of a Hindu’s life is to seek Kama. In simple terms, Kama can be defined as obtaining enjoyment from life.

So far, so good. Live well. Behave decently towards your fellow human beings. Strive for prosperity. All sound and sensible. All stands up to examination in the light of day.

But then the murkiness which characterizes religious belief closes in:

The fourth and final meaning of life according to Hinduism is Moksha, enlightenment. By far the most difficult meaning of life to achieve, Moksha may take an individual just one lifetime to accomplish (rarely) or it may take several. However, it is considered the most important meaning of life and offers such rewards as liberation from reincarnation, self-realization, enlightenment, or unity with God.

“Unity with God” is what it’s for, the reason we endure our sufferings through many lives. That’s how hard it is to achieve.

*

What does Buddhism say?

Buddhism denies that there is any permanent and absolute significance of life, and described life as unsatisfactory (s. dukkha) and void (s. sunyata). However, Buddha acknowledged that there is a relative significance of life, and it is through this relative and conditioned nature of life that we can achieve and realize the universal truth. According to the discourses of the Buddha, our lives, and the world, are nothing but phenomena that rise and fall. It is a process of forming and degenerating. There is nothing that is not subject to change or impermanence. Impermanence indicates that there is no eternal bliss, because even a joyous state will eventually cease and become suffering.

Individuals can, however, attain a state of bliss temporarily. It’s not a purpose, not a meaning, not a significance, but a release from suffering. And that’s a lot!

*

No, Mr. Prager. Religion does not provide anything close to a satisfactory meaning of the universe’s existence or purpose of human lives.  

There is no meaning to existence.

The significance, or value, of human life cannot be measured because human life itself is the measure. Trying to assess the value of life is like trying to assess the wetness of water.

As for happiness, we each find it, if we do, as we can.

A few things that help most of us:  Living in a free country. Doing work we like doing. Making money. (Never mind being called a gross materialist. Even if money can’t buy happiness, lack of it can’t buy anything.)  Having a family. Having friends. Learning and thinking. Pleasures of the appetites and senses. Achieving our self-chosen purposes.

But to live is to suffer. Even the most fortunate of human beings cannot escape pain, disappointment, failure, and loss. And suffering  has not and cannot conceivably have any meaning or purpose that makes it good (except, within civilized limits, as legally imposed punishment).

We concede that some find happiness, or consolation for unhappiness, in religion. But for countless millions religion has been and continues to be a source of fear, anguish, and death.

 

Jillian Becker   January 29, 2020

Anti-white racism now obsesses the Left more than any other of its preoccupations (“gender-fluidity”, “climate change”, citizen disarmament, open borders). It was surely only to be expected that there would be an equal and opposite reaction on the Right. It exists. It is equal in intensity, but not in the numbers who support it. Adherents of what we might call the “whites are best movement” are a small minority among conservatives.

American Greatness publishes articles by some of them. Why is American Greatness giving the alt-Right a respectable platform? It is not that the editors are simply allowing the expression of white-Christian-supremacists as a matter of tolerant  broad-mindedness. One of their columnists who defends the alt-Right is Matthew Boose. He, we are told, is “a Mt. Vernon fellow for the Center for American Greatness”. We have recently discussed an article of his here. Boose defends a facetious youth named Nick Fuentes who declares the Holocaust to be a lie, and a funny one, a rib-tickling yarn.

Pedro Gonzalez is another such contributor. He is also a member of the online journal’s staff. Though not named on their “Who we are” page, he is, we learn from a note at the bottom of his column, an “assistant editor”.

In the column discussed here, he is reviewing a documentary film titled No Safe Spaces … 

… featuring conservative commentator Dennis Prager and comedian Adam Carolla. The aim of the film is to expose the illiberal direction that the halls of higher education have taken.

He gives it some praise:

The days of rage that have rocked universities across the country in recent years are well documented here.

And he makes it plain that he is in strong agreement with the film-maker, Dennis Prager, that the outbreaks of student rage – which in some cases brought disastrous consequences for the affected universities – were outrageous and indefensible.

But he finds flaws in the film. Or, rather, with people whose opinions it reflects. Gonzalez does not object to what they say in the film itself, but what they have said and done in other places at other times.

He says:

No Safe Spaces succeeds at its primary goal: revealing the fundamentally evil designs of our enemies. … There are, however, serious flaws in this otherwise polished production. For a start, the mainstream conservatives Prager props in the documentary have recently behaved themselves in a way consistent with how the Left operates.

They had offended, he explains, by refusing to give a platform at certain conservative gatherings to spokesmen of the (self-styled) alt-Right. Why?  Because, we can infer, the opinions of the alt-Right are as offensive to most conservatives as are those of the Left, for the same reason. They are intensely racist.

The alt-Right, spoken for in his review by Pedro Gonzalez, claims that its indignation is a righteous reaction to their being denied freedom of speech. (They speak and write freely, however, at many a gathering, on many a blog site, and everywhere in the social media.)

One of the professors whose story is treated sympathetically in both the film and, at first, in the review, is the (liberal, not conservative) biologist, Brett Weinstein. He refused to be kept away from the university where he taught, Evergreen State College in Washington state, on a “no whites on campus” day, was consequently subjected to violent persecution by Leftist students, and hounded out of his job. He maintained that the attempt to force whites to stay away was “an act of oppression”, and cited historical precedents of groups trying to force others to share their beliefs. He gave an example which Gonzalez quotes:

“Some of history’s darkest chapters involved brutal coercion of people because they didn’t accept that ‘Jesus is the son of God’,” wrote Weinstein recently. “Assuming Christians have outgrown that inclination, they’d be wise to quit broadcasting this exclusionary claim. Seems obvious. What am I missing?”

And that irked Gonzalez.

He comments:

That is, Christians must stop being Christians. Or to use Prager’s line, on preferring “clarity over agreement”, Weinstein is merely clarifying that liberalism requires that Christians dissolve Christ and adopt a secularized theology of humanism.

Weinstein did not mean that “Christians must stop being Christians”, unless Christians are nothing but enforcers of shared belief. Nor would Dennis Prager tolerate a requirement “that Christians dissolve Christ and adopt a secularized theology of humanism”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our beef with Prager is that he taints his intelligent advocacy of conservatism with arguments for religion. He earnestly defends Christianity, even as he passionately proselytizes Judaism.

But Weinstein had struck a nerve. The alt-Right does not only believe that whites are best, but that Christian whites are the best of the best: Christianity is the supreme good; it can do no wrong. And because Christianity is the supreme good, devotees of all other religions – and non-believers – are bad, and deserve what they get at Christian hands.

The alt-Right is doing exactly what Weinstein advises them it would be wise to quit doing: “Broadcasting this exclusionary claim.”

Indeed Gonzalez insists: “[T]he only social force with the moral and ethical framework to counteract leftism [is] Christianity.”

While many Christians today, particularly in America, are supporters of freedom, the kind of Christianity that the alt-Right apparently admires has more to do with intolerance, domination, and compulsion.

Christianity had a very long reign. Contrary to Christian claims, it did not prove to be historically a force for good. Whether the human suffering the Christian churches caused when they had the power to do so on a massive scale was less or more, better or worse, than that caused by Leftist powers, is a verdict more easily reached by prejudice than judgment.

Plainly and simply, the Left is the side of evil. The sinister side.

At present it is mentally torturing millions of children.

Dennis Prager (with whom we often agree on political issues and always strongly disagree on religion) writes about the adult-made Children’s Climate Crisis:

The entire American Left – the mainstream media, the environmentalist movement and Democratic politicians in particular – are celebrating the involvement of teenagers and even younger children in protesting the world’s “inaction” with regard to global warming.

And not just the American Left, of course. The Left throughout the world is celebrating. A 16-year-old Swedish girl whose contempt for adults is breathtaking is an international hero. Congressional Democrats invited her to testify in Congress, and the United Nations has likewise invited her.

All those LEFTIES sit back in their comfy chairs and smile placidly as the kids shout about having the earth snatched from under them and their future confiscated by us right-wingers who refuse to abandon civilized life and revert to the life of savages under THEIR control!

The 16-year-old Swedish kid is called Greta Thunberg. Thunberg the Teenage Thunderer. (See her long Wiki entry here.) Prophet of earth’s imminent doom. Of whom President Trump (arguably the wittiest president) has remarked:

She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!

Dennis Prager goes on:

The mayor and city council of New York City further politicized their city’s public schools by allowing students to skip school to actively participate in a global warming protest.

The message of young climate change activists is: “You adults aren’t doing your job. As a result, we have no future.” As a sympathetic reporter – are there any non-sympathetic reporters? – for the Los Angeles Times put it, “Teens are still waiting for a sign that their elders get it.”

The Times’ coverage is typical. It reported: “Underneath the activism lies a simple truth: Young people are incredibly scared about climate change. They see it as a profound injustice and an existential threat to their generation and those that will follow.” …

“‘They do worry, and they worry kind of a lot,’ said Maria Ojala, an environmental psychologist at Orebro University in Sweden. …

It is critical to remember that hysterias – such as Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, “endemic and systemic racism in America”, the heterosexual AIDS “crisis” in America and the “rape culture” on American college campuses – are to the left what oxygen is to biological life. No oxygen, no life; no hysteria, no left.

Apparently, however, the left-wing hysteria about global warming leading to the virtual extinction of life on Earth has not moved enough adults. …

The “existential threat” scenario is another left-wing falsehood used to whip up hysteria that will lead to the Left’s control of the economy and society.

Consider this: If the Left didn’t tell them the world is going to end, they wouldn’t worry about it. They’d be enjoying their young lives, maybe even learning to appreciate that they [Americans] live in the freest country at the most prosperous time in human history. Instead, thanks to Leftists (who are children in adult bodies), they live in their grip of “existential eco-anxiety”.

This is but one more way in which the left abuses children (along with telling them they are neither boys nor girls but whatever they later choose to be; teaching them contempt for their country …

Right!

… and depriving them of the greatest source of morality, meaning, community and happiness — any of the Judeo-Christian religions).

Ah – just there, of course, is where we disagree with the writer. He seems to have forgotten hellfire!

But otherwise, yes, we agree.

It’s depressing, and it’s frightening.

The scariest movies are those featuring brainwashed children. This horror show is happening in real life.

 

As all the world knows, yesterday, April 15, 2019, a few minutes before 7 o’clock in the evening, Notre Dame, the magnificent cathedral of Paris, caught fire and in a few hours its spire and roof were destroyed.

Was the fire deliberately set? There is reason to suspect it. In recent years there have been numerous attacks on French churches and Christian artifacts – 887 in 2017 alone.

These attacks occurred in the first quarter of 2019, according to Newsweek:

France has seen a spate of attacks against Catholic churches since the start of the year, vandalism that has included arson and desecration. …

[On Sunday March 17, 2019] the historic Church of St. Sulpice in Paris was set on fire just after midday mass on Sunday,  Le Parisien reported, although no one was injured. Police are still investigating the attack, which firefighters have confidently attributed to arson. …

[In February] at the St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Houilles, in north-central France, a statue of the Virgin Mary was found smashed, and the altar cross had been thrown on the ground, according to  La Croix International, a Catholic publication.

Also in February, at Saint-Alain Cathedral in Lavaur, in south-central France, an altar cloth was burned and crosses and statues of saints were smashed. …

And in the southern city of Nimes, near the Spanish border, vandals looted the altar of the church of Notre-Dame des Enfants … and smeared a cross with human excrement. Consecrated hosts made from unleavened bread, which Catholics believe to be the body of Jesus Christ [when consecrated and swallowed in the ceremony of the Eucharist], were taken and found scattered among rubbish outside the building. …

… The Tablet … reported that in February alone there had been a record 47 documented attacks on churches and religious sites. …

On February 9, the altar at the church of Notre-Dame in Dijon, the capital of the Burgundy region, was also broken into. …

Who has been doing this? Whom do the press and the authorities, clerical and lay, accuse?

The Vienna-based Observatory of Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe, which was founded in cooperation with the Council of European Bishops Conferences (CCEE) but is now independent, said there had been a 25 percent increase in attacks on Catholic churches in the first two months of the year, compared with the same time last year.

Its executive director, Ellen Fantini, told Newsweek that while in many cases the motive for the attacks was not known, France faced growing problems with anti-Christian violence, especially by anarchist and feminist groups.

“I think there is a rising hostility in France against the church and its symbols, but it seems to be more against Christianity and the symbols of Christianity. These attacks are on symbols that are really sacred to parishioners, to Catholics. Desecration of consecrated hosts is a very personal attack on Catholicism and Christianity, more than spray-painting a slogan on the outside wall of a church. … The pressure is coming from the radical secularists or anti-religion groups as well as feminist activists who tend to target churches as a symbol of the patriarchy that needs to be dismantled.” …

Last month, the Prime Minister Edouard Phillipe met French church leaders and said in a statement: “In our secular Republic, places of worship are respected. Such acts shock me and must be unanimously condemned.”

Senior Figures within the French Catholic Church expressed their sorrow at the rise in attacks on symbols of their faith.

Anarchists. Feminists. No mention of Islamic terrorists. Yet in one instance where the attackers are known, they were Muslims.

The last known plot to damage Notre Dame by blowing up a car near it was carried out though not to completion by a Muslim woman.

A  Muslim immigrant recently arrived will soon be on trial for damaging the Basilica of Saint-Denis in which kings of France are buried, including Charles Martel (Charles the Hammer) who defeated a Muslim army that was intent on conquering France at the Battle of Tours in 732 C.E.

And there is a known ISIS plan to repeat the atrocities committed at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris in 2015, when 130 people were tortured and killed.

Then there is the mysterious case of the alarm-raiser, reported by the Daily Beast:

An alarm was raised at Notre Dame at 6:20 p.m. on Monday night — 23 minutes before the structure was engulfed in flames — but officials found no sign of a fire.

Firefighters who responded to a second alert raced to the scene but were unable to tame an inferno that ripped through the 12^th century cathedral for the next 9 hours….

Paris public prosecutor Rémy Heitz announced on Tuesday that a full investigation would uncover how a massive fire was allowed to gut the cathedral.

“What we know at this stage is that there was an initial alarm at 6:20 p.m., followed by a procedure to verify this but no fire as found,” Heitz explained. “Then, there was a second alarm at 6:43 p.m. and at that point a fire was detected in the structure.”

Who knew that a fire was about to break out? If an arsonist, why the warning?

Despite all this – but unexpectedly, considering how afraid the European authorities are of stirring up indignant reaction to any accusation of Muslims – the Paris prosecutor’s office is treating the fire as an accident. It “rules out” arson as a cause and terrorism as a motive, “at least for now”. (If you listen hard you can hear the ghost of Charles Martel groaning in his tomb in the Basilica of Saint-Denis.)

Is it unreasonable to suspect that Notre Dame was set on fire by a Muslim terrorist?

Dennis Prager writes at Townhall:

I don’t know if a worker accident or a radical Muslim set fire to Notre Dame Cathedral (as they have scores of other churches around Europe). In terms of what the fire represented, it doesn’t much matter. What matters is the omen: Europe is burning, just as Notre Dame was.

With that we agree. The symbolism of the burning is inescapable. Europe is burning away. The main cause of its destruction is its slow conquest by Islam.

But that is as far as our agreement goes with the views Dennis Prager expresses in this particular article. He mourns the burning of Europe as a bonfire of Christianity. (He writes about Christianity as if he did not know its own  atrocious history of massacre and persecution.) We mourn it as a bonfire of Western civilization.

 

Who are these men smiling while Notre Dame cathedral burns behind them? Could we guess anything about them, and why they are happy?

How terrifying the Democratic Party has become.

How ugly and brutal.

Rude, crude, shallow, cruel, foul-mouthed, callow, ignorant, and vicious.

Dishonest, hypocritical, treacherous.

We are  not simply setting down a stream of invective because we disagree with the Democrats. We choose every word to describe accurately the nature of the Democratic Party as it now is. Every day it gives us new displays of atrocious acts and spiteful speech. From holding replicas of the president’s head dripping with blood to enacting wishful scenes of his murder, to demanding that mobs attack officials of the administration, to advocating the killing of police officers, to actual attacks on Republicans with guns, to viciously insulting and denigrating the president’s wife and very young child in the language of the gutter, they surpass themselves daily in savagery. Their military wing appears in hordes of thousands in black hoods and masks, howling and shrieking, spitting fury and wielding clubs. And millions of them use the social media to heap abuse on individuals, as a story we relay below illustrates.

The Democratic Party is now no more or less than a faction of the world-wide Left.

Its aims are absurd fantasies of utopias where everybody can have everything they want without having to pay for anything.

Democrats hold that women are in all respects equal to men, yet that women are the helpless victims of men.

They believe superstitiously that the greatest danger facing humankind is a rise in atmospheric temperature in the next century.

They are in alliance with the actual menace to our civilization, advancing Islam. They call it a “religion of peace”. It is of no concern to them that Islam burns and buries people alive, boils them in oil, decapitates, flogs and stones them. That Muslims mutilate the genitals of girls. That Muslim men enslave and murder women and consider doing so proof and preservation of their honor.

Like its ally Islam, The Democratic Party is a vast terrorist movement, dividing America.

And Americans discover that the Constitution which brought their nation into existence is not strong enough after all to bind them together.

Dennis Prager writes in an article titled Even Astronauts Fear the Left.

There are many reasons I pity today’s younger generation of Americans.

Among them are:

The unconscionable debt we are leaving them.

The obliteration of male and female as separate and distinct categories — and the sexual confusion that is left in its wake. 

The emasculation of men and the de-feminization of women.

The undermining of the value of marriage. 

The receiving of indoctrination, rather than education, in most schools from elementary through graduate. 

The inability to celebrate being American.

We have omitted one of the items on his list: “The lack of God and religion in their lives — and the consequent search for meaning in the wrong places.” Of course we do not agree with him about that. We deplore religion. And as for “meaning” – it is as we make or perceive it. But as usual with this writer, we agree with him to a large extent, so we overlook his religious belief.

He goes on:   

Tragically and ironically, each one of these was brought on by the very group many young people identify with: the left.

You can add the left’s tearing down of heroes to the list.

This came to mind this past month, when world-famous astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a year on board the International Space Station, among other space-related achievements, tweeted the following message in commenting on the deep divisions in American politics: “One of the greatest leaders of modern times, Sir Winston Churchill, said, ‘In victory, magnanimity.’ I guess those days are over.”

He was then widely attacked on social media — for quoting former British Prime Minister Churchill and deeming him a great leader. According to the trolls, Kelly is now in league with the hateful, racist Winston Churchill.

As I repeatedly point out, if you do not understand the left is a wholly destructive force whose primary mission is to tear down the leading institutions and individuals of the Western world, you do not understand the left.

Thus, to many — perhaps most — young Americans, the Founding Fathers of America were not the giants you and I believe them to be. They were rich, racist, misogynistic white men. Now it is Churchill’s turn to be torn down. It means nothing to the left that he led the world in fighting the greatest racist of all time, Adolf Hitler, and the greatest racist ideology of all time, Nazism. …

Those on the left regard themselves as Ubermenschen, superior to all those who lived before them and all those who differ with them today.

But the worst part of the Scott Kelly story is the astronaut’s immediate reaction to the negative tweets: “Did not mean to offend by quoting Churchill. My apologies. I will go and educate myself further on his atrocities, racist views which I do not support. …”

In Kelly’s view, Winston Churchill went from “one of the greatest leaders of modern times” to a man whose “atrocities and racist views” he will further educate himself on.

You know why? Because in America today, the greatest fear is fear of the left.

Are we all too afraid of it to speak and act against it?

Revolted and appalled by it as we are, are we just capitulating to it, as much of Europe has to the Left-Islam alliance?

We are lucky to have a leader in President Trump who is not afraid of it. Millions of Europeans are inspired by him to start fighting against their subjugation. We need to be his soldiery.

As in all wars, total loyalty to your side is essential if you are to win. At present, there are no good Democrats – however personally nice an individual member of the Democratic Party might be, however out of sympathy with its Leftism.

The nastiness of the Democrats now is a foretaste of how vile they will be with any power they get.

 

It seems that many vocal Democrats have no idea what the Nazis did.

To say that President Trump, who is as far from being an anti-Semite, or racist of any sort, as anyone could be, is “like Hitler”, is slander. And that is nasty. But what is far worse is that such a comparison normalizes and exonerates Adolf Hitler, one of the most evil men who ever had the power to destroy millions – and did.    

Dennis Prager writes at the Daily Signal:

The fools who compare Trump to Hitler and the Nazis have utterly trivialized the Holocaust. As everyone who isn’t on the left knows, there is nothing morally analogous between the way the last three presidential administrations dealt with some children of immigrants who are in the country illegally and what the Nazis did to Jewish children.

American children are routinely separated from their parent when that parent is arrested, and if the arrestee is a single parent, the child is taken into government custody until other arrangements can be made. With regard to immigrants who are in the country illegally, the only way to avoid separation is to place the children in detention along with their arrested parent(s).

But this was expressly forbidden by the most left-wing court in America — the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — if detention lasts longer than 20 days, as it nearly always does when either a not-guilty plea or an asylum claim is made.

Moreover, as awful as separation from a parent is, these children were not treated like animals in cages but transferred to the care of relatives or foster homes, or housed with other detained children where they were provided with room, board, education, sports facilities, etc.

By contrast, Jewish children separated from their parents by Nazi guards were sent to gas chambers to die a gruesome, painful death by their lungs being filled with poisonous gas. And their parents almost always eventually suffered the same fate unless they were worked, starved, or tortured to death.

Comparing the two is not only a trivialization of the Holocaust; it is actually a form of Holocaust denial.

If Jewish children were treated by the Nazis the same way Central American children have been by America, then everything we know about the Holocaust is false. …

For its devotees, Leftist politics takes precedence over everything else: over conscience, knowledge, patriotism, family, history, fact, truth.

The Anti-Defamation League, which once defended Jewish interests, is becoming just another leftist interest group. …

In discussing the condition of children dragged illegally into the US by their parents, or by smugglers and traffickers to whom their parents have sold them, Lefists have blamed the Trump administration – and the president personally – for their being held in detention and separated from their mothers.

[The Anti-Defamation League] made a direct comparison to the Holocaust. …

Leftism has poisoned much of American Jewish life. That is the primary reason, as reported in the just released American Jewish Committee poll, American and Israeli Jews are so divided on so many issues.

There were rabbis who announced they fasted when Trump was elected. Non-Orthodox synagogues around America sat shiva (the religious mourning period for a deceased immediate family member) when Trump won. And the Hebrew Union College, the Reform Jewish movement’s rabbinical seminary, had an Israel-hating writer as this year’s graduation speaker. …

To their credit, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Zionist Organization of America, and a few other organizations did condemn those who equate America under Trump with Nazi Germany. But most Jewish organizations kept quiet, offered tepid caution, or actually echoed the sentiment. …

But here is real comfort: If the Left keeps on smearing nearly half its fellow Americans as Nazis, it will assure more Republican victories this coming November.