More Prager

I'm continuing to pick out some interesting comments by Dennis Prager in his book Still the Best Hope. His subtitle is "Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph," and by this he means conservative, traditional American values as opposed to those on the Left. Here are some more thoughtful comments:

1. (When speaking about global warming). I choose to join the skeptics because an extraordinary number of scientists – tens of thousands – considered the prognostications to be either outright wrong or greatly exaggerated; because I'm not prepared to wreck the Western world's economy, which is already on the brink of debt-caused collapse; because computer models predicting what may happen in half a century are not compelling; because climate has always changed (sometimes dramatically) without any human influence; because climate is extremely complex and quite beyond anyone's current ability to predict with certitude; and because the people pushing this thesis have been wrong regarding every crisis and hysteria they have heretofore asked the rest of us to believe in.

2. It seems to be a law of life that those who do not confront the greatest evils will confront lesser ones.

3. Virtually everything Leftism has touched it has made worse – morals, religion, art, education from elementary school to university, and the economic condition of the welfare states, it created.

4. Religion in the West raised all the great questions of life: Why are we here? Is their purpose to existence? Were we deliberately made? Is there something after death? Are morals objective or only a matter of personal preference? Do rights come from the state or from the creator? And religion gave positive responses: we are here because a benevolent God made us, there is ultimate purpose to life, good and evil are real, death is not the end, human rights are inherent since they come from God.

Secularism drains all this out of life. No one made us. Death is the end. We are no more significant than any other creatures. We are the result of chance. Make up your own meaning because life has none. Good and evil are ultimately euphemisms for "I like" and "I dislike."

5. As G. K . Chesterton noted at the end of the 19th century, when people stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.