More wisdom from Dennis Prager

Here we go again. I'd like to continue listing some interesting comments from Dennis Prager's book called Still the Best Hope. It's an important book that compares the United States with its values against Islam and European-style democratic socialism. Here are some more things Dennis has to say:

1. There never has been a model of non-Muslim equality under Muslim rule. Jews and Christians fared poorly throughout most of their sojourn in the Muslim world.

2. The fact is that America has been the greatest model of liberty, the greatest spreader of liberty, and the greatest preserver of liberty the world has ever known. It believed that it was its mission to spread liberty.

3. Individual liberty exists in inverse proportion to the size of the state. The bigger the government/state, the less liberty the individual has. The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.

4. If people are not morally accountable to an all-powerful state or to a monarch and they are granted an amount of personal freedom that is unprecedented in the history of mankind, they need to be accountable either to themselves – that is, their own hearts and consciences – or to a God who is moral and who judges each individual (and nation).

The first alternative was out of the question for the Founders – and should be out of the question for anyone who doesn't romanticize human nature. The heart is an awful guide to good behavior.

5. The American experiment in liberty was inconceivable to the Founders – and should be inconceivable to everyone today – without God and without God-based, morality-teaching religion.

6. When Leftists make the argument that God and religion are unnecessary, they omit to note that this is only achievable with a strong state.

7. The American Revolution was in essence the political and military expression of a religious movement.

8. If people were basically good, we wouldn't need value; we could rely on the human heart to always do the right thing. But the heart is not a moral compass; it is a generator of emotions. Values are there to overrule our heart, our emotions, our appetites, our weaknesses, and even our often flawed reasoning.

9. When we say that if there is no God, there is no good and evil, we are not saying that an atheist cannot be a good person. We are saying that there is no objective good and evil.

10. While secular government is a good thing, secularism has been devastating for individuals and for societies. On the individual level, among these consequences have been increased unhappiness (all surveys report that religious Americans are happier than secular ones); increased reliance on drugs, sex, alcohol, and mine-numbing entertainment to get through life; moral confusion; a paucity of wisdom (for example, belief in male-female sameness); and a search for substitute religions such as Marxism, socialism, fascism, communism, environmentalism, and pacifism.

Continuing comments from Dennis Prager

I want to continue listing some important quotations from a new book by Dennis Prager – Still the Best Hope.

1. While Europeans and the American Left have more faith in the moral judgment of the United Nations – where Libya under Qaddafi chaired the Human Rights Commission and where dictatorships like Syria and China vote in the Security Council – most Americans have more faith in America.

2. Leftism is concerned with materially transforming society, not with morally transforming individuals.

3. If your primary concerns are expansion of the state, material equality, reduction of American power in the world, making America and Europe secular societies, removal of Judeo-Christian influence, substitution of internationalism for nationalism, and making ethnicity and race important values, the Left has been a wild success.

4. Radical Islam is not, by any means, a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives and sympathizers – according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7% of Muslims, that is, more than 80 million souls – it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It has changed the course of nations and affected the lives of millions.

5. Prager quotes a Muslim writer: Muslims love to live in the US but also love to hate it. Many openly claim that the US is a terrorist state but they continue to live in it. Their decision to live here is testimony that they would rather live here than anywhere else. As an Indian Muslim, I know for sure that nowhere on earth, including India, will I get the same sense of dignity and respect that I have received in the US. No Muslim country will treat me as well as the US has.

6. The most humane societies in the world, all emanate from Judeo-Christian roots. No Koran-based societies have attained the equivalent moral development, not to mention similar levels of liberty or tolerance.

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.

Some more from Prager

In my previous blog I mentioned a new book by Dennis Prager called Still the Best Hope. Here are some more comments from his book, which defends traditional values against assaults from the Left and Islam.

1. Liberals frequently criticize conservatives for fearing change. What we fear is transforming that which is already good.

2. Since the Enlightenment, the secular world has had to believe in man (or "humanity") because if you don't believe in God and you don't believe in humanity, you will despair.

3. The Left has a history of many decent people supporting many bad people doing great harm. Good intentions cause most of the world's great evils.

4. In order to do good in both the personal and social spheres, people need wisdom, common sense, and a moral value system.

5. Those of us who grew up in religious Jewish and Christian schools were taught early in life that our heart is an awful guide to doing what is right, that the human being is essentially flawed, that human nature needs to be constantly controlled, and that the greatest moral insights preceded our birth.

6. Those who value wisdom know that when you give people something for nothing, you produce ungrateful people; that when you obscure the differences between men and women, you end up with many aimless men and angry women; that when you give children "self-esteem" without earning it, you produce narcissists who enter adulthood often incapable of empathy and of handling life; that if you do not destroy evil, if will proliferate; and that if you are kind to the cruel, you will end up being cruel to the kind.

7. If you really want goodness to prevail, wisdom is a key to unlocking it. The heart is not.

8. The most closed-minded people in American and European society today are more likely to be on the Left than in the religious world or on the Right.

9. How do Leftists get elected? The answer is that, through its dominance of the news media, entertainment, media, and educational institutions, the Left is able to successfully demonize the Right. The Left rarely convinces Americans to adopt its views. Rather, it creates a fear of the Right.

10. There is much more racism on the Left than on the Right. The very notion that race is a significant human characteristic – a basic Left-wing tenant – is racist. The notion that whites and black, should not be judged by identical moral standards – or even taught similarly – is also racist.

11. American women have more opportunity and more equality than just about any women in the world today and certainly ever in history. In fact, if either sex is more "oppressed" today, is more likely to be males. If women were incarcerated, let alone murdered, as disproportionately as men are; if only 40% of those getting a bachelors degree were female; if girls dropped out of high school at the rate males do; if females committed suicide as often as – let alone considerably more often than – males do, there would be a national outcry. But for feminists, academics, and CBS News, it is women who are "oppressed."

A powerful book on American values

Dennis Prager is a talk show host, who has just come out with a book called Still the Best Hope. The subtitle to the book says it all: "Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph." It is a look at three world systems, which are currently competing for the world's attention – leftism, Islamism, and American values. He analyzes each, showing the weaknesses of the first to and defending American values is the best way for the world to improve. For the next few blogs I would like to include quotes from this book because I think it's powerful.

1. Prager says there is an American Trinity of values: Liberty, In God We Trust, and E Pluribus Unum. He says, "Liberty represents personal freedom, which according to Americanism is dependent upon small government, free economy, and a God-based society. In God We Trust represents a society that regards its liberty, its human rights, and its moral values as ultimately emanating from God. E Pluribus reprerepresents the American value of a society based on neither ethnicity nor race."

2. "Conservative intellectuals are sometimes wrong, but the list of foolish and dangerous ideas on the Left dwarfs the list of such ideas among conservatives: Marxism; Communism; people are basically good; poverty causes crime; men and women are basically the same; women are as likely to seek and enjoy sex without the prospect of commitment as are men; more government money solves most social problems; America was as responsible for the Cold War as was the Soviet Union; a human fetus has no worth, unless the mother says it does; all things being equal, it is not better for a child to have a mother and a father; humans are just another animal."

3. "A major part of the reason for the foolishness of Leftist ideas is the secular world from which they emanate. Its rejection of the basic book of wisdom of the Western world, the Bible, and its similar rejection of almost all pre-20th century wisdom literature along with its emphasis on the value of "change" have led people to rely on their hearts for insights into life. And the heart is the worst place to find wisdom."