|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Judaism and Christianity are the only two religions that share a sacred text and a fundamental set of values. These values created and sustained Western Civilization. But now many want to discard them. If we do, at what cost?
Don’t miss this vital video message below:
In order to eliminate spam comments that have historically flooded our comments section, comments containing certain keywords will be held in a moderation queue. All comments by legitimate commenters will be manually approved by a member of our team. If your comment is “Awaiting Moderation,” please give us up to 24 hours to manually approve your comment. Please do not re-post the same comment.
A Project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center
Make A Donation
Thank you Dennis for sharing your view. As usual some of the values you cite have their origin in Greco-Roman philosophy. They are foundational to Western thought and I’m glad you incorporate them in your version of religion.
The problem is that not all Christians incorporate these truths; there are variants of Judaism and Christianity that are problematic. I’ll wish you well in convincing them that your conservative take is the right one. Best wishes.
“At 38 seconds Mr. Prager says, “Mrs. Thatcher was a believing Christian and I am a believing Jew. While we have different theologies, we have the same core values. And as far as society is concerned moral values are far more important than theologies.”
Who is he trying to kid, himself? I can’t figure out if Prager is really that stupid or simply dishonest. If conflicting and opposing theologies don’t matter then conflicting and opposing religions don’t matter, then religion doesn’t seriously matter. If you do away with the crucial importance of theology, you have eviscerated religion.
How many hundreds of thousands of Christians killed and persecuted each other over precisely that? Over interpretation and exegesis of theology, over orthodoxy? Prager HAS to know the bloody, brutal, history of that conflict.
The fact is this contemporary and modern truce between conflicting theologies that exists today in American society was made possible not by Judaism or Christianity, not by religious faith, but by the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, by the ascendancy of reason over faith.
One of your real problems is Prager has a following, a career and a life. People know who he is, and people like him. His videos are seen the world over. He is respected.
Unlike Prager, you have no following, no career, and no life, except for your endless phony Objectivist spam.
You try to make a career by being small-minded, petty and insulting. How’s it working out for you?
Does popularity make a man great and virtuous? Adolf Hitler had a following Prager can only envy.
” It is only a [second-hander] who could conceive of such absurdity as hoping to win an intellectual argument by hinting: “But people won’t like you!” – Ayn Rand
I can’t believe you just compared Prager to Hitler (your favorite fall guy in your attempt smear anyone you don’t like). You’ve even attempted it with me and Lutheranism.
Ah yes, the second hander….your latest favorite insult. You are the ultimate second hander. You are the last person anyone would call great and virtuous. You are simply a jealous little man.
You will never have the influence Prager has. And it has been eating you alive for years.
At 1:20 Mr. Prager says, “The Hebrew Bible introduced the most revolutionary moral idea in history. That there are objective moral truths just as there are mathematical and scientific truths.”
Objective moral truths require and rest upon the Law of Identity, in other words an immutable, never changing, eternal, reality. A reality that is independent of any consciousness, human or divine, natural or supernatural. AND a reasoning mind capable of perceiving and making sense of that reality.
Judeo-Christianity does not begin with an immutable and stable reality but with the will of a God. The will of a supernatural consciousness that can create, destroy, change, or contradict himself and the reality that he creates at will and whim.
For example, this supernatural consciousness first tells Abraham you must murder your son to please me, whatever I will is the good, whatever I will is the moral, don’t listen to your reasoning mind or the facts of reality, listen to me and obey me, because I know better than you, and anyway I’m the one that creates the facts of reality at will and whim”. Then this God changes his will and his whim, and tells Abraham in effect, “Oh Abe, I was just kidding, don’t murder your boy”. Fundamentally, in religion, there are no objective moral truths, only the whim of God.
Dear THX 1138,
You misrepresent, or, more likely (due to being a person without faith, fail to comprehend, the situation in relation to Abraham and Isaac.
This event pictured God’s willingness to sacrifice His own son for the world of mankind.
For Abraham, this was a test of faith. God had given promise to Abraham that by means of Isaac the promised seed (Christ Jesus) would come. The promise was made *before* God instructed Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. (Gen. 17:17-19).
Abraham, in faith, offered up his beloved son. He reckoned that God could raise him back to life (because of God’s promise – and God cannot lie). (Heb. 11:17).
Again, I appreciate that for someone without faith this is impossible to comprehend. At any rate, Abraham passed the test and through him the promised Messiah (Jesus Christ) came into the world. Abraham is still to receive more blessings in the future – these blessings he saw through eyes of faith. Again, impossible for an Atheist (particularly those with a swine like disposition) to comprehend these sacred secrets, these pearls of great price.
You forget that people of the Renaissance were devout Christians and the intellectuals of the Enlightenment arose only in the Christian West, not out of thin air, and nowhere else. The killing of God occurred later, not during the Enlightenment. The philosophers of the Enlightenment were against the Church, not God, as can be seen by the language used by out founding fathers.
Philosophy, Science, Mathematics, the Arts as we know it, all exploded in the deeply Christian West.
Jeffery, I’m glad you wrote the “Christian West” and left out the “Christian East” i.e. Orthodoxy. I hope that was intended. After the schism, Aquinas championed Aristotle like no writer before (or since). This laid the groundwork for the Renaissance/Enlightenment which failed to touch Orthodox nations. This is why we also need to remember our Greco-Roman inheritance.
Thumbs up. We remember our Greco-Roman inheritance because of Christianity.
Mr. Wyss, you forget that correlation is not causation.
Mere Christianity, in other words pure Christianity, pure faith devoid of reason, produced the Christian Dark Ages and the Muslim Dark Ages that are still very much with us inside the Muslim mentality.
“What — or who — ended the Middle Ages? My answer is: Thomas Aquinas, who introduced Aristotle, and thereby reason, into medieval culture. In the thirteenth century, for the first time in a millennium, Aquinas reasserted in the West the basic pagan approach. Reason, he said in opposition to Augustine, does not rest on faith; it is a self-contained, natural faculty, which works on sense experience. Its essential task is not to clarify revelation, but rather, as Aristotle had said, to gain knowledge of this world. Men, Aquinas declared forthrightly, must use and obey reason; whatever one can prove by reason and logic, he said, is true. Aquinas himself thought he could prove the existence of God, and he thought that faith is valuable as a supplement to reason. But this did not alter the nature of his revolution. His was the charter of liberty, the moral and philosophical sanction, which the West had desperately needed. His message to mankind, after the long ordeal of faith, was in effect: “It’s all right. You don’t have to stifle your mind anymore. You can think.”…
What then deserves the credit for the new development — the age-old belief or the new philosophy? What is the real intellectual root and protector of human liberty — God or reason?” – Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America”
Hey Moron, you never say that your beloved Christian Dark Ages (which never existed by the way) ended about 450 years ago. But hold on tightly to your imaginary shibboleths.
It’s too bad you will always be stuck in the 15th C.
I just wish I could rationally refute this but I’m at a loss.
There is hope for you, THX.
You are precisely the kind of person for whom Christ came both to seek and to save. Even if you were the only one.
Darling Christian, the devil is in the details, if you look closely the moniker on the comment is “THX 1139” not “THX 1138”.
It’s not me “THX 1138” who posted the comment. Maybe I’ll comment later on this video as it is Prager is either extremely stupid or extremely dishonest, probably both.
I would bet it is you.
Do you really think this narcissist will ever have his “road to Damascus” moment. And if he did, I honestly believe he would try and reason his way out of it.
It is not reasonable.
But neither is Romans 5:8 “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
Or Matthew 9:10 Later, as Jesus was dining at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with Him and His disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they asked His disciples, “Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
12 On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 13 But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Oh go ahead. I knew you couldn’t rationally control yourself.
Very essential and frank. I admire his conciseness and clarity. Religiously I am an agnostic but am indeed horrified by foolish atheists who ramble on and on about how the Bible is not scientific.. I always liked what Galileo quoted Cardinal Baronio had to say: “La bibbia ci insegna come si vadia al cielo, e non come vadia il cielo”, which goes likes this; “The Bible says not how the heavens go, but how to go to heaven.”
Hi Jeffrey, Yes, I too admire his conciseness and clarity. It takes courage to speak of moral absolutes these days. And of course, didn’t the whole tragedy we are presently living in begin when our first parents decided that they did not want to accept their Creator’s standards of good and bad, but decided to set their own?
There is one important point i would want to add, in view of what you said about heaven. Doesn’t the Bible promise us life forever, right here on the earth? Jesus famously said that the meek would inherit “the earth”. The earth, not heaven. And when he said that wasn’t he confirming the same promises in the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament?
The sacred text being referred to is clearly the Hebrew Scriptures. Jewish people reject Christ as Messiah, and therefore also reject Christian Scriptures. The values of a Christian are based primarily on Christ’s words and example, and those of his Apostles.
The Jewish nation rejected and executed Christ, and its religious leaders insult Christ, etc., in the Talmud (the real source of Jewish morality), so it’s really not correct to refer to Judeo-Christian values’. Christian should recognise only Christian values, and not be swayed by the crafty Talmudist deceptions.
Ah! Now you’re talking! Gimme that ole time religion! Before the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. When Jews and Christians took their theologies seriously and were at each other’s throats!
This modern, diluted, watered-down, unserious, Judeo-Christianity is pretty damn boring. If people took their conflicting and opposing theologies seriously again, we could be living in interesting times again, interesting times like the 300 years of bloody Christian wars and brutal Christian theocracies that were the Reformation and the Counter Reformation.
And the infidel Jews could be put in their proper place, the ghetto.
Gee T.
If it’s boring why don’t you just go back to your lotus flower and leave us “dolts” alone.
Actually, if people took their conflicting and opposing theologies “seriously” again, you would be in big trouble. You act like the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment was the be all and end all in Western Civilization. It wasn’t.
Greek philosophy crumbled like a cheap suit in the face of the spread of Christianity, which absorbed the teachings of your pagan heroes. Your heroes worshipped many Gods. So what is your problem with God? Without Christianity Greek history would resemble those ruins that everyone takes selfies at.
The fact is we do take our theology seriously, just not to your liking. We don’t need religious wars anymore. Those days are past, as much as you would like them to come back. We leave war to the atheists like you.
But it’s nice to know that you think Jews should be put in ghettos, because that is exactly where they would end up in an Objectivist/atheist run world. That is where they ended up in an Objectivist/atheist run world.
And please spare us from your Hitler/Lutheran fantasies.
Dear THX 1138,
I’m certainly not calling for the persecution of any religious group. And I also pointed out to you in past comments (other threads) that there is a great Antichrist ‘Christian’ system that still exists, which is the Papacy.
In the first century the early Church had a problem with Judaizers – those who sought to bring Christians under BONDAGE claiming necessity for the Christian to observe the Mosaic Law. This was (and still is) wrong because Christ fulfilled the Law, and removed it when he gave his life as a ransom.
In this video it is evident that the Jew speaking sees a need for God-based rules (number 7). What else could this be referring to (for the Jew) but the Mosaic Law (and Talmudic rules of their so-called rabbis)?
The Christian is at liberty, but is still bound by conscience towards God and neighbour – obliged to obey the royal law, the law of Christ. — James 2:8; Galatians 6:2
The Christian recognises that works (of Mosaic Law) cannot make them acceptable before God. Only by coming to God on the basis of Christ’s sacrifice can we have standing before God.
Moses was a faithful ‘servant’ (Heb. 3:5); Christ is a ‘son’ over his house. (Heb. 3:6). The Christian, unlike the Jew (still a servant in bondage to the Law of Moses), is dealt with as a son – not a servant. (Heb. 12:7).
Hello Peter, the Inspired Scriptures, both Hebrew and Christian Greek (Old and New Testament), whose writers are all Jewish, have one consistent message from Genesis to Revelation.
But there is a profound difference between Judaism and Christianity. As a Christian, I believe that Jesus is the Messiah promised in the Hebrew Scriptures, as I believe the writers of those Scriptures are telling us the truth. For example, prophecy in the Book of Daniel told the Jews the exact year the Messiah would appear on the earth, and warned what would happen afterwards, as it did.
In contrast, Judaism believes he is a false Messiah. Both sides cannot be right.
Dear sue,
Thanks for that. I completely agree with what you have stated.
God bless.
I listened a 2nd time and asked myself if a progressive “social justice” Christian would disagree with anything Prager said. Interestingly not!
Prager left out property rights, productivity, self-reliance, self-interest and all the virtues/values that were central to our founding. As we descend into dependency and surrender our lives to the government, we need to emphasize how we differ from the left.