Another problem with the view that you don’t need God to believe that murder is wrong is that a lot of people haven’t shared your view. And you don’t have to go back very far in history to prove this. In the twentieth century millions of people in Communist societies and under Nazism killed about one hundred million people – and that doesn’t count a single soldier killed in war. So, don’t get too confident about people’s ability to figure out right from wrong without a Higher Authority.
The world’s thinking is morally confused because it is informed by the morally confused.
Gratitude takes effort; resentment is effortless.
Gratitude: Only when people remember the good others have done for them will they have gratitude. Unfortunately, however, most people remember the bad people have done to them far longer than the good. Or to put it another way, gratitude takes effort; resentment is effortless.
There were slave traders, Nazis, and Communists who were compassionate in their personal lives, but all of them told, and most of them believed, some great lie that enabled them to participate in a great evil. Black slavery was made possible in large measure by the lie that blacks were innately inferior to whites.
Identity without democracy is totalitarian; democracy without identity is weak and self-betraying.
Individuals initiate mass evil, but they need the collaboration of many people to carry it out.
Muslim religious leaders – from Al-Azhar in Cairo to local imams throughout the world – need to say exactly what Pope Francis said to the Catholic members of the Mafia: ‘Any Muslim who commits an act of terror – that is, deliberately murders civilians of any nationality or religion – goes to hell.
There are far more kind and honest people than there are courageous people.
Left-wing policies don’t stop the rich from being rich, they stop the non-rich from getting rich.
A rabbi challenged his followers one day: “Where does God exist?” Puzzled by what almost seemed to be a heretical question, they answered: “God exists everywhere.” “No,” the rabbi responded: “God exists wherever man lets Him in.
Religious Americans donate more and volunteer more time to charitable institutions than do secular Americans.
One of humanity’s most common character traits is ingratitude.
Blessed are You God, ruler of the world, Who created man in wisdom and created within him numerous orifices and spaces. It is known and revealed before You that if one of them should open when it should close or one of them should close when it should open, it would be impossible for us to exist. Blessed are You God, Who heals all mankind and does wonders.
The Ten Commandments are preoccupied with goodness. Each commandment is a moral tour de force. Together they present the most compelling plan ever devised for a better life and good world. Yet, they were written – and in the eyes of hundreds of millions, revealed by the Creator – three thousand years ago. The Ten Commandments are what began humanity’s long, arduous journey toward moral progress.
The next time you hear someone cite, ‘Do not kill’ when quoting the sixth commandment, gently but firmly explain that it actually says, ‘Do not murder.
When it comes to fighting evil, the left is almost pacifist.
That’s the great question: Who sees the miracles of daily life? And the answer is: Whoever chooses to see.
The best way to combat racism is to have blacks and whites relate to one another as individuals, rather than as racial abstractions... It becomes much harder to make a nasty generalization about another group after you have spent time in the home of one if its members.
God gave the Ten Commandments in the no-man’s land of a desert rather than in the land of Israel, to signify these laws do not just belong to one people, but to all humanity.