The oft-cited charge that belief in God and religion has led to more wars and evil than anything else is as untrue as it is widely believed. Secular movements in the twentieth century alone killed and enslaved more people than any other movement in any century in history.
The Left would like to believe that racism – not the breakdown of marriage and family, the absence of religious norms, a degraded popular culture, and other issues that all concern values – is the primary impediment to black progress in America. Therefore the Left declares racism the greatest impediment to black progress.
Nearly every African who has given the issue thought knows that America is not only not racist, it is the best place for an African to immigrate to. That is why more black Africans have come to America voluntarily than came to America as slaves – a statistic that virtually no college student is allowed to know.
If nothing is holy, nothing is profane.
Fear of God is a liberating emotion, freeing one from a disabling fear of evil, powerful people. This needs to be emphasized because many people see fear of God as onerous rather than liberating.
Political correctness is as coersive as any right-wing dogma, but it lescapes the tyranny charge because it locates its demands precisely upon feelings.
If the question is ‘How do we stop enormous evils in the world?’ the answer is, unfortunately, quite frequently ‘War.’ Nazi and Japanese racist genocide were ended by soldiers shooting people, and by bombers bombing people, not by people who believed ’war is not the answer.
Almost every major news medium on earth is either center-left or left. And the left around the world loathes America.
One of the saddest facts of the human condition is that most people follow the herd. Sometimes, of course, the herd is morally right. That, obviously, is the ideal. But most good is achieved by individuals who have the courage to part from the majority when it is morally wrong. In addition, people tend to act worse in groups than when alone. The herd, not to mention the mob, emboldens people to do bad things they would rarely do if they had no such support.
I often wonder if I am entitled to be as happy as I am, given the amount of suffering in the world.
The left is far more concerned with attacking America – its alleged racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia and economic inequality – than with fighting Islamism.
The Arab world has no peer when it comes to hatred – of the Western world generally, and especially of Israel. Israel-hatred and its twin, Jew-hatred, are the oxygen that the Arab world breathes.
We owe it to our husband or wife, our fellow workers, our children, our friends, indeed to everyone who comes into our lives, to be as happy as we can be.
It is almost impossible to do good without wisdom. All the good intentions in the world are likely to be worthless without wisdom. Many of the horrors of the twentieth century were supported by people with good intentions who lacked wisdom.
What does it mean to “carry” or to “misuse” God’s name? It means committing evil in God’s name. And that God will not forgive. Why not? When an irreligious person commits evil, it doesn’t bring God and religion into disrepute. But when religious people commit evil, especially in God’s name, they are not only committing evil, they are doing terrible damage to the name of God.
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.