Truth is Not Desired by the Left

While probably no former time tolerated so many diverse opinions on religious or philosophical matters, factual truth, if it happens to oppose a given group’s profit or pleasure, is greeted today with greater hostility than ever before . . . The facts I have in mind are publicly known, and yet the same public that knows them can successfully, and often spontaneously, taboo their public discussion and treat them as though they were what they are not—namely, secrets.

Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics”

Lives of Married Couples vs Cohabiting Couples

Married couples have the possibility of maturing and evolving, but cohabitating couples typically succumb to relational inertia. Without the foundation of marriage vows and shared selflessness, they cannot build anything stable. They live “day to day,” and have to shut out the possibility of planning for the future because that future may not exist, and, theoretically, they should have everything they want already. …

People who cohabitate believe they will have the best of both the single and married life. They believe that they will have the freedom of single people, paying their own way, leading their own life, and having the option to leave, while enjoying the stability of married people, having steady company each night. In reality, they usually have the opposite: they are not free, and it is not stable. This is because people who have decided to live together cannot simply break up as though they were only dating. Cohabitation is commitment without commitment, and people invest a great deal of themselves (their time, their emotions, and their money) into a relationship when moving in together—even if they say and imagine otherwise. After a few months, or a few years, it is far easier to keep things intact than breaking up a bad relationship, so nothing changes.

Moreover, people who cohabitate for so long have increasingly fewer options available to them once they break up. Instead of dating and meeting different people in their 20s, they loafed around with a subpar mate and let the best years of their life pass them by. Once they seriously look for a spouse in their 30s, they will have to tote around some heavy personal baggage.

Auguste Meyrat, How Cohabitation Traps People Into Using Each Other

Do Not Base Romantic Relationships on Practicality

Forming or maintaining a relationship on the basis of practicality may serve well with classmates and coworkers, but this will not do for romantic relationships, which actually do require romance. Once practicality takes root as the couple’s primary concern, short-term material goods (money, chores, schedule, sex) supersede long-term immaterial goods (virtue, understanding, life goals, general happiness). In the practical arrangement of cohabitation, two people will mutually seek to maximize their own interests through each other. This may have the appearance of marriage, but it is only a parody: the love and generosity one would expect devolves into lust and greed.

By turning people in on themselves and their own interests, the focus on practicality essentially objectifies both parties in the relationship. Consider the analogy some give for cohabitation: just as one would test-drive a car before buying it, one should live (and sleep) with another person before deciding to marry. What, exactly, are people imagining when they think this? Do they really think they can test-drive a person by living with him or her for however many months or years? Only if they view other people as objects to be used and marriage as a material investment that will likely lose value over time.

Auguste Meyrat, How Cohabitation Traps People Into Using Each Other

When Children Do Not Honor Parents

A society in which children do not honor their parents will rapidly lose the means through which the society’s culture, religion, and ethics can be transmitted, and thus will soon disintegrate.

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Biblical Literacy, pg.431

Cults Separate Families

New religions usually want to alienate children from parents. When one thinks of cults, one of the first associations is the attempt to drive a wedge between parents and children.

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Biblical Literacy, pg.430

Fear Those Who Do Not Fear God

One major lesson the twentieth century teaches us is that one should particularly fear those who fear not God. A common characteristic of this century’s three most murderous leaders — Hitler, Stalin, and Mao — has been contempt for the notion of a God who punishes evil behavior. Few people are more dangerous than those who combine passionate hatreds with a lack of belief in a God whose primary demand of human beings is ethical behavior.

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Biblical Literacy, pg.416

A Society Without Capital Punishment

A society that lets premeditated murderers live—let alone paroles them from prison, as commonly occurs today—is, from the Bible’s perspective a polluted culture for “blood pollutes the land, and the land can have no expiation for blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who sheds it” (Numbers 35:33).

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Biblical Literacy, pg.407

Swords and Plowshares

History teaches us that he who beats his sword into plowshares usually ends up plowing for those who kept their swords.

Charles Pellegrino, cited by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Biblical Literacy, pg.286-287

Mercy?

Whoever shows mercy to the cruel ultimately will be cruel to those deserving of mercy.

Simon ben Lakish, 3rd Century Rabbi.

Pity?

People who don’t show pity to others, crave it for themselves.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize winner. Cited by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Biblical Literacy, pg.12

Homosexuality in the Catholic Church

The sexual abuse of boys by Catholic clergy is now a mushroom cloud hanging over the Church. … But the Church invited this scandal when it began allowing homosexuals to enter its seminaries in the 1960s. They did so because of the difficulty of recruiting young men into the priesthood who quite naturally wanted to marry and have families. As more and more homosexuals flooded seminaries and then went into the priesthood, a culture of homosexuality was fostered in the church with all its attendant pathologies.

Bryan Fischer, The Inescapable Link Between Homosexuality and Pedophilia