Immoral Ideologies, Intellectual Foolish Beliefs

Nearly every American university was founded to teach young people theology and other subjects. Moral education was deemed the most important form of education, and knowledge of the Bible was assumed to age part of that moral curriculum. By the early-to-mid twentieth century, education, first at universities, then at high schools and elementary schools, was divorced from God and the Bible, and a disproportionately high percentage of secular intellectuals adhered to immoral ideologies and intellectually foolish beliefs.

Nowhere is the belief in education as the road to a moral society more apparent than in some of the later writings of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, an atheist who was deeply committed to moral behavior, published a critique of religion, The Future of an Illusion (the illusion being God and religion). Freud did not fear the breakdown of belief in God would have any moral implications among intellectuals: “Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them, the replacement of religious motives for civilized behavior by other secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively.” 

As Dr. Freud was to witness within ten years of his statement, civilization has as much, if not more, to fear from educated people as from the uneducated. Freud’s fellow Austrian and German intellectuals show no more moral insight or strength than any other group of Germans and Austrians. What Germany lacked during World War II was not enough educated people or, for that matter, artistically sophisticate people but not enough good people.

Many would counter here that Germany lacked enough good people among the religiously educated as well. They would be entirely right. The failure of German Christianity was horrific. But the moral failure of German Christians (with noble exceptions such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer) is almost universally acknowledged—even by virtually all Christians.

On the other hand, the moral failure of secular education and secular intellectuals in Germany is almost universally ignored.

Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Exodus: God, Slavery, and Freedom, pg.229-230