Maintaining parental authority—of one’s mother as much as one’s father—is central to maintaining an orderly civilization. That is why cults and totalitarian movements seek to sever parental authority. Parental authority is also a gateway to divine authority. One who honors his parents’ authority is considerably more likely to honor God’s authority.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.419
The unhappy…often seek to destroy their societies. The primary reason is that they attribute their unhappiness to society, not to their own attitudes and choices, the tragedies that periodically darken even happy lives, or their own inability or unwillingness to improve their lot in life.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.408.
[A] consequence of devaluing virginity has been the devaluing of marriage. Until the latter half of the twentieth century, one reason men married was that marriage provided the one socially acceptable way to have sex on a regular basis. It was not the only reason men got married—religion and society made marriage and family central values—but now that A) society does not promote marriage, B) religion is dying, and C) many men can get sex with no commitment, fewer Western (and Asian) men and women are marrying than ever before.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.350
[F]reedom is possible only with moral law. Free people must discipline themselves, or they will end up losing their freedom. Why? Because when people do not control themselves, they will end up having others control them. They will either end up in prison or controlled by tyrants. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, societies abhor chaos—and absence of law and order. Therefore, if individuals will not control themselves, others will. Those others will either be foreign tyrants or indigenous tyrants.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.266
Virtually nothing is as significant to a good life as gratitude. Gratitude is the mother of both happiness and goodness. The ungrateful can be neither happy nor good. All happy people and all good people are grateful people. Anything that undermines gratitude undermines happiness and goodness. And nothing undermines gratitude as much as taking something or someone for granted.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.155
Whether or not we believe in God, we should regard the hardships of our lives as tests of our characters. Though we are not free to choose our hardships, we are free to choose how we react to them.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.151
It is so injurious to society when children stop honoring their parents that this the only one of the Ten Commandments that states a reward for obeying it: “that you may long endure, and that you may fare well, in the land the the Lord you God is assigning to you.” The warning is clear: if children in your society stop honoring their parents, you will not fare well, and your society will not long endure.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.98
In the modern era, American and other Western children study neither the Bible nor the literature of the great classic minds. The result is more and more well-educated people who are devoid of wisdom. This why universities became centers of foolishness. The great American thinker William F. Buckley famously said, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.81-82
A person of average intelligence can have a great deal of wisdom; many do. A person of high intelligence can be a fool; many are. Given how much more important wisdom is than intelligence in leading both a moral and happy life, wisdom is far more important than intelligence. Yet precisely because people so value intelligence, wisdom has become less valued.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.81
[M]any people act as if intelligence is the most important quality in a human being. With regard to children, for example, middle- and upper-middle-class parents usually boast most about their intelligence: how “bright” they are, how well they do in school, and what university they attended. Few parents say to their child, “I care more about your character than about your grades.” Nor do most parents teach their children that clear thinking and common sense are more important than brains.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.80.
There is…a level of cruelty and evil that transcends the word “sin.” All evil is sin, but not all sin merits the word “evil.” Where exactly that line is crossed cannot be defined. But to deny it exists is to declare all sins equal and all sinners evil, which empties the word “evil” of its horror and renders it superfluous.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, p.78
There appears to be little correlation between people’s well-being and how much they complain. Many people who live in the freest and most affluent countries—and who themselves are particularly affluent—complain more than their less affluent fellow citizens and more than people living in poor countries. Similarly, it is impossible to gauge from people’s levels of complaint how much they have actually suffered. Many individuals who have suffered terribly almost never complain, and many who have had it comparatively easy constantly complain.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.25
The combination of secularism, higher education, and affluence seems to produce more people who are afraid of emotional pain, and even of marrying and having children.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg. 14
Universities…aim to dismantle the status of luminaries who works celebrate traditional values. For example, in 2016, the English department of the University of Pennsylvania removed its long-standing portrait of William Shakespeare, the greatest English-language writer. The reason was that Shakespeare was white, European, male, and presumably heterosexual. The portrait was replaced by that of a black lesbian poet (Audre Lorde), who replaced Shakespeare because she was not white, not male, and not heterosexual. In the secular university, considerations of race, gender, and class have replaced considerations of artistic and intellectual excellence.
Education uncoupled from God becomes a false—and therefore dangerous—god. Western universities were founded to pursue truth and excellence. American universities were founded almost exclusively by Christians rooted in the Bible, especially the Torah.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.73-74
One does not have to believe in God to recognize that as America has become increasingly secular—that is, as God has become smaller and smaller—the state has become bigger and bigger. In order to prevent moral chaos society must inculcate moral accountability in its citizens. And as people hold themselves less accountable for their behavior to God (specifically, the God of the Bible), the more they will be accountable for their behavior to the state. In order to create a free country—and America did become the freest country in world history—America was designed to have people morally accountable to God. This is the reason John Adams, the “father of the Constitution” and the second president of the United States, wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral an religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.67
[N]o good society would want to ascribe to human authority—whether king or a state—the power one ascribes to God. That is why America, the freest country ever founded, was the only country founded on the principle of limited government, which was understood to be possible only if the country’s citizens felt morally obligated to God (specifically, the God of the Ten Commandments). Thus, one of the iconic symbols of the United States of America has always been the Liberty Bell, upon which is inscribed one sentence, a verse from the Torah (Leviticus 25:20): “Proclaim LIBERTY Throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.” The American Founders identified God with liberty.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.66-67
It is the job of parents, teachers, and society at large to connect each generation with its nation’s past. Just as a person ceases to exist as that person if he loses his memory, a nation ceases to exist if it loses its memory. This is happening to many Western countries at this time—without their people even going into exile as the Jews did.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pgs. 48-49
This is among the most important and relevant commandments in the Torah: “Do not forget…. Make them [the events you saw] known to your children and to your children’s children.”
If there is one overriding reason Jews have survived for more than three thousand years—the great majority of those years spent exiled from their national homeland—it is that they preserved their national memories.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, Pg. 48
Leftism is the attempt to destroy the past — every value and every institution, the good as well as what it regards as the bad.
That is why leftists, by definition, hate conservatism. Conservatism seeks to conserve the best from the past. The Left seeks to destroy the past, including the best.
The first of the modern left-wing revolutions, the French Revolution, quite consciously sought to destroy every major institution and value of French society — not just the monarchy but God, religion, the legal system, traditional notions of good and evil, the calendar, the old way of telling time, the old weights and measures, and even the names of the days of the week. In other words, the past. Just like the Left in contemporary America, the leftists of the French Revolution toppled statues — in their case, the statues of every king of France.
The next major left-wing revolution, the Russian, did the same. As the Soviet dissident joke went, “In the Soviet Union the future is known; it’s the past which is always changing.”
Now you can begin to understand leftism.
Dennis Prager, Can You Define Leftism?
Without wisdom, all the good intentions in the world are likely to be worthless. Many of the horrors of the twentieth century were supported by people with good intentions who lacked wisdom.
Therefore, because they have so much wisdom, the Torah and the rest of the Bible are indispensable. We live in an age, however, that has little wisdom; many people do not even value it. People value knowledge and intelligence, but not wisdom. This lack of wisdom—certainly in America and the rest of the West—is directly related to the decline in biblical literacy. In the American past, virtually every home, no matter how poor, owned a Bible, which was the primary vehicle by which parents passed on wisdom to their children.
In the modern period, however, people have increasingly replaced Bible-based homes and Bible-based schools with homes and schools in which the Bible plays no role. As a result, we are less wise and more morally confused.
Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, pg.xviii
