Animals Have NO Rights

Animals, by their nature, don’t have free will (the power of self-determination), and they don’t act with any awareness of moral responsibility. Without such a capacity, animals don’t have rights.  Because humans have such a capacity by nature (through God’s gracious gift of the divine image), this confers upon them a certain moral shield or moral protection which animals don’t have.

Paul Copan, How Do You Know You’re Not Wrong? Pg.144

The Right Word

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

Mark Twain

We Are Living in "1984"

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.

George Orwell, 1984

This perfectly sums up the ideology of the LEFT today.

The Ideology of the LEFT

For the common run of mankind, I suspect, the highest earthly pleasure is self-righteous moral infatuation.

Roger Kimball, “Shall We Defend Our Common History?,” Imprimis, February 2019

Librarians and College Presidents Set to Destroy Cultural Inheritance

In the bad old days, librarians and college presidents were people who sought to protect the past, that vast storehouse of offensive attitudes and behavior that also just so happens to define our common inheritance. In our own more enlightened times, many librarians and college presidents collude in its effacement.

Roger Kimball, “Shall We Defend Our Common History?,” Imprimis, February 2019

Acts of Cowardice

It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.

Charles Peguy.

The World Hates Non-Conformity

The world is a society of rebels. It finds it hard to tolerate those who are in joyful fellowship with Christ. There is a sense in which believers are aliens. They do not belong. They are different, and the world hates the difference. … Says [William] Barclay, “To put it at its widest—the world always suspects nonconformity. It likes a pattern; it likes to be able to label a person and to put him in a pigeonhole. Anyone who does not conform to the pattern will certainly meet trouble. It is even said that if a hen with different markings is put among hens that are all alike, the others will peck her to death.”

David J. MacLeod, “Destroying Our Illusions: What the Bible Says About the World: A Meditation on John 12:31,” The Emmaus Journal, Vol.5/No.1, pg.16-17

The Worldview of Humanism

Humanists claims to be humanitarian, i.e., caring about people. Yet as a world view humanism is atheistic and secular. This world is all there is. There is no divine revelation. Mankind is the only source of morals. The humanist will stand one night outside a prison protesting capital punishment, yet the next morning he will stand outside an abortion clinic defending the right of a doctor to kill and unborn baby. He loves humanity, yet he will fight for legislation to protect 40 or 50 spotted owls—legislation that will cost 50,000 people their jobs.

David J. MacLeod, “The Consecrated Christian and Conformity to the World: An Exposition of Romans 12:1-2,” The Emmaus Journal, Vol. 4/No. 2, pg.113

State Education System

A general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is inefficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.

John Stewart Mill, “On Liberty,” 1859

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