Dennis Prager explains the eternal truths bestowed by God
The following featured post does not necessarily express the views of The Plain Truth. We are sharing other opinions and will sometimes offer a commentary on anything we may disagree with.
The term “Judeo-Christian values” is frequently used. I am one who uses it.
I do so for the same reason the late great British prime minister Margaret Thatcher did: “The truths of the Judaic-Christian tradition,” she said, “are infinitely precious, not only, as I believe, because they are true, but also because they provide the moral impulse which alone can lead to that peace, in the true meaning of the word, for which we all long. … There is little hope for democracy if the hearts of men and women in democratic societies cannot be touched by a call to something greater than themselves.”
Mrs. Thatcher was a believing Christian. I am a believing Jew. While we have some religious beliefs in common, we have different theologies. But we have the same core values. And in societal terms, moral values are far more important than theologies.
That is why traditionally religious Protestants, Catholics, Mormons and Jews are aligned on almost every important social issue.
Here are 10 of those values.
No. 1: There is one God. That God is the God introduced to the world by the Hebrew Bible – the source of one universal morality.
No. 2: The Hebrew Bible (the only Bible Jesus knew and which he frequently cited) introduced the most revolutionary moral idea in history: that there are objective moral truths just as there are mathematical and scientific truths. Without God as the source of moral standards, there is no moral truth; there are only moral opinions.
No. 3: Because there are moral truths, good and evil are the same for all people.
No. 4: God – not man, not government, not popular opinion, not a democratic vote – is the source of our rights. All men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” declares the American Declaration of Independence.
No. 5: The human being is “created in the image of God.” Therefore, each human life is precious. Therefore, race is of no significance, since we are all created in God’s image and God has no race.
No. 6: The world is based on a divine order, meaning divinely ordained distinctions. Among these divine distinctions are God and man, man and woman, human and animal, good and evil, nature and God, and the holy and the profane.