If There Is No God: The Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil by Dennis Prager - 2

DENNIS PRAGER: Since I was your age and younger, I have been preoccupied with one issue: Why do people hurt other people? Or, to put it even more broadly, why do people do evil? I acknowledge that I have abnormal preoccupations. I am sure most of you care about the fact that people hurt other people. But I suspect you don’t walk around preoccupied with it. I was born in 1948, only three years after the Holocaust. I’m a third-generation American. Yet, when I was a kid, from the earliest time I could think, the Holocaust consumed me. When I was about ten, I watched a program on television, and I saw Hitler. I asked my father, “Who is that man?” He said, “He was Hitler, and he killed six million Jews.” He gave me a pretty direct answer.

Now, most kids would think, “Whoa, that’s bad,” and then go on with their day. I thought, “Whoa, that’s bad,” but did not go on with my day and haven’t ever since, even though I lost no relatives in the Holocaust, since they were all in America. The Holocaust is so horrible that you don’t have to be Jewish to wonder, “How did the most civilized country in the world orchestrate such a horror?” Or, to put it philosophically, “How did the country that gave us Beethoven, Bach, Schiller, Thomas Mann, and other unique figures in the sciences and arts also give us Auschwitz?”

Remember, Germany was the most cultured country in Europe. Germany had more orchestras and the highest number of museums per capita of any country. To this day, Germans are among the most cultured of nations. I believe Germany has more bookstores per capita than anywhere else in Europe. Germans read the most, had the most philosophers, had the most artists, had the most musicians, and produced the greatest composers. Not only Bach and Beethoven, but also Schubert, Schumann, and Haydn were all German-Austrian. It’s incredible. They utterly dominated music. Yet, this is the nation that took as many Jews as possible from virtually every country in Europe and shipped them in trains to gas chambers.

I’m not talking to you only as a Jew; I’m talking to you as a human. I didn’t understand: How do people do that? How do people torture? How did Stalin and Mao do it? The Nazis killed six million Jews, and Stalin and Mao killed tens of millions of their own. The communists of Russia killed more than twenty million of their own people in the Gulag. How many of you have heard of the Gulag? If you haven’t, it is a discredit to your education. It should be a word that resounds in your mind.

You see, my problem with Americans is that, because we have been spared much of the suffering the world has known, we have grown up somewhat naïve about humanity. I’m preoccupied by the fact that people can take other people and beat the living daylights out of them for fun. How does that happen? How do you get people who do things like what happened at the yogurt stand in Texas? You probably heard about it; HBO made a series about it. Four teen girls were sitting and eating yogurt, and some guys came in, held them up, and then burned them to death so there would be no evidence. How does a mother feel if her daughters go for yogurt and she finds their ashes the next day?

Don’t you wonder how this happened? A lot of people dismiss it very simply. Do you know what they say? Whoever does those things is “sick.” That’s the comment, the typical American’s response: They’re “sick.” Do you think a massive number of Germans all of a sudden became psychologically ill? Is that what happened? Were all the sadists who worked in the concentration camps sick? Were all the Germans—and all the Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, and others who helped the Germans—sick? Were all the Germans who watched their longtime neighbors being rounded up and sent away sick? You end up labeling so many people sick that you have to wonder how many normal people there are.

Maybe many of the normal are the sick ones. Maybe the few good people who risked their lives to save Jews were the abnormal ones, which, by the way, is a variation on a position I hold. I do believe that goodness is often abnormal. Not psychologically abnormal, but certainly statistically abnormal. More people in Europe helped murder innocent people than helped save innocent people. So, what do you say to that? Was Europe sick?

Look at Africa. In Somalia today, you have millions of Somalians at risk of starving to death, and not because of a drought. It is because of evil people in Somalia. I read in the New York Times that 40 percent of all the food sent into Somalia has already been looted by gangs in Somalia. The efforts to feed the hungry are failing because fellow Africans, fellow Somalians, are starving people to death for political purposes and for whatever other reason they have for doing so.

Do you ever sit down and wonder how this happens? Why do you have to lock the doors to your house every night? Why do we need car alarms? Why do people do so many bad things? Why are most women afraid of walking alone in virtually any of America’s big cities at night? These are the questions that preoccupy me, and that’s why I’m here. I’m not here to have an interesting philosophical or theological debate with you over whether or not there is a God. If people were good, I wouldn’t have come to this event. But I’m not a philosopher. I’m a guy who wants to make sure you can grow up and raise your kids without them being killed.

I’m worried. I live in a city where people once burned a billion dollars’ worth of other people’s businesses because they were angry over a trial verdict. They’re awful human beings. They took the livelihoods of Koreans, blacks, and Hispanics and burned them down, wanting an excuse to commit violence. If you believe that is induced by legitimate grievances, you have seen too many television documentaries. It was primarily gangs with Molotov cocktails, seeing how much of Los Angeles they could burn in a night.

Maybe the concerns I have are more immediate to me than to some of you because of my lifelong preoccupation with good and evil, and because of the misery I’ve seen in so many countries. By the way, I’m not cynical. If I were cynical, why would I come here to talk about goodness? I would just put plenty of locks on my house and keep as many arms in my home as I could. I’m not at all cynical, because I know there are good people. Those who are cynical dismiss goodness. So now you understand where I’m coming from. I’m not focusing on theology; I’m preoccupied with goodness. I’m preoccupied with why people hurt other people and how to stop it.

There is no way to judge cultures. For example, if your culture holds that it is best to have the big meal in the middle of the day and not for supper, I honor that. If your culture holds that you should wear certain types of clothing and not others, I honor that. If your culture has a certain type of music, I honor that.

I love to see and experience diverse cultures. I’ve been to 130 countries. I lived with a family in Bulgaria. I lived with a family in Morocco. I ate their food, I saw the way they lived, and the way they raised their children. I honor different cultures.

But I don’t honor different moral values. I’ll give you one example, something I broadcast on my show repeatedly. It was from a story in the New York Times that occurred in St. Louis. The family involved was Palestinian. I’m not picking on them because they’re Muslim or because they’re Palestinian. It just happens that this story was about them.

This family’s telephone was tapped by the FBI because they were suspected of supporting Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorists. While the FBI never noted any contacts with the PLO, they did record the father murdering his daughter. Why did he kill her? Because she dated boys, and in his culture, you don’t do that. If you are female, you are given to a man whom the father wants you to marry. If you date, you bring shame to the family and can be killed. In many parts of the Arab world, parents essentially own their children, especially daughters. So, if the daughter is suspected of having premarital sex, she has brought shame to the family and must be killed. Obviously, I don’t honor that cultural value. What the father did was murder—plain, ordinary, unadulterated murder.

I honor your culture, your faith, your dress, your food, and your music, but not your different moral values. That is what the Bible was meant to teach the world: There is one universal God from Whom emanates one moral value system. “Thou shalt not murder” is not for one group alone. “Thou shalt not steal” is not for one group alone. “Thou shalt not kill your daughter” for having premarital sex is not for one group alone. It is for every human being.

That level of morality is very simple: Do not murder, do not steal, do not eat the limb of a living animal, which was done in biblical times. Isn’t it touching that three thousand years ago, the Torah said that no one in the world should eat the limb of a living animal? I’m very moved by that law. The Torah cares so much about the suffering of animals that it prohibits that practice everywhere, not just among Jews.

When I was in Indonesia, as I walked on the beautiful island of Bali, I would see men gathered, yelling and screaming. It sounded like there was a sporting event. And there was. It was called cockfighting. These male chickens would scratch each other’s eyes out, and people there would place bets on the cock they thought would win. You may bet on Nebraska football games, but they were betting on animals scratching each other’s eyes out.

I vividly recall thinking, “Boy, what a task Abraham had.” I imagined walking over to the cockfight and saying, “Gentlemen, excuse me. This is wrong. There’s a God in the universe who says that betting on animals scratching their eyes out is wrong.” Can you imagine how they would have looked at me?

DENNIS PRAGER: Your feelings are not the first thing to consider. Right and wrong are more important than your feelings. Your feelings are important to you, but it is how you act that is important to everyone else. We’re raising generations in this country for whom feelings are the most important thing. If society can just get you to express your feelings, things will be great. But that’s just not true.

Behavior is everything. We don’t have signs on the road that say, “Speed Limit: Whatever You Feel.” Why not? If we could rely on people’s feelings, why shouldn’t it say, “Speed Limit: Whatever You Feel Is Right.” Why is it necessary to have universal traffic laws, but it is not necessary to have universal moral laws? Obviously, we need universal moral law. Just as we don’t trust people to drive safely if guided only by their feelings, we don’t trust them to do what is moral if guided solely by their feelings.

Given how much cruelty human beings have engaged in—human sacrifice, slavery, mass murder, torture, rape, child abuse—by far the most important question every individual and society must grapple with is: How do we make good people?

The first question I want to deal with has to do with God and goodness.

I’ll begin by asking you a couple of questions.

First, how many of you think good and evil are a matter of personal opinion?

Please raise your hands.

About half of you.

To the half of you who raised your hand, I have a question. Would you say that Hitler’s murder of six million Jews and millions of others was evil? Or, would you only say, “I think what Hitler did was evil, but he thought it was good, so there’s no way to say, ‘it was evil.’ ”

How many of you would say number two: “I think what Hitler and the Nazis did was evil, but they thought it was good, so there’s no way to say.” Raise your hand if that’s the position you would hold.

Well, we’re down to only about eight hands.

I just want you to understand that every one of you who raised your hand the first time has either changed your mind or you don’t want to confront the consequences of your position. If good and evil are a matter of personal opinion, then you have to agree with the proposition that putting children in gas chambers because they’re Jews is wrong only in your opinion. That’s all you can say: “In my opinion, it’s wrong.”

What I have just confronted you with might be the single most urgent issue facing America and the entire Western world today. Do good and evil exist, or are they a matter of personal opinion? By “exist,” I mean objectively exist—like the answers to mathematical questions. It is not a matter of opinion that two plus two equals four because there are objective mathematical truths. In the same way, there are objective moral truths.

Let me give you an example that’s less dramatic than Hitler. I was in Cleveland doing a television show. The audience was composed of students from six different Cleveland high schools. And the students were of different races, ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, and religions. I asked them a question: “If you really wanted a certain item, would you shoplift if you were sure you could get away with it?”

I would like to ask that question of you, and, to avoid embarrassment, everyone close your eyes for a second. Would you shoplift if you knew for a fact that you’d get away with it? If the answer is yes, raise your hand.

Okay, you can put your hands down and open your eyes. There are seventy-four of you, and about six raised their hands.

Now, this is very interesting. I posed that question to about seventy-five high school students in Cleveland. Do you know how many raised their hands, affirming they would shoplift? I would say about seventy raised their hands.

While I found it remarkable that such a large number raised their hands, it didn’t shock me for a reason I’ll tell you later. What did shock me was that they were willing to raise their hands on television with no embarrassment.

Now I will put you to another test.

DENNIS PRAGER: How many of you own a dog? I am asking this because the question I am about to ask applies only to those of you who own a dog, which, I assume, is the great majority of you.

To those of you who raised your hand, here is a very simple question with three possible answers.

You are walking along a body of water—a river, lake, or ocean—with your dog, when suddenly you notice your dog has fallen into the water and appears to be drowning. About a hundred feet away, you notice a stranger, a person you don’t know, is also drowning. Assuming your dog can’t swim, and also assuming that you would like to save both your dog and the stranger, the question is, who would you try to save first?

There are three possible answers: (1) your dog; (2) the stranger, and I’ll even allow you to vote for (3) you don’t know.

Raise your hand if you would save your dog.

Raise your hand if you would save the stranger.

Raise your hand if your answer is, “I don’t know.”

As happens every time I ask this question, one-third votes for the dog, one-third for the stranger, and one-third is not sure. I would have been shocked if the vote had been lopsided in any direction because it has never happened from Vancouver to Miami. You’re right in the middle, so I would have been startled if your vote had differed, and depending on the answer, I might have moved here!

Those of you who voted for the dog, please raise your hand again because I want to ask a couple of questions.

Okay, the girl in the back, tell me why you would save your dog first.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m very, very close to my dog; I’ve had it for, like, eleven years, and he does some wonderful tricks.

(Laughter)

DENNIS PRAGER: So, you’re very close to your dog, and your dog does wonderful tricks.

Who else voted for their dog?

Yes, why would you save the dog?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You don’t know what the stranger has done.

DENNIS PRAGER: You don’t know what the stranger has done. For those of you who voted for your dog, is it fair to say that a much greater feeling—perhaps even love—for your dog determined your decision?

MANY: No.

DENNIS PRAGER: No? If that is not the reason, raise your hand and tell me what other reason you had in mind.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What if the guy is a total nerd?

DENNIS PRAGER: What if the guy is a total nerd? Let’s assume the stranger is not a total nerd. He’s just a regular guy. He was not Mother Teresa, and not a total nerd, just a normal human being. Would you change your vote?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes.

DENNIS PRAGER: You would. So, you would save a non-nerd stranger before your dog? You’re definite?

(Laughter)

To those of you who voted to save the stranger: How many of you are prepared to get up and say those who voted to save their dog are wrong? Raise your hands. As is always the case, very few of you.

You would?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I would.

DENNIS PRAGER: Stand up. Go ahead and say it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Because the dog isn’t as important as a person. A person can do a lot more than a dog can.

DENNIS PRAGER: All right. Human life is much more valuable than animal life.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: And you can get another dog .

DENNIS PRAGER: Where did you learn the idea that human life is worth more?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hebrew school.

DENNIS PRAGER: Thanks. Is there anybody else who is prepared to say the ones who voted for the dog are wrong?

You would say they’re wrong?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah.

DENNIS PRAGER: Stand up and look at them and say, “You’re wrong.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You’re right, Dennis. I mean, it’s easier to replace a dog than a human being.

DENNIS PRAGER: I’d like to take a re-vote on this. For those of you who own a dog, how many of you would save your dog first?

Okay, the vote count went down somewhat. How many don’t know?

That count also went down somewhat.

How many of you would save the stranger?

And that count went up somewhat. I wish to make a few points and will use them as a jumping-off point for everything we will discuss.

Those of you who said that you would save your dog first were animated by feelings. Your feelings are understandable, and as I own two dogs, I fully relate to you. You love your dog more than the stranger, and I do, too. If either of my dogs, Babe or Lady, were drowning and a stranger was drowning, and you were to ask me, “Who do I love more?” there’s no question that I love my dogs more than the stranger.

However, the whole point of values is to hold that something is more important than your feelings. This may be as important as anything else I could say, and it’s the reason I worry about what’s happening to America. Having values means you say to yourself, “I feel X , but I must do Y ”—my feelings are not as important as what is right.

There is no ambivalence in the Bible about this. Human beings are created in God’s image; therefore, human life is sacred and animal life is not. While we cannot abuse animals, because they can feel pain and because we also do damage to our character in the process, the Bible holds that we are infinitely valuable, and animals are not.

By the way, there is a certain irony here that should prove to those of you who voted for your dog that your choice was only based on feelings. Most of you who would save your dog before a stranger would be happy to have a hot dog afterward. You would be happy to eat an animal that was killed just so you could eat it. That demonstrates your choice is based on feelings, that it’s not a worked-out ethical position about the worth of people or the worth of animals.

My friends, my worry in life is that people are animated more by feelings than by values, and this was a good example. Let me go back to the results in Cleveland. Nearly all those kids said they would shoplift if they could get away with it. But even the handful who would not shoplift were not prepared to say the others were wrong. Why? Because, they said, everything is a matter of opinion. I can’t tell them they’re wrong for shoplifting. That’s their value system.

Here is where I want to challenge you and, if I get through to you on this point, I will go back to LA a happy man. The great moral tragedy of our time is that feelings have replaced values. And they shouldn’t. Feelings are beautiful. Feelings are wonderful. It’s good to cry, it’s good to laugh, it’s good to love, it’s good to care, it’s good to have compassion. Feelings are what make us human. But values must always come first.

Knowing there is a listing of values, a hierarchy of right and wrong, is crucial. The whole point is to acknowledge that there is something higher than my feelings. Hitler felt that Jews should be destroyed. Whites in South Africa felt that apartheid was right, that blacks shouldn’t be allowed to use white bathrooms or white restaurants or go to white businesses or live in white neighborhoods.

Feelings cannot determine what is right. We need something higher than feelings to tell us what is right. People who commit adultery have feelings for the person they commit adultery with. If they didn’t have feelings for the person, they wouldn’t have committed the act. That’s why one of the Ten Commandments is “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” because, despite your feelings, some things are right and some things are wrong.

In fact, the reason for all laws is that people cannot rely on their feelings to do what is right. As I already noted, imagine if highways had signs that read “Speed Limit: Whatever Speed You Feel Like Driving.” Would that work?

That’s a tough battle in life, and that is my biggest argument for Bible-based laws and values. They tell me how to act because relying on my feelings doesn’t work.

In fact, the Bible repeatedly warns people not to rely on their hearts. If you want to know why so many people reject Bible-based religions, there it is: Most people want to be governed by their feelings and not have anyone—be it God or a Book—tell them otherwise. The battle in America and the rest of the Western world today is between the Bible (or Judeo-Christian values, as they’re almost always the same thing) and the heart.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a question about the dog and the person. What if the person was, like, Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer [an American serial killer who murdered, performed sexual acts upon, and dismembered seventeen males between 1978 and 1991]? Would you save them, or would you save your dog?

DENNIS PRAGER: Excellent question. And I have an answer for you: If Jeffrey Dahmer or Hitler were drowning and there was no dog drowning, I wouldn’t save them. The presence or absence of the dog would have been irrelevant. If Dahmer or Hitler and a leaf were drowning, I would save the leaf. If either of them were drowning while I was getting change for a sandwich I had just purchased, I would get my change and go about my day. I don’t think mass murderers have a right to live.

I’m not here to argue with you about capital punishment. I’m merely answering your question vis-à-vis the dog. I have a value system I follow, not my feelings. My values are that there is no reason to save a mass murderer, so the dog is irrelevant.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What are your values based on?

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s what I’m going to talk to you about. My values are rooted in the Bible.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, then, how can you justify letting a murderer die when your value system doesn’t support killing? You said you didn’t let feelings determine values.

DENNIS PRAGER: You’re right—my feelings don’t determine values. I didn’t want to take the time to talk to you about why I would support the death of a murderer, but I’ll be happy to if you want.

My position is rooted in justice as expressed in the Bible.

It is not just that a person who commits premeditated murder—I support capital punishment only for premeditated murder—is allowed to keep his life. You can argue that even with eyewitnesses, fingerprints, and DNA, a society can still make a mistake. But people who oppose capital punishment oppose it when there is absolutely no doubt of guilt—such as in the case of a Jeffrey Dahmer or of a Nazi death camp guard. But it is just not fair to allow someone who deliberately takes the life of an innocent person to keep his own life. [Readers are invited to read the essay from my commentary on Genesis in The Rational Bible , titled “The Death Penalty for Murder Is a Moral Cornerstone of Society,” defending capital punishment for murder, in the appendix.] And it is not true that, as many opponents of capital punishment argue, life imprisonment is worse than capital punishment. For one thing, few people actually serve their entire life sentence. For another, just about every murderer prefers prison to death.

Regarding the Bible, in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, when God creates the world, one of the only laws He gives to all mankind—not just the Jews—is that if a man [or woman] sheds another man’s [or woman’s] blood, “by a human being shall his blood be shed.” In other words, taking the life of a murderer is one of the cornerstones of a moral civilization.

I am well aware that some religious Jews and Christians oppose capital punishment in all circumstances. But when they say that their opposition to capital punishment is biblically based, they are simply wrong.

I can live with that. It is not important enough for me to make an issue of it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Isn’t your support for the death penalty determined by your feelings?

DENNIS PRAGER: I will admit to you that this is certainly an example of my values and my feelings fully coinciding. But I try never to allow my feelings alone to determine my position on any given issue. So, to take the example of capital punishment for murder, if the Bible expressly outlawed capital punishment, I would have to oppose capital punishment.

To return to the question of the drowning dog and stranger, I will try to show you that, in the final analysis, your feelings will compel you to save the stranger first for the simple reason that if you were drowning and somebody saved their dog instead of you, you and your loved ones would be pretty upset, and you and your loved ones would have every right to be. So, I will try to show you, if you think it through, that a Bible-based value system and your feelings will often coincide.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is your whole point that you should put values in front of feelings?

DENNIS PRAGER: Yes, behavior must come before feelings.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, that’s a feeling itself, right there. Your feeling is that values are better.

DENNIS PRAGER: If you’re going to dismiss everything, including values, as feelings, then the word “values” has no meaning. It becomes nothing more than another word for “feelings.”

So, here is one way to distinguish between feelings and values: Feelings equal “I want to.” Values equal “I have to.” Hopefully, in life, values and feelings will often coincide. But, as in the case of whether to first save your dog or a stranger, your feelings and your values will often conflict with one another. You feel for your dog far more than for the stranger. But you should save the stranger first.

To lead a good life, you have to answer the question “What should I do?” and then act according to that answer, whether or not you want to do it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What you’re preaching is, like, your opinion. You think that we should believe that values are more important than feelings, but your value is the same thing as feelings.

DENNIS PRAGER: No, it isn’t. As I said, if you call every position a person holds a “feeling,” then there are no better or worse feelings, and there is no reason to save the stranger first. You can just go by your feelings and save your pet instead of the stranger. For that matter, why does it have to be a living creature? What if I loved a painting and it fell into the same water where the stranger was drowning? Would you acknowledge that at some point, you would have to put your feelings aside for a value? Or would you save a painting you love before a stranger?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Feelings make sense for people and pets. You can have a value without feelings for an object.

DENNIS PRAGER: Of course, you can have a value without feelings.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: If you think that humans are more important than paintings, that’s a feeling.

DENNIS PRAGER: While I could have a feeling for my painting, ultimately, the biblical value is that human beings are more important, which trumps my feeling.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You’re expressing your feeling that human life is more valuable than an animal or a painting.

DENNIS PRAGER: What you’re doing, again, is saying that every position one takes is nothing more than a feeling. Is it a feeling that two and two are four, or is it a fact?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: It’s a fact.

DENNIS PRAGER: Why isn’t it a feeling? You just might say, “I feel that two and two are four.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Because math doesn’t involve opinion. Numbers are objective, and feelings don’t change that.

DENNIS PRAGER: So that is my point. We need values that are just as objective as math. Otherwise, we end up with your position that everything is a feeling. What would happen to math if it were reduced to feeling? There would be no math. That’s what happens to morality when we reduce it to feeling: There would be no morality.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You’re saying that your values are based on the Bible and not feelings, but aren’t your values the same set of values that your parents gave you, based on their feelings of what should be done? So, aren’t values altogether just a separate set of feelings?

DENNIS PRAGER: My answer is the same as I gave to the previous questions: If values and feelings are identical; there is no such thing as a value. And we are then left, obviously, with no values. That, in turn, would mean there is no possibility of making a good society.

People might still use the word “values,” but it will mean nothing more than their feelings. In order for values to be above you, they have to emanate from something above you. Values measure your actions against an ultimate authority. Feelings measure your actions against nothing at all.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, how do you get a value without feeling something first?

DENNIS PRAGER: The whole point of values is not to rely first on feelings. Here’s a simple example: Imagine a child in kindergarten who sees a box of cookies meant for the whole class and takes them all for himself because he feels like he wants to eat them all. As just about everyone would acknowledge, that child would have to be taught that it’s wrong to take them all for himself. He has to learn to share those cookies.

If values were derived from feelings, as you contend, this child would keep all the cookies and make up a personal value that held that whoever gets to the cookies first gets to keep them. In fact, that has largely been the way the world’s societies looked at life: “Might makes right.” The cookies belong to whoever has the power to grab them.

That’s why the Ten Commandments outlawed stealing. Because stealing is normal. The whole purpose of a legal code is to forbid people from acting on their feelings.

Like the boy with the cookies, people should first learn a Bible-based value. Later, perhaps moral values will produce moral feelings. And should that happen—feelings coinciding with good values—that makes doing good more likely. But we cannot rely on feelings first to determine how we act. When we do, the world descends into chaos; people would tear each other apart.

Perhaps the most obvious example of the need for values to overcome feelings—especially, though not only, for men—is sex. When men do not control their sex drive, they rape females (and gay men who don’t control their sex drive rape males). A vast number of women and girls have been raped in virtually every society. And in wartime, when victorious armies can essentially do what they want, rape has been the norm, with few exceptions such as the American, British, and Israeli armies. Only men whose behavior is guided by values rather than feelings do not rape in such circumstances.

We would all want every cookie. And guided by feelings alone, people will grab them all if they can.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, we do now anyway.

DENNIS PRAGER: No, we don’t. Do you? Don’t say “we.” Those of us who place values over feelings don’t act that way.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Then there are more people with feelings than there are with values.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s why so much of the world stinks, no?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay. Put this on a modern level. Would it be saying, like, if you wanted to have sex with the opposite sex but the other person didn’t want to, you would feel it, but you wouldn’t because of your values?

DENNIS PRAGER: Yes. Exactly so. If you hold values that oppose having sex in that situation—wartime or any other time you can get away with it—values are the only thing that will stop you. Feelings are unlikely to stop you.

DENNIS PRAGER: Imagine two equally wealthy men, alike in almost every way. Their jobs, incomes, expenses, and needs are just about the same. They are both approached by a woman whose daughter has cancer. The woman desperately needs money for her daughter’s surgery. She tells her story to the men. On hearing the woman, one of the men cries and, while crying, gives the woman a dollar. The other man does not cry. In fact, he has to leave and doesn’t even stay for the entire story. But because he observes the biblical law of charity, he gives the woman fifty dollars. Which man did the greater good?

You can vote for one of three options: The man who cried and gave the woman a dollar, the man who gave the woman fifty dollars, or you’re not sure.

Raise your hand for the man who gave a dollar.

Sixteen hands.

Next, the man who gave fifty dollars.

Thirty-three.

If you are not sure, raise your hand.

I’d guess about another sixteen or so.

Okay, let me take an argument from each side. Who voted for the one-dollar man? Why?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Because he put more feeling into what he was doing.

DENNIS PRAGER: More feeling. Does anyone who voted for the one-dollar man have an additional reason, or does that basically summarize your feelings? Apparently, that summarizes it for all of you. Next, who voted for the fifty-dollar man?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I voted for it because fifty dollars is going to help the girl more than the “one-dollar man,” and that’s the most important thing.

DENNIS PRAGER: Does anybody who voted for the dollar have an answer for his argument? You do?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, he may have given fifty dollars, and it may have been better in the long run, but he showed no compassion. You said he didn’t even stay to hear the whole story. He couldn’t have cared less. The guy who gave a dollar, he cared about the girl. He might come up and see her and might give her more money.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But you don’t know that. You’re just assuming he is going to give more money.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m just saying that the added compassion he shows is more important to the girl.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’d rather have compassion.

DENNIS PRAGER: Any other comments on the one-dollar man and the fifty-dollar man?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The fact that the man is crying is not going to help the girl out.

DENNIS PRAGER: Those who voted for one dollar, what do you say to that? Is that correct?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The sympathy he felt for her when he cried could give him emotional reasons to help even more.

DENNIS PRAGER: Emotional impetus, okay.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The guy who gave fifty dollars gave it based on a value and not his feelings.

DENNIS PRAGER: Hey, I feel vindicated. My trip to Omaha has been worth it already. The guy who gave fifty dollars was basing it on a value, not a feeling. This was a perfect example of feelings and values. I want you to know something: I have asked this question of poor kids in poor areas of Los Angeles and they all vote for fifty dollars. I never get one vote for a dollar. Only affluent people vote for the dollar because they’re more concerned with feelings and don’t empathize with the need for money. When I asked this question at a lower-middle-class public school in La Mirada, California, they laughed at me. They actually laughed when I asked the question. I have their response on tape: “The guy who gave one dollar cried? BIG DEAL! We need fifty dollars!” That’s what matters: What does someone need? The Bible’s ethical laws concern behavior.

Attention, attention: Biblical laws require that people act well. If you are also compassionate, that’s great, but it is more important to do good than to feel good. This is one of the most important points I’ll be making, so I repeat: It is more important to do good than to feel good. When poor people need money for surgery, they need money more than they need your feelings. Feelings are easily expressed, but the mother could only save her daughter’s life with the help of the guy who observed the tzedakah law, the charity law, not the guy who showed compassion.

My friends, this is the biggest raw stuff of your life. It will become even more relevant as you get older and start wondering what really matters. When you date somebody, I want you to notice how the person behaves toward you, not how compassionate they sound. I want to know they are good to you and others, not that they cry easily. Crying is easy. After beating their wives, men are notorious for crying about how much they love them. But the day you’re beaten, you get the hell out of there and don’t pay attention to his tears. His tears don’t mean a damn thing. His beating you is all that matters. Behavior is what matters in life. Feelings matter to you; behavior matters to the other five billion people you share the planet with. A religion based on ethical behavior is not a romantic religion.

I’ll give you another example and then take your comments and questions. A guy called my show and said, “Dennis, I’m torn. My mother is very old and sick, and I’ve been supporting her for years, and there are times when, frankly, I wish she would die. And I am haunted by my terrible feelings. I walk around plagued by guilt.” I asked this caller two questions: What do you do for your mother? And does she know that you sometimes have these feelings?

The answer to the second question was that she had no clue and the answer to the first question was, “I support her. I keep her alive through my financial support.” I said, “You are a beautiful son. Instead of feeling guilty, you should walk around thinking, ‘I’m a noble guy. I’m a beautiful human being. Look at how much I do for my ailing and sick mother.’ ” That’s what you should say instead of, “Look at how awful I am, sometimes I wish she would die.” Miserable thoughts are normal. Every one of you in this room has had them. You’ve wished something bad would happen to a relative, or perhaps a friend. You are envious of somebody, or you have some feeling of greed.

The whole question in life is what you do, both for good and for bad. If your feelings are good but your behavior isn’t particularly good, like the man who cried with sympathy while he gave the woman a dollar for her daughter’s surgery, that’s not good. If you have bad feelings but good behavior, like my caller who provided for his sick mother, that’s beautiful. Okay, questions. Yes, you with your hand up.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Oh, about when you said the son with bad feelings was beautiful, how can that lady live with money and not love from the son?

DENNIS PRAGER: He shows her love, and he does love her. You can love somebody—

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Just because you give money doesn’t mean you love her.

DENNIS PRAGER: You’re right. But I would far prefer to have a child who didn’t love me that much but who helped me when I was ill, sick, and old, than one who loved me and didn’t help me.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Loving someone is helping them.

DENNIS PRAGER: So long as you say behavior is more important, I’m with you. I don’t want someone to love me and behave callously toward me. I’d rather someone have ambivalent feelings toward me but treat me well. Behavior is what matters in life.

DENNIS PRAGER: The problem we face in our society is that we are raising a generation in America to rely on feelings rather than values. Many of you have been raised that way. And then we wonder: Why are there so many problems? Why are people behaving so badly?

As one of you said, we try to take everything for ourselves. Those are people who put their feelings first. What would you say about those kids who voted that they would shoplift, knowing they wouldn’t be caught? Few people, perhaps no one, ever said to them two of the most powerful words in our language: “That’s wrong.”

Here’s an example that illustrates how people are being raised. When my son was three, he was pushed down by a five-year-old in a park. That kid walked over, pushed my son down, and his head hit the concrete. My son was fine, but it was an ugly scene. Do you want to know what the five-year-old kid’s mother did? I’ll tell you. She went over to her son, hugged him, and said, “What’s bothering you, darling?”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Oh, my gosh. Oh, God.

DENNIS PRAGER: The mother did not say to her son, “That’s wrong!” She essentially said to him, “Your feelings are more important than right and wrong.” That message is constantly conveyed: Your feelings come first. Right and wrong don’t matter. Feelings do.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, what is a value? Is it society’s values? Because who is to say pushing people down is not wrong? I mean, what if it’s the way everyone acts?

DENNIS PRAGER: Good. You, my friend, have led directly to the other pillar of biblical values: the issue of God. If there isn’t a God who says pushing little kids down—or raping women—is wrong, then you are right: All we have to go by are feelings, and then doing whatever you feel like doing isn’t wrong.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I understand that values are society’s rules and laws.

DENNIS PRAGER: No. If values are just what society says, then murdering Jews in Nazi Germany was a good value. But you and I would say that was an evil value because we hold that there is a source of values that is higher than any society. That’s why the Founders of the United States wrote in the founding document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

People have unalienable rights only if rights come from the Creator, which we call “God.” If rights come from human beings—that is, the government or society, they are not “unalienable.” They’re granted by human beings and can be taken away by human beings. If our rights come from society, then society can decide to take them away. But if they come from our Creator, from God, then society cannot take them away.

That’s what we will be talking about. “You say right; I say wrong. Who decides?” That’s why God is necessary for murder to be wrong. If there is no God who declares it wrong, it isn’t.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Who makes up values?

DENNIS PRAGER: Are you asking who should make up values or who does?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Who does?

DENNIS PRAGER: “Who should” and “Who does” are two separate issues. Regarding “does,” everybody—every individual and/or every society does. Slaveholding societies, communist regimes, the Nazis, and Islamic societies—they all had values. Slaveholding societies valued slavery; communists, Nazis, and Islamists [Islamists are fundamentalist Muslims who demand Sharia govern all of society, not only Muslims] valued murdering certain people.

Societies that engaged in slavery held that enslaving certain people—captured people, people of other races—was good. They had societal values, but some of those values were bad.

Those of you who equate values and feelings can’t say slavery or the Holocaust was wrong. All you can say is that it’s your feelings against theirs. That’s the reason you need a value system that derives from something higher than society—because if your society says killing is okay, then it’s okay.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: If slavery was a value and people had feelings saying “slavery is wrong,” should they blindly follow values or should they go with their feelings?

DENNIS PRAGER: Excellent question.

There would be two reasons to hold that slavery is wrong. One might be, as you said, “feelings,” and the other might be values. But the feeling-based opponent of slavery has no answer to either a value-based or a feelings-based argument for slavery. If the opponent of slavery says, “I feel slavery is wrong,” the defender of slavery could simply reply, “And I feel slavery is right.” Since there is no value higher than either of them that says slavery is wrong, all we have is one person’s feeling versus another’s.

If I say, “Blue is the best color,” and you say, “Red is the best color,” those are statements about feelings. There is no such thing as the best color. “The best color” is just one person’s feeling versus another’s.

The same holds true for slavery if a person’s position on whether slavery is right or wrong is only a matter of feelings. You couldn’t say, “The abolition of slavery is better than slavery” any more than you could say, “Blue is the best color.”

This is why morality—good and evil—has to be rooted in something higher than human beings—namely, God. If what is good and evil is determined by man, then good and evil are merely opinions. Only if values come from God are they not opinions. I know most of you have problems with this because you may not believe in God, or because you will say that what God says is also a matter of opinion. I promise to deal with these issues.

Now, I just want to establish that values are higher than feelings. That’s why neither you nor I say, “It’s my feeling that murder is wrong.” We both say, “Murder is wrong.” Period. But when you say, “Murder is wrong” rather than “I feel murder is wrong,” whether you are aware of it or not, you are asserting a value higher than feeling, and therefore you should also be perfectly willing or capable of asserting that those who differ are wrong. Just as you would say that those who say the Earth is flat are wrong. In fact, whether you realize it or not, you are asserting that there is a religious rather than a human basis for morality because you are acknowledging that there is a value system higher than human opinion.

Now let’s return to your question: What do we do if pro-slavery people don’t just say they feel slavery is right; they say their “ values” hold that slavery is right? In such a society, you correctly ask, if we feel that slavery is wrong, shouldn’t we follow our feelings rather than blindly follow values?

The answer, of course, is that in this case, we should follow our feeling because it comports with God-based values. But the reason is not that following feelings is a good idea, but because, in this case, the values of the defenders of slavery are wrong.

And that, of course, raises another question: How are we to know what values are right? I will address that question. In the meantime, all I want you to understand is the need for values—for something higher than opinions.

You also ask about “blindly” following values. I do not advocate “blindly” following values. That, too, will be explained. But I should point out that a vast number of people “blindly” follow feelings!

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don’t see how you can stand up there and say that people who don’t have Jewish values are wrong.

DENNIS PRAGER: Did anybody hear me say that people who don’t have Jewish values are wrong?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: It sounds like you’re saying if values aren’t from Judaism, they’re wrong.

DENNIS PRAGER: To be precise, I am not saying that anyone who differs with any of the Torah’s laws that only apply to Jews is wrong. What I say is that the best values ever created come from the Bible. Therefore, anyone—a Jew, a Christian, or just a Bible-based individual who practices neither Judaism nor Christianity—can and should live by them.

I’ll go further. I acknowledge that there are people who never read the Bible, who have essentially the same moral values as the Bible. I also recognize that there have been Jews and Christians who have not lived according to the Bible’s values.

But the most moral civilization that has ever existed—Western civilization—was produced by people who believed in the Bible. Western civilization has had its share of bad people. But no other civilization, to cite one example, abolished slavery before Western civilization did. And the people who abolished it were overwhelmingly Bible-based Christians. The abolitionist movement was a Christian movement that began in England.

Western civilization gave the world democracy, women’s rights, universal human rights, guarantees of free speech, virtually all its medical and scientific advances, uniquely great art and music, and the most prosperous nations that ever existed. It was the Judeo-Christian value system’s emphasis on individual rights and liberty that made these accomplishments possible. There are fine attributes of virtually every other religion, but none of them produced what Western civilization did.

I fully acknowledge that there is a danger in my position. There is no belief system that is certain to make good individuals and good societies. Just to cite one example we’ve been discussing, more than a few people who believed in the Bible defended slavery. So I want to remind you that, while practiced all over the world, it was the Judeo-Christian West that first abolished it.

Yes, some people who claim their values are Bible-based will do evil, and some will even misuse the Bible in doing so. But this is true about every noble thing. Some people abuse medicine: The Nazi and Japanese physicians who, during World War II, performed grotesque experiments on human beings are the two most terrible examples. Should we therefore stop taking medicine or visiting physicians when we are ill? There are people who abuse art and music, using their talents to make art and music on behalf of cruel regimes. Should we therefore abandon art and cease painting and composing?

I know that religion can be abused. I know that values can be abused. But without them, we’re left with feelings. And then we’re doomed.

By and large, American Jews and American Christians have very similar values. We have different theologies, but very similar values. Jews and Christians share the entire Hebrew Bible, the Ten Commandments, and the same belief that they were given by God.

We are working through two issues: One, feelings and values are not the same. Values override feelings. And, two, values must be rooted in a God who is higher than we are. Those are the only two issues for now, and believe me, they’re the toughest part of the discussion, except for the upcoming one on human nature.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How do you evaluate different values when they conflict?

DENNIS PRAGER: How do you evaluate two different, competing values? I can’t give you a general rule without a specific example.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Let’s say you have a value that killing is bad, and a value that killing is good. I mean, how do you decide? What makes one right and one wrong?

DENNIS PRAGER: The truth is that without a value system revealed by God, it’s essentially impossible. Before the Jews and their Bible introduced the world to God and God-based morality—the Ten Commandments being the best and best-known example—the belief that killing was moral was widespread.

Take human sacrifice, for example. In every ancient society with which we are familiar in Central America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, human sacrifice was practiced. The first nation to forbid all human sacrifice was Israel—the Jews. Their holiest book, the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, repeatedly forbade human sacrifice and condemned its practice anywhere. The Torah allowed pagan nations to continue to worship idols, but it did condemn their practice of human sacrifice.

And not only sacrifice. People throughout the world believed that war—which involved massive killing—was permissible for any reason: usually for gold and other precious resources, for slaves, and for land. The Hebrew Bible forbade all human sacrifice and all war-making except for defense. The one—the only—exception was the Hebrew conquest of the small land of Canaan. And that, according to the Torah, was only allowed when the Canaanites reached a spectacular level of evil, including child sacrifice.

When, because of their Torah, the Jews announced, “There is one God for all people and therefore one morality for all people,” they changed history. In effect, nearly four thousand years ago, this tiny people said to the world, “You’re all wrong.” In the view of many scholars, both Jewish and non-Jewish, this is the ultimate reason for Jew-hatred—what is euphemistically known as antisemitism.

One tiny people had the chutzpah to say to the world: “All of you are wrong—human sacrifice is evil.” That is the reason for the Genesis story of Abraham and the near-sacrifice of his son Isaac: to teach that human sacrifice is not what the God of the Bible wants. The God of the Bible, who is the God of the world, does not want children or any other human beings sacrificed.

Human sacrifice was not only common in the ancient world, but a form of it, a custom called sati , was practiced in India until 1829, when the British, who then ruled India, abolished it. Sati was the Hindu name for the practice of widows leaping into the flames of their deceased husbands’ funeral pyre. This practice was not fully criminalized by India until 1987. Like the outlawing of slavery, the ban on sati was instigated by British Christians. So, who was right—the Hindus who said that widows should burn themselves alive or the British Christians who said this was murder? This is an excellent example of competing values.

So, then, to answer the question about competing values, that is why morality is dependent on the God of the Bible, revealing what is good and what is evil. In this case, this God revealed nearly four thousand years ago that human sacrifice was evil. Otherwise, how would human sacrifice have ever ended?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But if our values are rooted in some higher God who has authority over all the world, then wouldn’t our values be determined by our faith, and isn’t our faith a feeling?

DENNIS PRAGER: Those are two separate questions: Are our values determined by our faith? And isn’t our faith just a feeling?

The answer to the first question is “yes.” As you correctly point out, if our values are rooted in God, our values would then be rooted in faith that there is a God, faith that this God is moral, and faith that the Torah reflects this God’s moral will.

But let me point out that every moral assertion—with or without religious faith—is dependent on faith. The statement “Murder is wrong” is a statement of faith. You believe murder is wrong. You cannot know murder is wrong. Just as there is no way to prove that God exists, there is no way to prove that murder is wrong. Both God and morality are faith assertions.

But there is a huge difference between them. While both are assertions of faith, the objective existence of morality is dependent on the existence of God. Only if there is a God who declares that good and evil exist do good and evil really exist. Without God, all morality is opinion.

Now to your second question: “Isn’t our faith just a feeling?” As one of you did when making values synonymous with feelings, you’ve made faith synonymous with feelings. But when everything is just a feeling, nothing actually exists. Everything is a feeling.

Now, it is true that for many people, faith is a feeling. But it isn’t necessarily so. If faith is only a feeling, there is no difference between faith in God and the Bible and faith in any of the thousands of other gods that people have worshiped—Zeus, Jupiter, Baal, gods of rain, gods who had sex with other gods and with human beings, and gods who demanded human sacrifice.

That is why we need something in addition to faith—and feeling.

DENNIS PRAGER: That something is reason.

In fact, reason is almost as important as God. In order for faith to be more than a feeling, we need reason. A good society is produced by a combination of God, the Bible, wisdom, and reason. Reason without God has never made a good society, and God without reason easily leads to fanaticism.

As for feelings, I acknowledge that I very much feel that there is a God. But I do not believe in God because of what I feel. I believe in God primarily because of reason, which leads me to faith. I believe in God because there is no other rational explanation for the existence of the universe, of life, or intelligence. The idea that everything came about on its own is far less rational than belief in a Creator. It is utterly irrational. Nothing makes itself. Everything has a maker. Put another way, why is there anything?

As regards the question of who made God, God is eternal by definition. Otherwise, you go back infinitely, “Who made the Creator?” and then “Who made that Creator?” And again, “Who made that Creator?

If we found a computer anywhere—on this planet or any other—we would immediately assume that an intelligence had made it. Anyone who assumed the computer made itself would be dismissed as a kook. And I should note that virtually everything in the world is infinitely more complex than a computer.

Just as faith requires reason, the same holds true for reason and values. Reason is as necessary for values as it is for faith.

For example, antisemitic beliefs about Jews are all irrational. Historically, there has been massive persecution of Jews as a result of the widespread belief that Jews slaughtered Christian children and used their blood for Passover matzah. It’s a completely irrational belief. Jews aren’t permitted to eat the blood of an animal, let alone the blood of a human being.

Another irrational belief that is widely held by white racists concerning race and ethnicity is that non-whites are intellectually inferior to them. On the list of the top-earning groups in America are Indian Americans, Taiwanese, Chinese Americans, Filipinos, and Nigerians. White Americans come in below those groups. Clearly, the belief in the inherent inferiority of non-Europeans, aside from allowing for the evil of slavery, was completely irrational.

And, of course, the belief that a man can become a woman and a woman can become a man is profoundly irrational.

As much as we have a battle in the West between feelings and values, we could just as easily term the battle as being between feelings and reason.

In order to determine right and wrong, we need God, the Bible, wisdom, and reason.

DENNIS PRAGER: Reason alone, however, hasn’t accomplished much regarding morality. People didn’t stop sacrificing human beings because of reason. They stopped because people—specifically the ancient Jews—believed that the God of the Bible said human sacrifice is wrong. Nor did reason end slavery. People of faith in the Bible and in the God of the Bible—specifically British Christians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—fought to abolish slavery.

DENNIS PRAGER: In fact, virtually every attempt to make a moral society without God and the Bible has led to making a worse society, often an evil one. The French Revolution provides the original modern example. The French Revolution tried to abolish religion, and all it led to was violence. Its best-known symbol was the guillotine. Meanwhile, the best-known symbol of the American Revolution, which took place just nine years before the French Revolution, and which was rooted in God and reason, was the Liberty Bell.

Unlike the radically anti-religious French Revolution, the American Revolution was founded on the belief that human rights do not come from man—and therefore not from reason alone—but from God. In the words of the American Declaration of Independence: “All men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” [italics added].

For most of its history, America was the world’s most religious industrialized democracy. This God-centeredness helped produce the freest and most prosperous country ever made. By 1864 the words “In God We Trust” were put on American coins; and in 1956 “In God We Trust” was made one of America’s official mottos—the other two are e pluribus unum —Latin for “from many, one”—and “Liberty.”

A particularly clear example of what happens when God and the Bible are abandoned is the moral record of communist countries: the greatest degree of genocide in history. Their moral record has been abysmal. The group that most supported the mass-murdering communist regimes of the twentieth century was composed of secular intellectuals. In addition, they have led virtually every anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Israel movement. They have rendered most universities moral and intellectual wastelands.

Nothing confirms the moral need for God and the Bible as does the moral record of secularism. There are, of course, decent secular individuals. But the existence of moral secular people no more makes the moral case for secularism than the existence of moral pagans made the moral case for paganism. Moral pagans were not moral because of paganism, and moral secularists are not moral because of secularism.

To morally assess secular values vs. God- and Bible-based—what are more widely referred to as “Judeo-Christian” values—you have to ask what type of societies each made.

The answer is clear: While God- and Bible-based ideologies made Western civilization, which, with all its flaws, has been the most morally advanced civilization in history, anti-God secular ideologies have been utterly destructive.

I remind you that the antislavery movement was created and led by Bible-centered individuals, while the horrific genocidal tyrannies of the twentieth century were all secular, just as the French Revolution was.

Reason is very important when used in accordance with God and the Bible. But when God and the Bible are abandoned, reason alone doesn’t make good societies and doesn’t make good and evil moral absolutes. They remain relative concepts. Remember, if there is no God, good and evil are merely opinions. When those opinions are based on reason, they are rational opinions—and certainly preferable to irrational opinions—but they are still opinions.

I’ll give you an example of how reason without God can fail. Who acted more reasonably: a German non-Jew who risked his or her life to save a Jewish family or a German who did nothing? It should be obvious that the German who did nothing acted more reasonably than the German who risked his or her life. Why risk your life to hide a stranger, let alone a Jew—a member of another ethnic and religious group?

It was irrational to murder or to help the Nazis murder Jews because the directive to murder Jews was itself irrational. But it was not irrational to do nothing. A German non-Jew would rationally think, “I don’t want Jews to be killed. That’s wrong. But I don’t want to risk getting imprisoned, maybe even killed, by the Gestapo [the Nazi secret police] for trying to help them hide or escape.”

So, reason alone doesn’t lead to goodness. As you should realize, looking at the world today and throughout history, it is very hard to make good people, let alone a good society. We need reason, we need wisdom, we need God, and we need values.

Feelings are what most distinguish humans from robots. Feelings make us feel alive. Without feelings, life wouldn’t be worth living.

But feelings alone are morally unreliable—considerably more unreliable than reason alone. Guided by feelings, every type of behavior is justifiable: If you feel like shoplifting and act on your feelings, you’ll shoplift. If a man is sexually aroused by a woman, he will rape her if he is guided only by feelings. And, of course, if you have deeper feelings for your pet than for a stranger, you’ll save your dog and let the stranger drown. If we rely solely on feelings, everything is justifiable. That’s the issue I want you to confront.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Don’t you get your values from your parents?

DENNIS PRAGER: Some people do. Some people don’t. Many people, especially today, reject their parents’ values.

But let’s say you did get your values from your parents. That doesn’t change anything I’ve said. If your parents’ values aren’t good ones, let’s hope you adopt good values—by using God, the Bible, wisdom, and reason. Moreover, even if your parents’ values are good ones, you will still have to use God, the Bible, wisdom, and reason. “My parents said” is no match for “God said.”

If the only thing that keeps you acting decently is the value system you inherited from your parents, there is a good chance that, over time, you will be influenced by peer pressure and by society to abandon at least some of those values.

My generation of Americans was raised by the generation that has been called “The Greatest Generation.” I don’t think that description is necessarily accurate since there were other impressive generations in the American past. But because of the way they endured the Great Depression and fought World War II, they have been called “The Greatest Generation.” However, the sad fact is that many parents of that generation raised millions of narcissists. I remember why. Their motto was “We want to give our children everything we didn’t have”—by which they meant material things and peace.

In fact, they did give their children more material benefits and a more peaceful world, except for the war in Vietnam, than they had when they were young. But while they gave their children what they didn’t have, many of them didn’t give their children what they did have: religious values and American values, such as patriotism and the need to preserve liberty. The Baby Boomer generation was considerably less religious and less patriotic than its parents. And now, two generations later, we have the least religious, least patriotic, least likely to marry, least likely to have children, and most depressed generation in American history.

Relying on parents’ values—even when they are good values—only works under two conditions: One is if parents derive their values from something higher than themselves. The other is whether they know how to communicate those values and diligently do so. No matter how good parents’ values are, their children—let alone their grandchildren and great-grandchildren—will not perpetuate those values without those two conditions.

So, to respond to your question, if, as you say, “you get your values from your parents,” even if those values are wonderful, getting values from parents isn’t enough to last more than a generation, and often not even a generation.

And what if your parents’ values aren’t wonderful? What if your parents believe in human sacrifice? What happens if you’re a German child whose parents are Nazis? Or if you’re an Arab or Iranian child whose parents want to exterminate Israel?

When it comes to cultural, as opposed to moral, matters—having good manners, for example, like not eating with your elbows on the table, holding the door open for the person behind you, or cleaning your room, accepting parents’ values without God or reason may be fine. But for moral issues, values need God, the Bible, wisdom, and reason. I can make a far better case to my children by saying “It’s in the Bible” or “It comes from God” than by saying “Because I say so.”

When my older son was nine years old, he and I were talking about an initiative on the ballot in California, where we live. The initiative is the first one in American history that would allow doctors to help kill patients who have decided they want to die. I understand why it was on our ballot, and I don’t condemn the motives of the people who put it there. But thankfully, Californians rejected it.

My son, who attends a Jewish day school, asked me whether he should support it. After he rightly pointed out, “Well, people are in pain and suffering,” he then said—without my saying anything—“Wait a minute—my rabbi said it’s a sin to kill yourself.”

My son came to oppose the measure, not because I, his father, did. That would be a pretty poor reason. I don’t want my son to be my clone. I want him to be a good person, as “good” is understood by God and the Bible. He came to oppose the measure because his religion, which is infinitely higher than what his father thinks, says suicide is wrong. That’s a big difference. In fact, if he ever finds that his father and the Bible conflict, I hope he follows the Bible.

Having said that, I want to add that there are occasions—such as intractable pain that cannot be alleviated or when the alternative, usually in time of war, is horrific torture—that I would not condemn a person who took his own life. But that is different from the state allowing doctors to kill.

I suspect most of you are not taught the difference between value systems. In deciding among conflicting value systems, that’s where reason, faith, and wisdom come in.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I know, when you’re little, you don’t get it. I mean, I wasn’t involved with my religion when I was little, and my values came from my parents. I mean, now my values come from what I observe, but when I was little, my values came from what my parents taught.

DENNIS PRAGER: Yes, of course, your values come from your parents when you’re young. Where else could they come from? But as you get older, you can think more for yourself, without relying on “my mother or father said.” Your parents may well have good values. I certainly hope they did. But where did your parents’ values come from? Their parents? Their religion? Their society? Their own thought processes? Clearly, at some point, parents were not the source of their values.

So, I hope your parents transmitted to you a value system higher than themselves.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don’t think my values are rooted in God because I don’t even know if I believe in God. Most of my values come from my parents, and if I ask them to justify a value and so forth, they’re not going to tell me to go look in the Bible.

DENNIS PRAGER: You raise three issues here:

I’ll start with your third point. I’m sure you’re right about your parents not telling you to “go look in the Bible.” But whether or not they said that—and, for that matter, whether or not they believe in God or the Bible at all—is irrelevant as to where their values came from. Whether or not they consciously acknowledge it, hundreds of millions of people in the Western world got their basic moral values from the Bible.

Regarding the second point, I have addressed the issue of getting values from your parents.

Now to your first point: How could your values be rooted in God when you don’t even know if you believe in God or the Bible?

You say you don’t know if you believe in God. I am curious: Do you believe in good and evil?

I ask you this because it is common for agnostics and atheists to dismiss belief in God as essentially wishful thinking. But they have no problem asserting that certain things are good and others are evil despite the fact that all moral statements not rooted in God are declarations of faith, not assertions of truth. People believe murder is wrong; they do not know it.

Without moral absolutes, you can no more prove good and evil exist than I can prove God exists. Yet, you and just about everybody else who finds it impossible to believe God exists live as if good and evil exist.

DENNIS PRAGER: So, that is what I am asking you to do regarding God—live as if you believe God exists, just as you would live if you believe good and evil exist. And why do you believe good and evil exist instead of just being wishful thinking? Because if you acknowledge that good and evil are just made-up terms to describe actions we approve and disapprove of, your moral universe will collapse. It is too chaotic, even depressing, to think that the Holocaust being evil is just a personal opinion.

The same holds true for God. If God doesn’t exist, the consequences are too awful to contemplate. If there is no God, there is no good and evil. But that is not all. If there is no God, life is ultimately meaningless. Your life has no more meaning than a grain of sand. Yet, as with good and evil, most people who don’t believe in God choose to live as if their lives do have some ultimate meaning, as if their lives are more than some random event.

So, then, since you probably live as if your life, and life in general, has meaning—and as if good and evil are not just opinions, but really do exist, you should live as if God exists. Especially given the fact that only if God exists do good and evil and meaning exist.

Now you can understand something that otherwise would probably surprise you. I am not here to convince you that God exists. I am here to convince you of the necessity of God, specifically:

Therefore, while it would be a wonderful thing for you personally to believe in God, it is more important that you know—not merely believe—that morality is dependent on God’s existence. God’s existence may be a matter of belief, but the indispensability of God to morality is not a matter of belief; it is a provable fact. To repeat: If there is no God, “good” and “evil” are subjective terms that individuals and societies make up to describe actions of which they approve and disapprove.

I am asking you to embrace Bible-based values, whether or not you believe in God and the Bible. I will make the case for the superiority of those values later.

Once you come to understand that God and the Bible are necessary for morality and indispensable to a happier life, there is no reason you should wait to believe in God to lead a more religious life. I know the word “religious” scares many of you. But the word that should scare you is “secular,” not “religious.”

Regarding secularism, please understand that I am all for secular government and that I am talking only about Western—that is, Judeo-Christian—countries. Giving up Judeo-Christian values for secular values has been a calamity. Outside of the Judeo-Christian world, however, sometimes secularism replacing religion would be a very positive thing. For example, it would be an enormous moral improvement if countries like Iran became secular. Between Iran having an Islamic fascist regime or a secular regime, all decent people would prefer it had a secular regime—and even a secular society.

To return to acting as if you believe in God, acting as if you believe in God means being religiously active even though you aren’t particularly religious, or even religious at all.

What would that entail? Essentially, regular study of the Bible—ideally using The Rational Bible because it explains everything rationally—on your own and with others. And regular attendance at a synagogue, if you are a Jew, at a church if you identify in any way as a Christian, or at a synagogue or church if you don’t identify as either.

Let me explain some of the life-changing advantages of leading a God-centered and religiously active life.

Number one: You will have a community. Americans are lonelier today than ever in American history. And not just Americans. Loneliness is a nearly worldwide epidemic. Loneliness is such a problem in Great Britain, for example, that the UK government has a Minister of Loneliness. What all these countries suffering a loneliness epidemic have in common is that they are predominantly secular.

Can you name one secular community that meets regularly and forms the human bonds that religious communities do? Probably not, because such communities rarely exist.

There is no secular equivalent to attending weekly services all year round. There is no secular equivalent to weekly Shabbat services or weekly Church services.

Number two: By studying the Bible, you will have unparalleled access to wisdom.

Wisdom is the most important thing individuals need to lead a good life and to create a good society. Good intentions do not make good people or good societies. In fact, good intentions without wisdom led to more death and suffering than anything else in the modern world.

Communism killed at least one hundred million people in the twentieth century. Yet, many of those who supported communism had good intentions. What they lacked was wisdom. This does not imply that there are no wise secular individuals. Goodness is not possible without wisdom and though there are some wise secular individuals, there are no wise secular institutions. There is virtually no wisdom at almost any university in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia, among other countries. This has been true since at least the 1960s, and it has been truer every year since then.

Moreover, the most prestigious universities are the least wise—and therefore the most morally confused. There are far more Hamas supporters at Harvard and Oxford than at your local state college. Far more students and faculty at Yale and Stanford say “men give birth” than at your local state college.

The Bible is the moral and wisdom foundation of Western civilization, the most morally, scientifically advanced civilization human beings have ever developed. Again, it was Western civilization that abolished slavery, gave women rights, created democratic countries, and produced free societies. Other civilizations produced art and music, but it is Western art and music that other civilizations revere. You can hear Japanese music in Japan and hear Indonesian music in Indonesia, but you will hear Bach’s and Beethoven’s music everywhere—including Japan and Indonesia.

If you live as if you believe in a God who judges, you will understand that it is your behavior that matters, not your intentions.

Virtually every poll taken on the subject of happiness has concluded that believers in the God of the Bible are happier than people who are not. You are more likely to get married and have children. You will have a built-in community. Again, can you name a secular community equivalent to a God-based community such as Alcoholics Anonymous, a church, or synagogue community? The only one I can think of is the community of bonds among people who served together in combat. But that bond speaks to the life experience of only a small fraction of religious people who are bonded without having to go to war.

You will not only lead a better and happier life, but there is a good chance that you will eventually come to believe in God.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have values and they haven’t been rooted in God.

DENNIS PRAGER: I don’t know what your values are, but if they are similar to mine, they are likely very much rooted in God. They’re just not consciously rooted in God in your mind. But where do you think your values came from? Did your grandparents make them up? If you were born into a Jewish or Christian family and were given moral values like mine, they ultimately came from people who identified as a Jew or Christian. Your parents or your grandparents may have dropped Jewish or Christian observance, but somebody immersed in the Bible transmitted those values to you.

My point to you is that if the Bible dies, its values will eventually die as well.

Here is an analogy: Imagine cutting flowers from their soil and showing the flowers to someone who looks at them and says: “These flowers look great. Apparently, they can survive when cut from their soil.”

That is how people look at Bible-based or Judeo-Christian ethics cut from their soil—the Bible and religions based on the Bible. Of course, they appear to survive for a few generations rather than a few days. But like flowers, ethics cut from their religious soil will eventually wither and die.

That is why I started with the questions I did. How did you vote on the dog/stranger question?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I would save the stranger before the dog.

DENNIS PRAGER: Fine. So, whether you realize it or not, you have a biblical value.

And why would you save the stranger before the dog?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Because I value human life more than that of an animal.

DENNIS PRAGER: Would you say the ones who voted for the dog are wrong?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, because that is their value.

DENNIS PRAGER: Please understand once I learn you wouldn’t say they are wrong, your valuing of a “human life more than that of an animal” isn’t a universal value. It’s merely your personal value, which, in reality, is an opinion. So, since your answer is that valuing a human life more than that of an animal is not higher than anyone but you, it is a feeling. A value is something higher than you, and higher than every person.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why does God appear not to reward good and punish evil? I’m talking about modern life, not the stories of the Bible.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s actually not all that difficult to answer. If God rewarded acts of goodness and punished acts of evil, free will would not exist. If everybody knew “If I do X , Y , and Z , I’ll get a reward” and “If I do A , B , and C , I’ll be punished,” then clearly there would be no real free will. Free will exists because you don’t always know the consequences of your actions. That’s the way it has to work. If you go out for a drive and get severely injured by a drunk driver, you did not deserve that injury. But you don’t always get what you deserve in life.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How can the Torah be objective if scholars disagree about its opinions? If scholars differ on their opinions of what the Torah is telling us, how can we know what the Torah is telling us?

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, that’s like saying, how can truth be objective if scholars disagree on what’s true? There’s still an objective truth, even when humans have not yet discerned it. One has nothing to do with the other. There’s nothing that all people agree on in any field, let alone all scholars.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But, for example, you can end up with scholars who are on polar opposite sides of the abortion issue or capital punishment. So then how do you follow the Torah?

DENNIS PRAGER: Oh, I see. Which scholars do you follow? That’s what you’re asking?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah.

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, that’s what the Orthodox argue. That’s why they rely on the rabbis of the Talmud.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: And even they don’t universally agree.

DENNIS PRAGER: Right. Well, that makes an argument for relying on the text, doesn’t it? That is my approach to explaining the Five Books of Moses in my commentary on the Torah.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But that also depends on who’s interpreting the text, right?

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s correct. Well, I believe relying on the text is the closest we can get to really understanding God and His will. Your question is a good one. Ultimately, we can study the opinions of scholars and make our own judgment. Someone can argue that taking such an approach makes everything subjective, but I think there’s a difference between trying to understand what the Torah says and simply relying on how I feel. If I’m honestly evaluating what the Torah is trying to tell me, that’s different from relying on my feelings. And in the end, what’s the alternative? We’ve already established the dangers of relying solely on one’s feelings to determine values. In general, people who rely on their feelings talk themselves into believing that they are seeking truth but they are fooling themselves.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How can “an eye for an eye” be just?

DENNIS PRAGER: It sounds barbaric, doesn’t it? But I think my answer will surprise you: It is one of the most moral ideas in the Bible. For one thing, it says, all eyes, all lives, are equally valuable. In the ancient world, the life of a nobleman was worth more than the life of a peasant. That law marked a profound change in the way people were viewed. For another, it was common practice in the ancient world that if someone harmed or killed another, their family or tribe would take revenge not only on the perpetrator, but on his entire family, perhaps his entire tribe. What that verse says is you can’t punish others for what someone did. Only the individual who committed the action can be held responsible. If a man took out your eye, you could only punish him and no one else. So banning the killing of innocents was a great moral advance. However, it was never, ever taken literally, that if I take out your eye, I lose my eye. It also means that if I deliberately take out your eye, there should be an appropriate penalty for my offense.

The Torah demonstrates this law is not to be taken literally because of a verse in Leviticus (24:18). The law says anyone who takes the life of someone’s animal must repay the animal’s owner “life for life.” Since the Torah tells us humans are of greater worth than animals, as only we are created in God’s image, clearly the Torah can’t be saying the offender must sacrifice his life. The law of “eye for an eye” only exists to demonstrate that justice is carried out by requiring a punishment that is the moral equivalent of the offense.

This law revolutionized human understanding of the worth of every individual. In nearly all of the pre-Torah world, the concept of human equality did not exist: The life of a nobleman was worth considerably more than the life of a peasant.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But should my values be imposed upon everyone else?

DENNIS PRAGER: If by “imposing” you mean forcing your personal values on others, of course not. But if it means values that are higher than everyone else, then yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why should it be their value, too, though?

DENNIS PRAGER: By definition, a value that is higher than everyone else is universal and must apply to all people, and therefore must derive from a source higher than people—in the words of the Declaration of Independence—from the Creator. It does not mean it applies to only one nation, race, or religion. If a value isn’t universal, it’s an opinion—the opinion of your society or the opinion of an individual. Are you going to say, “I would save the person, but I have no comment on those who would save the dog; they’re just as right as I am”?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, no. I’ll say that, in my opinion, they’re wrong. In my opinion, they shouldn’t think that way. But that doesn’t give me the right to tell them, “You’re wrong, you shouldn’t think like that.”

DENNIS PRAGER: You think they’re wrong, but you don’t have the right to say to them that they’re wrong?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Right, I don’t have the right to impose my values—

DENNIS PRAGER: You used a keyword here: “impose.” I didn’t ask you if you would impose your value on others. I asked you: “Would you say the ones who voted for the dog are wrong?”

Now, why would you think that saying to another person “You’re wrong” is imposing? Are you going to arrest them?

When I say to you that you’re wrong if you would save a dog before a stranger, am I “imposing” my values on you? I am asserting a universal moral value. You are free to reject it. But, at the same time, I am equally free to say to you, “You’re wrong.”

Also, I’m not saying you’re wrong because that is how I feel. I’m saying you’re wrong because there is a value system higher than me, one that is rooted in the Bible, that says you’re wrong. You don’t affirm that—or any higher value system. That’s the reason you can’t tell someone they’re wrong. As you yourself acknowledge, you couldn’t even tell Hitler he’s wrong, though many others in the room would. But that requires that they hold something higher than feelings. That’s my whole point, and my worry: You can’t say to someone who saves a dog before a person they’re wrong because you have replaced biblical values with feelings.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How do you know what that value is supposed to be in every case? Is it written in the Bible: “You should save the stranger before a dog”?

DENNIS PRAGER: It doesn’t use those words, but it does—yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: It tells you to value human life, I know that.

DENNIS PRAGER: It tells you we are created in God’s image and animals are not.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why should you save someone who is created in God’s image before someone who is not?

DENNIS PRAGER: Because “in God’s image” means “sacred,” having a divine soul. The biblical teaching is, therefore, that only human life is sacred. We cannot abuse animals, but they are not equal in worth to human beings.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Then should someone who is not Jewish also believe that value?

DENNIS PRAGER: Of course.

If Jewish or biblical values were only applicable to Jews, they wouldn’t be moral values; they would be cultural values or religious practices that are unique to Jews. By definition, moral values must be universal. Keeping kosher, for example, while it contains moral elements, is not a moral value as such. It is a Jewish religious practice, and therefore not applicable to non-Jews.

That is why we can speak of Judeo-Christian values. This term refers to the moral values that the two religions share as a consequence of their sharing a Bible: The Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. People don’t speak of Judeo-Christian theology because Jewish theology is Jewish and Christian theology is Christian.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But that’s imposing our values on them.

DENNIS PRAGER: First, we don’t need to impose our values on Christians, as they already share our moral values. As for imposing our values on non-Christians, would you argue that we should not enforce moral laws against murder and theft? Of course we should. And you would want us to as well if you want to live in a decent society. Generally, we should teach our values, and, in the case of biblical commandments such as not to murder, steal, bear false witness, we should impose our values as universally applicable.

If you believe that saving a stranger before a dog is right, how could you believe it’s only right for you? Don’t you believe it’s right for others to save people first?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I believe it’s right for everyone—

DENNIS PRAGER: Then why won’t you teach it?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, I can teach it, and they can reject it.

DENNIS PRAGER: Of course, they can. I am totally for freedom of rejection. But I have the obligation to teach it. The Jews were the first people to ban human sacrifice. When they said to other tribes or nations, “You cannot commit child sacrifice because the universal God says so,” they were presumably laughed at—just as you would be laughed at if you walked into the average American high school and said, “You must save a person before your dog because the universal God says so.”

This is the battle Jews and Christians must fight. I know this is new to you. It’s the reason Jewish and Christian life are in such terrible straits: Their followers are losing their sense of purpose. You have beautifully crystallized our purpose. If we don’t teach that human life comes first, our civilization is going to be up the proverbial creek—our society will revert to being uncivilized.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: To me, that value seems so normal, like it would be completely odd for them to have different values.

DENNIS PRAGER: If that value seems “so normal” to you, it is thanks to the Torah and to the Jews and the Christians who spread its values.

DENNIS PRAGER: Here’s another example of how biblical values will have likely influenced you.

Imagine you are walking down a dark alley by yourself at night in a bad part of Omaha. All of a sudden, you see ten men walking toward you. Would it give you any comfort at all to know they had just left Bible class? Anyone?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, I would feel better to know that they had just left Bible class—but I’d feel even better to know they’d just left an academic building or prestigious place of employment. From my perspective, the issue is less about their moral system and more about whether they feel they have something to lose, like academic standing, income, or God’s favor, by committing a violent crime.

DENNIS PRAGER: I, too, would feel better if I knew that the ten men had just left an academic building or prestigious place of employment. However, there are exponentially more people in the inner-city studying the Bible than people in academic buildings or prestigious places of employment.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Doesn’t advocating for values based on God’s revelation invite prayer in school and other religious intrusions in society?

DENNIS PRAGER: The fact that something is good for society does not necessarily invite intrusion into daily life on behalf of that particular value or policy. I mean, it’s good to brush your teeth twice a day. Does that invite schools to ensure that kids brush their teeth twice a day? Obviously not.

Having said that, I am convinced that America was a better place when there was prayer in school, especially given that the prayers were non-denominational. That meant the prayers were not of any specific religion. The prayer that the Supreme Court knocked out of schools in 1962 made no reference to the Bible, Jesus, or Moses. It belonged to no denomination. It was: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our Country.” What is bad about students blessing their teachers? As I have noted on many occasions, within one generation, we have gone from kids blessing their teachers to kids cursing their teachers.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Since we have far more people now who reject God and reject religion, isn’t the idea of introducing even a non-denominational prayer going to exclude those people?

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, does “Merry Christmas” exclude this Jew? There wasn’t a day in my life that I felt excluded when I was wished, either individually or collectively, “Merry Christmas.” In Israel, on Friday evening, the radio announcers all say “Shabbat Shalom,” wishing the audience a “peaceful Sabbath.” Does that exclude all the non-Jews of Israel, which is about 20 percent of the population? I know many non-Jews in Israel who love being wished “Shabbat Shalom” and they love wishing it for others. How about the Jewish New Year? Before you wish somebody a happy Jewish New Year, do you first check if they celebrate it? That would be a bit bizarre. I would like to wish you a happy New Year, but I have no idea if you celebrate it. Hypersensitivity has taken over. If anything, kids should learn that it’s a good thing they are not excluded or disenfranchised by someone wishing them a blessed or peaceful holiday they don’t happen to observe.

The removal of the Creator Who gave us unalienable rights is then removed from society. There are many atheists who would not think that’s a good thing. The most prominent atheist alive at this time is Richard Dawkins, an emeritus fellow at Oxford University. Even he calls himself a “cultural Christian,” meaning that he broadly accepts the Christian moral worldview rather than any other. The pursuit of a world that offends no one would damage almost everyone.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Isn’t there a difference between having someone wish me “Merry Christmas” or something like that and having to attend school where I will be forced to say or hear a school prayer whether I like it or not?

DENNIS PRAGER: First of all, no one had to recite the prayer. At worst, you had to hear it. I don’t know why that’s bad. If I were a visiting student in India, and they made a non-denominational prayer at school, I would find it fascinating, not exclusionary. It’s a beautiful thing. This is their culture. A very important value that has been lost is my working to assimilate into a culture instead of being offended by many things specific to it. When my Orthodox Jewish grandparents came to America in the early 1900s, their dream, which was common to that generation of immigrants, whether Russian, Italian, or something else, was to become an American. That’s what everybody should dream. If you move to a country, you should work to become a member of that country. That doesn’t mean you forfeit your specific culture. But it does mean you work to integrate into that society—speak its language and adopt its cultural norms. We now have it backwards.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Are you saying that part of adopting American culture is working to adopt God in your life?

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, if I am right that the American Trinity is “In God we trust,” E pluribus unum , and “Liberty,” then I would think so. You’re not a bad American if you don’t adopt it, but you should try, as it will make a better life for you and for society.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, how do people get different values? Where do they come from?

DENNIS PRAGER: People have different values for two primary reasons:

People who derive their “values” from their feelings will, of course, have different personal values from people who have different feelings. To return to the dog-stranger scenario, those who feel that people are more valuable than any animal they love, will vote to save the stranger. They may call this feeling a value—that human beings come before other creatures—but again, it is still a personal “value,” a personal opinion. On the other hand, people who feel that an animal with whom they have bonded comes before a stranger with whom they have no bond will vote to save the pet they love. They might label that feeling a value—that loyalty to any being that is loyal to us is a supreme value—but that, too, is a personal value, not a universal value.

Second, different people may have different value systems. Here is an example I mentioned earlier: For centuries, there was a common but not universal practice among Hindus called sati, in which widows would leap into the flames that were cremating their deceased husband’s body. Widows who may not have wanted to be burned alive could not resist their society’s pressure to do so.

In the nineteenth century, when Britain ruled India, the British ordered the Hindus to stop this practice. Here was a clear case of clashing values, as exemplified by the following anecdote:

When a British official told a leading Hindu that sati must no longer be practiced, the Hindu leader responded that this was a Hindu religious practice, and the British had no right to interfere in India’s religious customs. The British official responded that the British, too, had a custom: to hang people who participated in murder. Thus, the British ended the ancient practice of sati.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, if these people instead chose to make decisions based on values, they would all have the same values?

DENNIS PRAGER: Only if one side persuades the other to adopt its values. You saw what happened when I explained why a person we don’t know, let alone love, should be saved before the dog we love. And that is why it is our duty to persuade people to adopt good universal values. You saw how that can be done here. Half the people who voted for their dog were persuaded to change their minds, and in just a few minutes, I should add. Presumably, no one had ever confronted them with this God-based value system and the consequences of everyone rejecting it.

To speak personally for a moment, this is my life’s mission—to persuade people to adopt Bible-based values. It is not my mission to have all non-Jews observe all Bible-based laws. Many of them, such as the laws of kosher, apply only to Jews. It is not my mission to persuade non-Jews to become Jews. While Judaism warmly welcomes converts, it has never insisted that people must be Jews.

People must be good, and they don’t have to be Jews to be good. I should also note the obvious fact that not all Jews are good.

The best way to be good is to live by biblical values, beginning with the Ten Commandments. You can adopt those values as a Jew, as a Christian, or even as a person with no religion, though that can be a lonely place to be. I will address the issue of religion later.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How do you draw your line? Where do values stop and feelings begin?

DENNIS PRAGER: Excellent question. Your feelings and your values may well coincide—and that is the ideal. But if you know yourself, you should usually be able to tell the difference between a feeling and a value. If you choose to save the person, is it because your value system holds that human life is more valuable than animal life, including the life of an animal you love? Or is it because you feel more for people than for animals? Likewise, if you would save your dog, is it because of some personal value—such as loyalty, or because you feel more for your dog than for the stranger?

One way to know whether you are doing, or not doing, something because of a value rather than a feeling is to ask yourself: “What do I want to do?” Generally speaking, you know you are doing something because of a value when you don’t do what you want to do, or do what you don’t want to do. However, that value might be a personal value, or a universal value.

I’ll give you an example that has nothing to do with morality. Most people like eating dessert. If you are one of them, and you refrain from having dessert, clearly there is a personal value—presumably held for health and/or weight loss reasons—that is stopping you. If you followed your feelings, you would have dessert.

Like those of you who would try to save the dog you love before trying to save a person you don’t even know, I, too, would feel like saving my dog. But I know I would first try to save a stranger.

In fact, I spend much of my life doing things I don’t particularly want to do and not doing things I want to do because of values. I’ll give you an example. I once slightly damaged a car in a parking lot. No one saw me do it; I could have easily driven off, and no one would have been the wiser. And let me assure you, that’s what I wanted to do. But because of my values, I left a note on the damaged car’s windshield telling the owner I had caused the damage and how to contact me.

I’ll tell you what happened next because it is touching. I received a text message from the woman whose car I hit—a heartfelt message telling me how touched she was that someone would actually do what I did. I thanked her, and I never heard from her again.

Let me offer some further thoughts on that episode. To be perfectly honest, while my values were the primary reason I wrote that note and didn’t just drive away—which I suspect the great majority of people would have done—values were not the only reason I did what I did.

The other reason was feelings. One was I would feel guilty and therefore find it hard to live with myself if I simply drove away.

And there was a second feeling I’d like to mention: self-respect. I have never found the notion of self-love to be particularly meaningful. All of my life, I’ve heard people talk about the importance of loving yourself, but I’ve never related to it. What does “Do I love me?” mean? Do people really ask themselves that question? I understand what it means to love your family, your friends, your dog, and even to love non-living things: I love my home and Beethoven’s music, for example.

But as regards feelings about myself, my interest has always been whether I respect myself, not whether I love myself. It is very easy to love yourself and not do the right thing. Most people who do the wrong thing love themselves. They love themselves so much, they excuse whatever they do. That’s why it’s much more important to work at earning and keeping your self-respect than loving yourself.

In any event, guilt and self-respect are feelings that impelled me to identify myself to the owner of the car I hit. That’s why I said that the ideal is when feelings and values coincide. But because they are so often in conflict, biblical values must always prevail over feelings.

There are many more feelings one can have, but they typically don’t compel you to do the right thing. How you treat other people has to be based on biblical values much more than feelings. You should definitely be in touch with your feelings, but they can’t be the primary guide to your behavior.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, here’s an example. I voted to save the stranger over the dog. But I have a friend here whose upbringing is almost identical to mine—both our parents are Jewish, we’ve grown up together since preschool, and attend the same synagogue. We’re a lot alike, but he voted for the dog. I mean, is that more because of his feelings?

DENNIS PRAGER: Yes, he voted on his feelings. He certainly didn’t vote that way because he learned in synagogue that dogs are equal to strangers. And anyone who received that many years of Jewish education and still voted for their dog demonstrates the failure of their Jewish education.

This is a serious problem in many Jewish and Christian schools. They have failed to teach some of the most fundamental values of their respective religions. I remember meeting a group of Christian elementary school students at one of my speeches. I asked them the dog-stranger question and nearly every one of them voted to save their dog. Their teacher was horrified and told me so.

The same thing has happened at many Jewish schools, including Orthodox ones. In some cases, especially the Orthodox ones, the rabbis, like the Christian teacher, were horrified, and they told me so.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Let’s say you’ve got someone who is a member of the Cheeseburger Religion, okay? Their one value is that you have to eat cheeseburgers. One day, they see you eating a hamburger and they say, “You cannot eat meat without cheese; you’re only supposed to eat cheeseburgers.” And you tell them, “You cannot mix milk with meat, because that should be one of your values, so you should not be eating cheeseburgers.” Who is right?

DENNIS PRAGER: Only God and ethics are universal. The parts of religion that are not specifically about ethics are not universal. So, to use your example, I would never ask non-Jews to keep Kosher or refrain from eating milk and meat together. I do ask non-Jews to save strangers before dogs. Ritual issues and moral issues are not the same. There is profundity in separating meat and milk, as I will explain later. But no religious ritual is meant to be universal.

A universal value is, for example, people’s right to keep their property, so not stealing is a universal value. The sanctity of human life is a universal value. That’s why all people should save a stranger before a dog.

It is my religious obligation to teach the world universal values because they are Bible-based values. It is not my obligation to tell others not to eat cheeseburgers.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is eating kosher a value or a feeling?

DENNIS PRAGER: Before answering, I just want to say that you are all asking great questions. The beauty of talking to you while in your teens is that you don’t let anything go by. One reason religious life is in very bad shape is most adults stop asking these basic questions. And, more importantly, most religious adults don’t know how to answer the questions you are asking.

That’s why I’m here—to offer you rational arguments for taking God and the Bible seriously. That’s why I’ve written The Rational Bible , a five-volume reason-based explanation of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Those five books are the basis of both the Old and New Testaments and, therefore, the basis of both Judaism and Christianity. Too many religious Jews and Christians cannot rationally explain their faith.

This is the same problem facing America and the whole Western world. Americans and the citizens of virtually every other Western nation—for generations now—haven’t explained the moral bases of America and the West. As a result, we are not only confronting the demise of Judeo-Christian values, but the demise of American and Western values as well. Most Jews don’t know why to be Jewish, most children raised by Christians don’t know why to be Christian, most Americans don’t know why to be American, and so forth.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a question. How can you say that all values are universal? Meaning, you know, that everybody has the same values when, obviously, everyone doesn’t?

DENNIS PRAGER: I didn’t say everyone has the same values; I said everyone should have the same God-based/Bible-based values. That’s why the British ended sati in India and ended slavery wherever they could. Because they understood that not burning widows and not enslaving people are universal—not just British—values. Do you not agree?

Of course, the whole world doesn’t have the same universal values. If it did, there couldn’t have been a Holocaust. That’s why our task is to convince the whole world to have the same God-based ethical values. That’s why the ideal is that Judeo-Christian values become universal.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, never.

DENNIS PRAGER: If you reject that idea, you’ll have to accept that Holocausts are inevitable. If you don’t want the whole world to hold that God declares murder wrong, then don’t complain when some group comes to murder you. Either we teach the world the Ten Commandments or the world will descend into evil. This may be the most important idea in your life.

Don’t be surprised when somebody beats the living daylights out of you or rapes you, because that is what will take place if we adopt the attitude you just heard called out, “Never, never teach the world values.” If you don’t teach men not to rape—because there is a God who holds rapists accountable—they will rape.

If we don’t teach biblical values, people will act in despicable ways. We’re not talking about theory. You’re living in a country where every few minutes a woman is raped, every minute a car is stolen, and every few hours a human being is murdered. The people committing these crimes don’t act on the basis of biblical values; they act on the basis of feelings. And in the case of the murder of millions—over one hundred million people murdered by communist regimes in the twentieth century—they act on the basis of different values, values that don’t come from the universal God of creation.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why does it have to be biblical values? Why can’t it just be human values?

DENNIS PRAGER: For two primary reasons.

First, there is no such thing as “human values.” There are biblical values. There are Islamic values. There are communist and Fascist values. They all have definitions. But neither you nor I can define “human” values.

Second, by definition, human values are based on humans. And any values based on humans can be taken away by humans. That’s why the American Declaration of Independence states that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Only if our rights come from our Creator, meaning God, are they unalienable. If our rights come from humans, humans can take them away.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have some friends who are Catholic, and they have the same values I do.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s why I keep referring to Judeo-Christian, biblical values. If you are true to Judaism and they are true to Catholicism, you share a great many moral values. Both your values come from the Bible and are from God.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So why can’t it just be religious values, then?

DENNIS PRAGER: Fine with me—if those religious values are based on the Bible. Hasn’t that been my whole point?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How do you resolve conflicts between people raised in two different value systems? To give an example, the British in India.

Let’s assume that the wife wants to be burned with her husband’s body.

DENNIS PRAGER: Many of them did. Many Hindu widows thought sati was a great religious act.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The Hindu believes in reincarnation and so they don’t care what happens to the body, all right? So, who is to say if they all agree to it, that it’s wrong? You can’t compare it to the Holocaust because there’s a difference there.

DENNIS PRAGER: Because the Jews didn’t want to die, and the Hindu widows did?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Exactly.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s an excellent point: What if the widow really wants to burn to death?

I would answer by asking a similar question. What if any of those who were sacrificed in the ancient world wanted to be sacrificed? Would that render human sacrifice moral? I don’t think any of you would argue that it does.

Perhaps now you can appreciate the importance of the law in the Torah, in Deuteronomy, “I have put before you today life and death, and you shall choose life.”

One clear implication of that verse is that the God of the Torah is not a god who wants people to die for Him. The Torah prohibited human sacrifice in the strongest language, and there is nothing analogous to sati in all of Jewish law. The Torah would hold the same position regarding euthanasia. It is no wonder that Christians, people who held the Hebrew Bible as divine writ, abolished sati.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But what gives us the right to impose our values on an adult who voluntarily submits themselves to a practice we don’t like?

DENNIS PRAGER: The best answer I can give you is God. To which you may respond, is it the Muslim god, the Jewish God, or the Christian God? That is why I constantly speak about the God of the Bible and Judeo-Christian values. Judaism and Christianity share the complete Old Testament, which is about 75 percent of the Old Testament and New Testament combined. Islam, on the other hand, does not share any part of the Hebrew Bible with Jews or of the New Testament with Christians.

For those who believe that values emanate from God, the question “what gives us the right to impose values?” has an obvious answer: God, the Creator of the universe and the God of the Ten Commandments. For those who don’t believe in this God, the answer is equally obvious: The believers in God have no such authority. But the arguments are not equally valid because Judeo-Christian civilization has produced Western civilization, the greatest experiment in human liberty, equality, and decency in human history.

The Torah and the rest of the Bible are a radical celebration of life. Though the existence of an afterlife is repeatedly implied in both the Hebrew Bible and is central to the New Testament, the whole emphasis of the Bible, and particularly of the Torah, is on sanctifying this life, enjoying this life, and acting morally in this life.

Life is a universal Bible-based value. Neither the Torah nor later Judaism wants Jews to give the world the Kosher laws, or asks that the world eat matzah in April. It does ask the world not to burn widows, even if the widows say they want it. For all we know, many of those involved in human sacrifice wanted to be sacrificed.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I agree with what you’re saying on the values and stuff, but I don’t understand why you don’t see the problem with basing values on our religion. We live in a big society with other religions and the government has to bring all those groups together. And saying the laws come from religion won’t do that. It can’t be one individual religion. Judaism and Christianity, I know they’re not that different, but some areas are different, so you’re going to have problems basing all the values on your religious faith. You can’t live together without having some conflicts.

DENNIS PRAGER: You don’t understand why I don’t see the problem with basing values on Judaism and Christianity since people with other religions live in our country. So laws coming from religion won’t work and won’t bring people together.

A number of responses:

First, the American Declaration of Independence states that all human beings are “endowed by their Creator”—God—with certain “unalienable rights,” such as “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

What American would disagree with that? Would a Muslim? Would a Hindu? An atheist would disagree, since atheists don’t believe there is any Creator. But most atheists would agree that society should regard all humans as having some unalienable rights, though an atheist could not explain, if no Creator endows people with unalienable rights, where unalienable rights come from.

The same holds for virtually every other value of American society because the many that are rooted in Judeo-Christian values are, by definition, universal.

Second, you might be confusing laws with values when you say, “Laws coming from religion won’t work and won’t bring people together.”

Those who advocate for Judeo-Christian values do not advocate for religious laws. There is no American law to attend church. And the Constitution explicitly states, “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” In other words, as long as the Constitution is adhered to, any person of any religion or no religion may hold political office.

If you were not confusing laws with values, and just arguing that no American laws should emanate from religion, that’s an impossible and undesirable requirement. First, how are we to assess what animates every American law? And who cares? The only thing that matters regarding any law is whether it is a good law or a bad law. Virtually the entire abolitionist cause—the movement to end slavery—in Britain, where it originated, and in the United States—came from Bible-based Christians. Would you have opposed abolishing slavery because abolition was mandated by religion?

Your other objection is that when religions differ, “you’re going to have problems basing all the values on your religious faith. You can’t live together without having some conflicts.”

That religions differ is irrelevant. If no Americans were religious, if every American were an atheist, we would have just as many conflicts. People will always differ with regard to many laws.

But I cannot think of one American law that is supported only by members of one faith. The most frequently cited example of a religion-based law is the banning of most abortions. That is supported by many secular people, not only by most religious Jews and Christians. You don’t have to be a religious Jew or Christian to believe that the life of a human fetus—especially one at the stage of viability—is worthy of protection. You only have to believe in science.

As it happens, the opposite of what you said tends to be the case. God has been a uniting force in American history. That’s what God is supposed to be. One God, one humanity. And as I said earlier, one of America’s three mottos, “In God We Trust,” has actually united Americans much more than it has divided them. Americans are less united today, in a far less religious America, than at any time since the Civil War.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But not all religions unite people.

DENNIS PRAGER: Maybe not. But Christianity in America has. The dominant American religion has been Christianity, and as much as Christians would like all mankind to be Christian, America’s Christians have almost never demanded that all Americans be Christian. In fact, America’s Christians created the freest and most tolerant society in history.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But you’re only talking about Judaism and Christianity. and I’m happy that we get along, but there are many others.

DENNIS PRAGER: Isn’t that an argument for retaining a strong Judeo-Christian America?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But it might not work for everyone in society. You’d be taking your religious values over, let’s say, other religions and people’s feelings and opinions, and stuff like that. Shouldn’t you have to consider the legal rights of the person who believes in another religion that doesn’t have the same values? Like, if you’re a Satanist and you believe Satan told you to go kill someone.

DENNIS PRAGER: If some people believe in Satan and that Satan says they should go and murder people, let’s hope these people remain a tiny minority. I don’t see how the existence of such psychopaths argues against religion-based, specifically Judeo-Christian, values. In fact, the most powerful antidote against Satanic religion is Judeo-Christian religion.

What we need is goodness rooted in God. That’s all I’m arguing. It’s so simple. All I’m asking you to understand is the need for a biblical, divine basis for goodness. Most of you acknowledged, with maybe five exceptions, that you would like the whole world to believe that it’s wrong to rape, wrong to murder, and wrong to steal. Again, what I’m telling you is the only way to teach these things is to base them on something higher than us. Only then are these values real, not just opinions or feelings, and therefore universal.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Shouldn’t you base it on everybody in society? In other words—you know, you can’t just base it on something higher, because something higher could be interpreted in any way.

DENNIS PRAGER: I’ll grant that. So we should say “God,” not just “something higher.” When God—meaning the God of the Bible—is our source of values, those values are less likely to be interpreted in “any way” than if we have everybody basing their values on their feelings.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, it’s not your feelings, it’s what most agree to. That’s how it is in a democracy where everyone gets a say.

DENNIS PRAGER: “Most agree to” is indeed what democracy means. But “most agree to” can be quite dangerous. Most Germans supported Hitler and the Nazis. We can’t know for sure, but most Russians supported Stalin. We do know that most Russians did so seventy-five years after World War II. Despite the fact that Stalin enslaved Russia and all the other Soviet republics and murdered about thirty million people, half a century later, according to the BBC in 2019, polls indicated that most Russians regard Stalin favorably. And, according to the Times of Israel in 2024, most Palestinians support Hamas and its stated goal of annihilating Israel and its Jews. Democracies don’t necessarily establish what is moral. Most people vote their feelings. Without God, feelings determine voting and most other behavior.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The main flaw I find with your position is your contention that, in essence, people are bad. And the second point I want to make is the conflict that I believe we’re trying to resolve isn’t the difference between feelings and values, it’s the difference between the ability to be confrontational and stand up for what you believe versus the inability to do so, which, in my opinion, is inborn, not taught.

DENNIS PRAGER: I said earlier, there is one more issue we will discuss that will be very controversial: Are people basically good? I’m going to address that later.

I will say now, however, that I’m happy about your first contention. It means that my points are getting through. You’re putting two and two together: “Wait a minute—if we can’t rely on our feelings, Prager is clearly saying we’re not basically good.” That is exactly what I am saying. We are not basically good. We are not basically evil either. But it’s not easy to be a good person. Judaism doesn’t hold that people are basically good. Christianity doesn’t hold it. Reason doesn’t hold it. And history doesn’t teach it. Only people today—since the Enlightenment—hold it. I might add that it is particularly odd when Jews, the people who have been hurt the most by other people, believe people are basically good.

So, you’re right, although I don’t think people are basically bad. I never said that, and Judaism doesn’t hold it. We’re neither.

Your other point is that the issue may not be one of values, but of psychology—namely, an innate inability to be confrontational.

You may be right about the inability to confront others being inborn rather than learned. On the other hand, it is also possible that many cultures teach people not to be confrontational. Whichever it is, most people do find it hard to confront people, especially to their face. And that, you are saying, may be the reason many people who vote to save the stranger won’t say that those who voted to save their dog are wrong.

My suspicion is that the inability to say others are wrong in moral matters comes from a lifetime of being told that morality is a matter of opinion. Many young people won’t even say the Nazis were wrong. They will say only that in their opinion the Nazis were wrong; the Nazis, after all, thought they were right.

Another reason I don’t think the issue is an inability to confront people is that when people regard what they believe as emanating from something higher than themselves, they are able to confront.

I don’t think people who approach strangers and say “You should believe in Jesus” are born with confrontational genes. In fact, Protestants created among the least confrontational cultures in the world. Politeness is a major Protestant virtue. Yet evangelical Protestants confront non-Christians—politely—about their faith. They do that because they hold that their religious beliefs emanate from something higher than themselves, not because they are temperamentally predisposed to confront others.

What stopped any of the stranger-savers here from saying the dog-savers were wrong is not an inability to confront. It is that they don’t believe morality is rooted in anything higher than their feelings.

You should know that I don’t do this work because I love doing it. I don’t think, “Hey, this is so much fun—standing in front of people and telling them they’re wrong.” I don’t particularly like doing it. I’d rather be listening to Bach or Haydn. The point is that I am duty-bound by my belief in God and my religion to say to people, “Wait a minute—you’re wrong.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: When you were talking about reason and the Germans who didn’t hate Jews during the Holocaust, you said it was more reasonable for them not to risk their lives to help Jews. But many of them didn’t help because they didn’t believe Jews were being persecuted.

DENNIS PRAGER: There were two types of Nazis. There were idealistic Nazis—Germans who truly believed Jews were inferior beings who needed to be exterminated; and there were opportunistic Nazis—Germans who viewed being a Nazi as a path to attain power, money, glory, and the ability to act on their worst instincts.

There is a famous scene in Arthur Miller’s play Incident at Vichy that deals with this issue. A Jewish doctor trying to escape Nazi-occupied France prays that he will encounter a corrupt Nazi, not an idealistic one. An idealistic Nazi will report him. A corrupt Nazi could be bribed. By the way, this is a good example of how morally worthless idealism and sincerity—traits we tend to regard as beautiful—can be. Idealistic and sincere Nazis were the worst Nazis.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, what about the third Nazi, the one who didn’t believe it was happening?

DENNIS PRAGER: We will probably never know what percentage of the German people knew about the genocide of Europe’s Jews. When I said not hiding a Jew was the reasonable thing for a non-Jewish German to do, I was making the point that reason doesn’t necessarily argue for acting morally and may even argue for acting immorally.

Even the German who didn’t know about the death camps knew that a Jewish neighbor who asked to be hidden was in serious trouble just for being a Jew, and every German knew the consequences for being caught aiding a Jew were dire.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I believe the ability to stand up to others is inborn, not because of values.

DENNIS PRAGER: I believe it emanates from both. Certain people are born with innate courage—it takes some degree of courage to confront others—but I think courage is primarily a result of a strong commitment to a value system. If you believe in something enough, you become courageous.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m kind of confused between opinions and values. Because I’m strongly in favor of euthanasia, does that mean my opinion is based on my values? I also have very strong opinions on other political issues. Does it mean I’ve lost touch with Judaism or I’m less of a Jew?

DENNIS PRAGER: Opinions and values might be different, and they might coincide. The ideal is to have opinions that flow directly from one’s values. In fact, however, very many people hold opinions that do not flow from their values.

Here’s an example: According to Pew Research, almost half of young Americans say they believe in free speech—but not hate speech. That is a perfect example of people having an opinion that contradicts their own values. If you believe in free speech, you cannot suppress what you deem to be hate speech. If you do, your commitment to free speech is meaningless. For one thing, you’re implying that you would only allow love speech. And that’s obviously silly. But what you’re really saying is that you would suppress all speech with which you differ. You would label such speech “hate speech,” and then suppress it. But if you get to ban anything you consider hate speech, and I get to ban anything I consider hate speech, we will no longer have free speech—or much speech at all.

Another example: A vast number of people value human life yet support abortion at any point during pregnancy even when the mother’s life is in no way threatened by the pregnancy. I know that raising this issue disturbs many of you. That’s not my intent, nor do I raise the issue to persuade you to oppose abortion.

I raise this issue solely to show you how one can hold an opinion, in this case, taking the life of a human fetus or unborn baby—you choose the term you prefer—directly conflicts with a strongly held value that human life is sacred. There is no debate about whether a human fetus, certainly at the stage when it has brainwaves and a heartbeat, is a human being. That’s why when someone kills a human fetus—at any stage of pregnancy—most states charge that person with homicide.

A third example: Nearly all people hold the value that all nations, all peoples, have a right to a country of their own: Italians have a right to Italy, Japanese to Japan, Russians to Russia, etc. But a great many people have an opinion that violates that value—that Jews do not have a right to a Jewish state.

They hold this opinion, they say, because when the modern State of Israel was created in 1948, it displaced many Palestinians. But if displacing people when a country is created means that country has no right to exist, no country in South America, Central America, or North America—not to mention many countries in the Eastern Hemisphere—has a right to exist. The anti-Zionist says that there is one people on Earth that is not allowed its own nation.

A fourth example: Many people hold a value known as pacifism. The one meaning of that term is: Killing a human being is always wrong. “Always” wrong is what makes pacifism. But then many people who believe they are pacifists justify killing in self-defense. Their opinion violates their value.

A fifth example is the French Revolution. Its motto was “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” But liberty and equality cannot coexist. The moment you allow liberty, there will be inequality. Just to cite one example, if people are free to earn whatever people will pay them, there will be material inequality. Professional baseball players will always earn far more than plumbers, doctors, and teachers.

And if you try to create a society of material equality, you will inevitably end up resorting to violence. The only way to ensure that everyone has the same amount of money is by using force. That’s the primary reason why the French Revolution ended up with the guillotine, while the American Revolution, which occurred just a few years earlier, ended up with the Liberty Bell. The American motto, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” did not contain the word “equality.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But should every opinion of mine be based on the Bible?

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s a great question. I will answer it as honestly as I can. After a certain time, the Bible either earns your respect or it doesn’t. If it earns enough of your respect, then even when you initially disagree, you will say, “Wait a minute. It’s clear the Bible holds a certain value, and I don’t hold that value. But since I respect it and believe at least some of it, so I have to rethink my view.

At one point in a public debate about Judaism I had with a major secular thinker, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, I turned to the audience and said: “I think I can summarize my basic difference with Professor Dershowitz in two sentences: When Professor Dershowitz differs with the Torah, he says, ‘The Torah is wrong, and I am right.’ When I differ with the Torah, I say, ‘The Torah is right, and I am wrong.’ ” Professor Dershowitz responded that my summary was entirely accurate.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But, close to the beginning of this session, you said you support capital punishment. As far as I know, I mean, Judaism doesn’t go by that.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s a difficult issue. Just about anyone who studies Judaism would acknowledge that Judaism regards premeditated murder as the greatest crime. They would also acknowledge that the Torah is adamantly in favor of capital punishment for premeditated murder. In fact, capital punishment for premeditated murder is the only law found in all five books of the Torah. They also acknowledge that later, post-biblical Jewish texts were opposed to capital punishment. The ancient rabbis made it almost impossible to ever enforce.

What we have here is not so much a clash of values as an evolution of law. By stating that premeditated murderers should be put to death, the Torah is clearly announcing how terrible God regards murder. That is a Torah value. And the rabbis never differed with that.

Therefore, the question is whether capital punishment for premeditated murder is a value or a law that emanates from that value. I think it is both. But whether or not you agree, we can all agree that there is usually a difference between a law and a value. The former is based on the latter. Here is a simple example: Driving safely is a value. Any given speed limit is a law.

Regarding capital punishment for murder, I believe the Torah would not have us keep Adolf Eichmann or Jeffry Dahmer alive. However, I acknowledge, based on later Jewish texts, that someone who believes in the Torah could differ with me on that issue. But no one could come to me and say what you did, “that’s merely my opinion.” My reply is, “My view has a biblical basis, so it is not merely my opinion.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I understand. Do you want the world to have the same values?

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s the mission of the Jewish people—for the world to have the same God-based moral value system, beginning with the Ten Commandments.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, if someone has a value system that contradicts their religion, how could the whole world have the same value system?

DENNIS PRAGER: Can you give me an example? I’m sure you’re thinking of something.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Not exactly. I’m just saying there have to be some situations where one religion can argue for and against the value. The whole world isn’t going to agree.

DENNIS PRAGER: Would you like the whole world to hold that murder is wrong?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes.

DENNIS PRAGER: So, where do you and I differ? We both want the world to have that value.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m not talking about murder. I’m not saying that.

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, that’s all I’m talking about—basic ethical principles. Remember, guys, I didn’t talk to you about keeping kosher. I talked to you about saving people before dogs, not stealing from stores, and not murdering. Do you have a problem with making those universal?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No.

DENNIS PRAGER: Then you and I are in agreement.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You say the Bible either earns our respect or it doesn’t; then why would I follow a religion that considers its Jewish followers to be chosen?

DENNIS PRAGER: The question implies that the belief in Jewish Chosenness is a belief in inherent Jewish superiority. But there is no hint of that in the Torah or the Hebrew Bible, where non-Jews are so often depicted as morally superior to born Jews. It was a non-Jew who saved Moses. It was the Jews who worshiped the golden calf. The examples are endless. “Chosen” means you’re chosen for a task. Period. End of issue. Does that make you a better human being?

The task Jews were chosen for is to introduce the world to the one God and spread the values of the Torah to the world. What’s more, Chosenness has historically come with the price of antisemitism. That tremendous burden hardly indicates Jewish superiority.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is it worth being a Jew given the dangers of antisemitism?

DENNIS PRAGER: The quick answer to that is, during periods when Jews were not persecuted, it was great to be a Jew. In other words, absent antisemitism, Judaism is a joy in Jews’ lives. But there’s so much antisemitism that the question is a valid one. I remember many years ago, I was flying back to LA from Phoenix, Arizona, and, coincidentally, a woman who attended the lecture I gave the previous night was seated next to me. She wasn’t Jewish but she came to the lecture. Her husband, who is Jewish, did not attend the lecture. She explained he was a child of Holocaust survivors, and the last thing he wanted was to raise his children in a dangerous movement where there’s a good chance they would be hurt. As the Passover Seder liturgy says, “in every generation someone arises to exterminate us.” And that turns out to be true. Now it’s Iran. Before that, it was Germany. Before Germany, over the centuries, there were pogroms against Jews throughout medieval Europe. There was the Inquisition and the Crusades, and so on. So, I wonder how many Jews regret being raised as Jews. Maybe a lot—I don’t know. It’s an interesting question. Raising your child to be a Jew is the ultimate statement that there are values greater than mere survival. The ultimate answer to why a Jew would remain a Jew despite the dangers of antisemitism is that he believes he has a divine mission to deliver God’s message to the world. In short, the most effective way to resist the fear of antisemitism is for Jews to believe they’re Chosen. As I’ve often said, Judaism wants Jews to fear God more than they fear man.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But you could make the argument if your standard is that there are values more important than mere survival, that Christians share our values. As a Christian, you could have the values without the risk of being a Jew.

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, I’m a big proponent of Judeo-Christian values. In fact, many Jews and Christians share more values than many Jews do with other Jews, and many Christians share more values with religious Jews than they do with many Christians. Having said that, our values are not all identical. I’ll give an example that doesn’t sound significant, but is significant. The Torah allows for divorce, and Jesus largely differed with it. That’s a big difference.

In general, religious Christians place more emphasis on faith than religious Jews do. Religious Jews tend to value behavior more than faith. I agree with Judaism’s emphasis on behavior over faith without denying the importance of faith. At the same time, I recognize that Christianity recognizes the importance of behavior.

While Shabbat and the Jewish holidays can be observed by anyone, they’re far better when observed with a community. To that point, the Hebrew phrase for “synagogue” is beit knesset , which is not “house of prayer,” but “house of meeting.” Furthermore, the vast majority of traditional Jewish prayers are prayed in the plural—for “we” and “us,” not “I.” Traditional Jewish prayers are offered for the community, and not generally for the individual. A community can amplify one’s celebrations and soften one’s suffering. The sense of peace and togetherness that observance introduces into one’s life is powerful and life changing. Jewish holidays such as Passover and Succot, while bringing important reminders of significant Torah values and stories to those who observe those holidays, also allow Jews to not only learn those values and stories by studying them, but by living them.

Finally, I believe that the Jews remain God’s chosen people.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay. Well, on the issue of abortion, Jewish people have both views on this. Is that a value or is that a feeling?

DENNIS PRAGER: First of all, much of the time, probably most of the time, “Jewish people” and Judaism are not the same thing. For example, the Ten Commandments command Jews to observe Shabbat. Most Jews do not observe the Sabbath. Another example: Judaism affirms the existence of the afterlife. Most Jews don’t believe in an afterlife. The list of where “Jewish people” and Judaism differ is, unfortunately, pretty extensive. So, when you say, “Jewish people have both views” on abortion, it doesn’t tell me anything about Judaism. The fact that Jews differ on abortion doesn’t really matter. What matters most is not whether Jews differ with each other on the subject. What matters most is what Judaism has to say, and whether Jews who try to live by Jewish law and values differ with what Judaism has to say.

Now, let’s get to your question: Are people’s positions on abortion a feeling or a value? According to people on both sides of the issue, their position is entirely rooted in a value. However, to be clear, I use the term “value” if the position is rooted in the Bible. Otherwise, it’s just a personal opinion. People on the pro-life side say their position is rooted in the value of protecting human life. People on the pro-choice side say their position is rooted in the value of personal autonomy.

It is worth noting that people on both sides of this issue hold the other side’s values. Pro-life people believe in personal autonomy, and pro-choice people believe in protecting human life. So, then, given that pro-life and pro-choice people believe in both preserving human life and personal autonomy, why do they come to opposite positions regarding abortion?

The most obvious answer is this: Pro-life people believe that preserving human life is a more important value than personal autonomy. The fact is, however, that pro-choice people also believe this. Pro-choice people don’t believe personal autonomy trumps preserving human life—they don’t believe people should be allowed to murder just because they would be exercising their autonomy.

So, then, given that both sides hold personal autonomy and preserving human life as values, and given that both sides believe that when those two values conflict, preservation of human life trumps personal autonomy, why do they differ on abortion?

There is only one possible answer: Some pro-choice people do not believe that a human fetus is a human life, and those who do believe it’s a human being don’t believe the fetus should be accorded all the rights of a fully developed human being. If they did, they would have to be pro-life and oppose pregnant women exercising their personal autonomy to have an abortion, unless a woman’s life were endangered if she didn’t have an abortion.

But there is a major problem with that position. The human fetus is a human life. And pro-choice people know this. They know—and agree—that if a mugger shoots a pregnant woman and kills her fetus, the shooter should be charged with murder.

So, there is simply no rational reason to hold that all abortions are moral. The people who hold this position are not acting on a universal value. They are acting on a feeling—the feeling that no one should tell any pregnant woman that by ending her pregnancy for her convenience, she is ever engaged in an immoral act.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But part of my question is, you said values come from your religion. Well, Judaism can be on both sides of a view.

DENNIS PRAGER: Judaism doesn’t support both sides. There is no normative Jewish position that holds that all abortions, no matter what the reason, and no matter at what stage of pregnancy, are permitted.

Having said that, it is true that there are instances when people arguing about a given Jewish position on a moral issue can differ. But that does not negate my point that we should derive our values from the Bible. It only means that at times, people can honestly differ about what the Bible’s position is.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Pardon me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you earlier say that all of our values come from our religion?

DENNIS PRAGER: You are referring to my exchange with the young woman who said that while she holds many positions that I or her parents hold, she may not be conscious that her values emanate from God or the Bible. I told her that her values probably emanate from the Bible, nonetheless. If your values were given to you by your parents, your parents likely got those values from their parents or grandparents, many of whom were probably religious.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don’t believe values come from religion like you do. I believe that freedom of choice for women is right because my values come from inside myself. They don’t come from someone or something else. Just because God or the Bible says it’s right—that’s not right to me.

DENNIS PRAGER: What, then, is your argument against someone who also believes that all values come from inside the individual, and says that his value is to kill Jews, as do Nazis and groups like Hamas? The fact is, you would have no argument against that person. Your values come from inside of you, and that person’s argument comes from inside of him. So, you would have no argument.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I wouldn’t agree with him. I would say that’s wrong because my value says it’s wrong. But there’s nothing I could do to change the opinion of the other person.

DENNIS PRAGER: The only thing you can do is convince the person that there is a standard of right and wrong that is above both of you and therefore above both of your feelings. That’s probably the only way we can prevent Holocausts.

Why are you smiling?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, because I don’t believe that. So I can’t argue that.

DENNIS PRAGER: I know. But that is my whole point. That’s why I’m here.

Don’t shake your head without responding. I’m not going to let you go away without responding.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don’t understand. I think I lost you like an hour ago.

(Laughter)

DENNIS PRAGER: All right. If you lost me an hour ago, ask me to explain it again.

How many of you do not understand what I’m saying? Okay, there are two more of you. I’ll be happy to spend more time with the three of you privately. Fortunately, the other seventy-one have followed the argument.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: If your parents just stuff their beliefs down your throat and you’re not supposed to make up your mind about anything—you just look at the Bible and you believe whatever it says, then it seems like you’re saying you aren’t supposed to have feelings of your own.

DENNIS PRAGER: I never said you shouldn’t have feelings of your own. We all do, and we all should. Feelings are what make us human beings rather than AI robots. What I am saying is that—in general, and especially regarding right and wrong—it’s a bad idea to be guided by feelings.

I am not asking you to be a religious robot. I am asking that you not be a feelings robot. By unquestioningly following either religion or feelings, you become a robot.

I am asking you to acknowledge that if ethics are not rooted in God and the Bible, everybody—or every society—decides to do whatever they think or feel is right.

I acknowledge there are risks to my position. I have no foolproof solution to evil. There are people who say, “God said,” and do bad things. But I need you to acknowledge the deficiency of your position. So, spend a few years studying the Bible and then make up your mind.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, I disagree.

DENNIS PRAGER: You disagree with what?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think you can’t tell others how they should think or what to do. Every person should believe whatever is right for them.

DENNIS PRAGER: I am telling you what to think—otherwise, there would be no point to this dialogue. However, I would never coerce you into thinking certain ways. I would advocate coercing you with regard to certain behaviors. Every Western society, indeed every society today, advocates coercion with regard to a host of possible crimes, the greatest of all being murder. There are a limited number of such commandments in the Ten Commandments, such as not to steal and not to murder.

With regard to good and evil, every civilized society tells people what they should do. The real world is filled with different groups advocating for a variety of positions. We’re told we should be socialists or atheists. We’re told we should pay more taxes or less in taxes. We should get married and have children, but some environmentalists will tell us not to have children—the planet is already overburdened, they say. The idea is not to avoid being exposed to or being offended by these ideas, but rather to be well aware of the proper values to hold so we can properly judge these ideas.

And wouldn’t you sometimes tell a person what to do? If a friend told you they wanted to hold up a store, would you say, “Don’t do it”? Would you say nothing? Would you think, “I have no right to tell him or her what to do; if they believe what they’re doing is right, it’s okay with me”?

At least, I hope you understand the consequences of your position: If somebody comes over, punches you in the face, and says, “I believe in busting people’s mouths when I can get away with it,” you would appreciate their position?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I would say I’m glad that they made up their mind about it.

DENNIS PRAGER: You would say, “I’m glad you made up your mind”? I think you live in a world of theory. I don’t believe that if somebody truly hurt you, maimed you, or maimed one of your parents, you would say to them, “I’m glad you made up your mind.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’d be mad because I would have been purposely hurt.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s all? You’d be mad because you were purposely hurt? You wouldn’t say the person was wrong? Again, I think you live in a world of theory. This is meant as an observation, not as an insult.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How can you separate feelings and values into totally different groups when a lot of the time they really work together because one leads to the other?

DENNIS PRAGER: We should all hope that good values lead to feelings and that feelings coincide with good values. But often that is not the case. That’s why I gave you the example of people who, led by their feelings, say they would save the dog they love before a human being they don’t know and therefore don’t love.

That’s why people need values—to tell them how to act irrespective of how they feel. If values and feelings were the same thing, we wouldn’t need values; we could simply follow our feelings and end up doing the right thing. But we do need values, because feelings alone usually don’t lead people to do the right thing.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don’t mean to demean your argument, but it sounds like it is more of a plan to help you find a balance between feelings and values, because they both happen so much that you need a little feeling to decide what’s moral.

DENNIS PRAGER: You don’t need feelings to decide what is moral, and you certainly can’t rely on them. Feelings are a terrible guide to either knowing or doing what is right.

Imagine your bank accidentally credits you with $5,000; you have no reason to assume the error will ever be discovered, and if it were discovered, you could always claim that you never noticed the error. I guarantee you that most people’s feelings would argue against reporting the error. If they report the error, it will be because of their values, not because of their feelings.

I’ll give you a real-life example. During the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, a store to which I owed $1,200 was burned to the ground, including its financial records. As a result, the store never billed me for that money. While I continued to send them the $100 monthly payments I owed, they had no way to know that I still owed them $1,200. I assumed they were insured, but I’d still be stealing if I didn’t pay the $1,200.

I paid the store the money not because I felt like doing so, but because of a value. I was taught the Ten Commandments from a very young age, and the Seventh Commandment is “Do not steal.” That makes the prohibition against stealing a transcendent value. It comes from God and is therefore infinitely higher than my feelings. Equally important, it is also infinitely higher than a secular value that also says we shouldn’t steal.

This is a good place to further explain why values must ultimately come from God. Most societies have an anti-stealing value: I don’t know of any modern Western society that says it is okay to steal. But if the value not to steal, or any other value, is only society-based, it is nothing more than an opinion. It is not a moral absolute; it is a societal opinion. Unless there is a God who says stealing is wrong, the value that stealing is wrong is human opinion. Without God, all morals are subjective. Only with God-based morality does an objective morality exist.

Now, obviously, I want to live in a society that says stealing is wrong—making “not stealing” a societal value—and prohibits it by making “not stealing” a law. But there are two insurmountable problems with that. First, the idea that stealing is wrong would then still be only a subjective opinion, that of society, not an objective moral absolute. Moral absolutes can come only from God, not from human beings. Second, if the ban on stealing does not emanate from God, many people will steal if they think they can get away with it. Many people violate societal laws when they think they can get away with it. On the other hand, if you believe that God is always watching you, you are far less likely to steal or engage in other law-breaking.

Just as with the example I previously mentioned regarding a car I accidentally scratched, I likely could have driven away without anyone noticing. There was a voice in me that said this was no big deal, that whoever owned the car was undoubtedly insured, and that no one would know the difference. But I still chose to leave a note on the car’s windshield. Why?

For two primary reasons: I believe I have to answer to God for all my actions, and if I hadn’t left the note, I would have had a guilty conscience.

Are there people who don’t believe in a judging God who would have also left a note on the damaged car? Of course. For them, reason number two—avoiding a guilty conscience—would have sufficed.

The unfortunate fact is that the conscience detached from God is rarely effective. The secular people whose consciences bother them are people with moral values—and those values are almost always Judeo-Christian values, whether they know it or not. Those secular people who have done something that conflicts with Judeo-Christian values and who take moral responsibility for their behavior are not a large group of people. As I told you earlier tonight, the world’s leading atheist, Professor Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, now calls himself a “cultural Christian,” meaning he remains an atheist but largely accepts Christian values.

The conscience is not a strong deterrent to bad behavior. Some people who do horrible things—incomparably worse than not leaving a note on a car they have damaged—have clear consciences. Murderers, torturers, rapists, and muggers sleep well at night. Roy Baumeister, a criminal psychologist affiliated with Florida State University and universities in Germany and Australia, told me during an interview and has written that murderers have particularly high self-esteem and often have clear consciences.

If you ask people whether stealing is wrong, most will say it is. That includes most people who steal. Yet, nearly all thieves avoid feelings of guilt. How do they avoid a guilty conscience? They find ways to justify their stealing. The most prevalent justification, for at least a hundred years, has been the claim that poverty causes crime. More recently, racism has been added to poverty as a justification for crime. Either claim enables many criminals to justify their crimes and avoid a guilty conscience.

That’s not all. If it’s a store they stole from, they will say—to themselves and to anyone who asks—that the store was insured.

When I was in high school, most of my fellow students cheated on exams. Did they have guilty consciences? I doubt it. They all figured out ways to justify their cheating and lived with a clear conscience. The most common justification was “Everybody cheats.” Another was “I’m not hurting anybody.”

Now, I readily acknowledge that there are secular people who would have repaid the $1,200 they owed, and there are religious people who would not have repaid it. But this in no way negates the need for transcendent God-based values.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But you felt guilty. That’s why you paid the store $1,200 and left the note on the car.

DENNIS PRAGER: I felt guilty because I was raised with, and kept, strong moral values. Guilt is a product of values, not of feelings without values.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, you know, you say you want us all to be religious. But there are many people who say the Torah was written by man. And the Torah has so many laws about slavery and selling a daughter into slavery and other things that I don’t know why I would want to follow writings that seem to have been written by men thousands of years ago.

DENNIS PRAGER: If the Torah was written by man, my argument concerning it is meaningless. I can give many examples of the uniqueness of its values.

Consider the following:

And, remember, this was written in the Late Bronze Age.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How can a supposedly good God allow so much suffering in the world?

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, if I knew the answer to that, I would be God. We don’t know the answer to that question, but I would like to offer some thoughts. One, no matter how much or how little suffering there would be, the question would remain. If God only allowed broken limbs, people would say, “How does God allow broken bones?” If God didn’t allow broken bones, what would happen if you were hit by a car? Somehow, like Superman, you wouldn’t have a broken bone? That alternative makes no sense, and people have to realize that. So that’s one answer: That for the universe to work, there has to be an element of undeserved consequences. That’s really important. Anyway, I admit that all these terrible things make one commandment difficult: “loving God with all your heart.” I admit it, and no religious group that has invited me to speak and heard me say that has refused to ask me to return.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, you said that for the universe to work, there have to be undeserved consequences. Why? Why can’t the universe work with only deserved consequences?

DENNIS PRAGER: Because that shatters free will. That means God intervenes no matter what happens.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I see. So, in other words, I could try to murder somebody, God would prevent the murder, and I would get away with having tried to commit the act.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s right. There are two categories of suffering: Man-made and natural. When it comes to man-made suffering, people don’t tend to challenge man enough. They’re more likely to only challenge God. When there’s mass murder, the question often asked is “Where was God?” when they should instead be challenging their faith in the goodness of man.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, so the harder question involves natural suffering. Say a child is born with half a brain, suffers for two years, and dies.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s right, that is hard. That is why I say the law to love God is the most difficult law in the Torah. And God knows it’s difficult. That’s why he made it a law. There is no law to love your kids or your friends. But there is a law to love God. It’s actually a law of divine humility. In effect, God is saying, “I know I’m not lovable, but I want you to try to love Me even though I know it’s not easy.” It’s actually an acknowledgment of the Divine’s decency. And it’s also to help us follow God’s commandments. If we love Him, we’re more likely to follow His laws.

Finally, when people pose these questions about unjust suffering, what they almost never do is think, “God gave us delicious foods, music, and magnificent scenes in nature. He gave us love and friendship. And so, if we’re to be angry with God for unjust suffering, in fairness, we have to give him credit for all the joys in life.”

It’s like I’ve often said, when we’re suffering, we ask, “Why me?” But when we have joy, we don’t ask, “Why me?” But, back to the two-year-old, there is no answer because that child had no joy. There are unanswerable questions. That’s why God’s answer to Job has always appealed to me. God asked, “Where were you when I created the world?” Basically, back to my opening line, “If I knew him, I’d be him.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was wondering: In Oregon, they have a measure on the ballot that says homosexuality is wrong, and they want that taught in the schools. Would you vote for the measure, because you said your values come from the Bible?

DENNIS PRAGER: I would vote to maintain marriage as between one man and one woman, but I wouldn’t vote to declare homosexuality wrong, let alone to ban it.

The Bible holds that heterosexual sex—within marriage—is the sexual ideal, that a man should confine his sexual behavior to his wife and a woman to her husband.

You happen to have picked the single most difficult issue I have grappled with as a serious Jew. It’s a struggle because I believe there are many truly decent gay people. Yet, at the same time, the Bible’s value system holds that men and women are meant to love the opposite sex sexually. That is the teaching I would like Judaism, Christianity, and our society to uphold.

I have written a twenty-thousand-word essay on one verse in the Torah—the verse that bans men from engaging in sexual behavior with one another. In a nutshell, prior to the Torah, virtually every society in the world accepted homosexuality. In many societies, like ancient Greece, men who could afford boy lovers had them, and everyone thought it was fine. In many cases, boys were for sexual pleasure, and wives were for making children. In effect, the Torah eroticized marriage. “Men,” the Torah said, “confine your sexual activity to your wives.”

Now, while this addresses the great majority of men—men who are sexually attracted to women—the issue of men who are not attracted to women, but only to men, remains.

I can tell you how I deal with this. I live by this rule: Keep standards in the macro and have compassion in the micro. This means that in my personal life, the micro, I show love and compassion to the homosexual, while with regard to religion and society, the macro, I retain my Bible-based ideals.

I am therefore quite close to a number of gay men, including male couples, while nevertheless continuing to oppose changing the definition of marriage to include two people of the same sex. In fact, despite our opposition to same-sex marriage, my wife and I are so close to one of these couples that we are the godparents of their two sons.

Another example. When I arrived at the hospital in Georgia, I asked my wife, “How much was the MedJet?” She said, “Thirty-eight thousand dollars.” I asked, “How did you pay for it?” And she replied, “I didn’t. Our dear friends [a gay couple we are close to, who happen to be quite well-off] paid for it.” They obviously don’t think I hate gays.

One of the main arguments of those who argued for changing the definition of marriage—for the first time in history—to include same-sex couples, was “gender doesn’t matter; only love matters.”

I knew at the time the idea that “gender doesn’t matter” was untenable—not only biblically, but scientifically and rationally. I knew this would lead to unforeseeable chaos regarding the two sexes, because the fact is that gender matters very much.

And sure enough, almost immediately after the United States legalized same-sex marriage, the notion that “gender doesn’t matter” morphed into “gender doesn’t exist”—meaning that “gender” is entirely a social and personal construct. The fact that there are two sexes/genders was not only instantly rejected by the secular intellectual elite, it was mocked. Those who didn’t go along were labeled “haters.” The American Medical Association went so far as to announce that the sex of a newborn child should not even be listed on the child’s birth certificate. The child will one day decide whether he is a “he” or a “she,” whether she is a “she” or a “he,” or whether they are neither or both. Airlines and other public venues stopped addressing customers as “ladies and gentlemen” because, the activists contended, many people identify as neither.

The Bible was right in saying that “God created man [the human being] . . . male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). Human beings are either male or female. Yet, as a result of society accepting the same-sex marriage argument that “gender doesn’t matter,” more and more people came to believe that any man can become a woman and any woman can become a man, and that “men give birth.” Men who said they were women were allowed to compete in women’s sports and were placed in women’s shelters and women’s prisons. Prepubescent boys and girls were given body-altering, dangerous hormone blockers. Girls who said they were boys had their healthy breasts surgically removed.

As regards schools, it is not the business of schools to teach homosexuality or heterosexuality. Schools are supposed to teach their students basic facts and skills—how to read and write, and to prepare students for citizenship, and how to make a living. It is not the place of a secular school to advocate for homosexuality or to speak against it. That should be done at home and in religious schools. So, I would have voted against that proposed Oregon law. But I also would not vote for a law requiring that we teach that homosexuality is as good for society as heterosexuality.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But isn’t a law against an act of love between two gay people an act of hatred toward them?

DENNIS PRAGER: I acknowledge the unfairness to the individual gay person, but no system of law is based on outcomes of fairness alone. To give a sports analogy, it is not fair to short people that they have a minimal chance of making it onto a National Basketball Association team. But for the good of the sport, they have a minimal chance. It’s not fair to the stutterer that he or she is highly unlikely to be hired as a podcaster or radio host. The examples are as numerous as anything that involves competition for a position. Laws are made for society in general, not to have a fair outcome for every individual in society. Though it is admittedly not fair to the individual negatively affected by the law, unfairness to an individual is built into every legal system and every practice of a profession. It is not fair to the kid who studied night and day but did not pass the bar exam and therefore was never certified as a lawyer. Should we drop that requirement because it’s unfair to the individual? As I said earlier, the law was enacted to keep sex within the bounds of marriage between a man and woman, and in this regard, the Torah was unique in all the world. In this case, I see no connection between opposition to a behavior and hating the person who engages in such behavior. Jews are commanded to only eat kosher animals. Do any of you believe that the Torah is instructing Jews to hate Jews who don’t keep kosher, or who eat on Yom Kippur?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But you’re comparing love between individuals to basketball games and passing tests. Love between two people is far more important than the examples you listed.

DENNIS PRAGER: While allowing short people to play basketball would ruin basketball, and allowing people to pass scholastic tests who didn’t earn that achievement would harm scholastics, having the Torah approve of sex between same-sex couples would undo a critical distinction in society. The Torah would be saying there is no ideal when comparing same-sex and heterosexual couples. The undoing of that distinction would have a serious negative impact on society.

I discussed that matter when I just discussed the law on homosexuality. The Torah and later Judaism were adamant about maintaining the male-female distinction. And we have seen the consequences of not maintaining that distinction, such as the belief that men can become women and women can become men. And the belief that, ideally, children would be raised to choose whether to be a boy or a girl, inevitably leading to doctors administering terrible drugs and conducting damaging surgeries on minors.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You say we should be religious, but how can I do that when it means joining a religious community that hates gays?

DENNIS PRAGER: First, about hating gays. Any religious person who hates gays is inauthentically religious. There is no mandate anywhere in the Bible, post-biblical Christianity, or post-biblical Judaism to hate gays. It’s obviously an immoral reaction. The commandment in Leviticus is against homosexual acts, not homosexuals. I have long believed that marriage should be defined as a man and a woman. But I can say that, and also say I have absolutely no hatred of gay people. It’s bigotry on the part of anti-religious people to think that being religious means hating gays. Second, of course, you will be siding with people with whom you don’t agree. The very fact that you used to be irreligious means you are now siding with religious people with whom you used to differ. So what? I don’t see why that’s morally or intellectually problematic. In addition, even if somebody chose not to become religious, they’d still be part of a secular community with people with whom they also disagreed on various issues. Today, many Jews who have been part of left-wing organizations are shocked to find that these organizations have demonstrated themselves to be openly anti-Zionist. There’s no way to find a community that doesn’t involve relationships with people with whom you differ on some issues.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The Bible has multiple laws about how a person can own slaves. How could I possibly be a part of a religion that has laws concerning slavery?

DENNIS PRAGER: There are many answers to that question. I’ll begin with a question: “How can you follow a Constitution that has laws concerning slavery?” I’ll give you an example of where the humanity of the Constitution came through. Every state has members of Congress, the number of whom is determined by the population of the state. So, the southern states wanted every black slave counted as a resident of the state to increase the number of representatives their state would be allotted, and thereby increase their clout in Congress. The authors of the Constitution, who were largely opposed to slavery, said, “No, you cannot count every slave as a citizen of your state and have more influence over slavery in Congress.” So the constitutional drafters said, “We’ll compromise. We’ll count blacks as three-fifths, not five-fifths of a full citizen. That way, you don’t get as much representation in Congress.” And many people accused the authors of the Constitution of regarding blacks as “only” three-fifths human. But the whole point was to decrease the influence of slave states in Congress. It had nothing to do with the worth of a black slave. So there you have an example of the Constitution talking about slavery, but doing so in a way to minimize slavery. It’s the same thing in the Bible. You have laws that are there to minimize the suffering of a slave. It actually says: If you kill a slave, you shall be killed. I don’t know if there’s any other legal system in the ancient world that had such a law. And even better, the Bible says you may not return a runaway slave to his master. So, clearly, slavery is discussed in order to humanize slavery.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay. But then the obvious question is, why didn’t the Bible ban slavery outright?

DENNIS PRAGER: Why isn’t it outright banned? Given how common and universal slavery was throughout human history, if there had been such a biblical ban, it would have been largely ignored, and without the biblical laws concerning slavery, the plight of slaves would likely have been far worse.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How can I be part of a religion that makes women second-class citizens?

DENNIS PRAGER: An honest reading of the Torah argues quite the opposite. For example, the Creation story goes from primitive to advanced, and the most advanced creation is the last to be created, which is woman. There’s no way around that. People say she was an afterthought. It’s true, God noted that Adam needed a partner. But so what? The women in the Torah are generally more impressive, so I don’t know where people pick up this notion that women are second-class citizens in the Torah. They’re often depicted as heroic. It was Egyptian midwives who refused Pharaoh’s order to drown Hebrew newborn boys, and, as I previously noted, it was Pharaoh’s daughter who not only saved but also adopted the Jewish infant, Moses, as her own son. It was a Canaanite woman who hid the Israelite spies, enabling them to conquer Canaan. Miriam, Moses’s sister, is described as a prophet and more.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But arguably the greatest leaders in the Torah were Moses, Aaron, and Joshua, and they were all men. And God chose those male leaders. Even the priests were male.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s right, but I don’t know why that proves that women are second-class citizens.

Males are the most violent in society, and the evidence is clear that they respond far better to a male rather than a female authority figure. I believe God saw the betterment of society and not egalitarianism as key to creating a good world, which is why many of the authority figures in the Torah are male. All I can say is, people should read my essay in The Rational Bible: Genesis titled “Why God Is Depicted in Male Terms” [Readers are invited to read this essay in the appendix]. It is why he gave the engraved tablets to Moses, because if God had given the Ten Commandments to a woman, I don’t think the laws would have had nearly the same impact.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: If God and the Bible are our moral authorities, how can the Ten Commandments say “Do Not Kill,” while the Torah has laws to kill murderers?

DENNIS PRAGER: The answer is, God never instructed us “Do not kill.” That has been an incorrect translation since the late fourteenth century, when the Old Testament was first translated into English. The Hebrew original doesn’t say “Do not kill,” it says “Do not murder.” Hebrew, like English, has two words for homicide: “kill” and “murder.” To be considered murder, the act must be intentional. This is analogous to American law, which also distinguishes between murder and killing.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You know, you’ve been talking about the importance of being religious and following biblical laws. But Israel is the Jewish state, and it has been tremendously immoral in its treatment of the Palestinians. How is that a good example of God-based values in action? As the Jewish state, shouldn’t Israel be far more moral than what we’re seeing now in the Middle East, and doesn’t this contradict what you’ve been telling us about the positive impact of Bible-based values?

DENNIS PRAGER: It was Hamas who attacked Israel. If Hamas had not attacked on October 7, 2023, Israel’s war in Gaza would not have taken place.

Also, every statistic on how many Palestinians have been killed comes from Hamas. Why would anybody believe the statistics of a terrorist organization?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, that’s good for October 7, but Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians goes back to the founding of the State of Israel. They took Palestinian land to create their state. They drove Palestinians out of their home country. They’ve inhabited their land ever since and victimized the Palestinians ever since. How is that an example of a moral Jewish state?

DENNIS PRAGER: When the modern state of Israel was founded, the number of Palestinians who either left voluntarily or were forced out of Israel was roughly matched by the number of Jews who voluntarily left or were forced out of Arab countries. Virtually identical numbers—a little under six hundred thousand. Nobody talks about the Jews who were expelled from Arab lands. That’s because the media is on the left, and the left hates Israel and America.

The world has a particular animus toward Israel. A year before Israel was established, the state of Pakistan was established. There was never a country of Pakistan in all of history. It was ripped out of India, and millions of Hindus and Muslims were displaced, while civilian deaths are estimated to be between two hundred thousand and two million. No one talks about that. The main reason people talk about Palestinians is that they are fighting Jews. No country in the world was established without displacing people living there. Only Israel’s existence is invalidated.

With regard to that ongoing fighting, Richard Kemp, a retired commander in the British Army, stated in a PragerU video titled Israel: The World’s Most Moral Army , that Israel has been more moral in urban warfare than any army he is aware of, including his own. If Kemp is correct, the mainstream media is not reporting accurately. This is not a shock to anyone who is aware of the leftward slant of most of the media. John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at the West Point Academy, said in a 2024 Newsweek article that “Despite the unique challenges Israel faces in its war against Hamas, it has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other military in history.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think the popular opinion in most of the media is that the Jews took over Israel, the land that the Palestinians inhabited, and just drove out huge numbers of Palestinians, period.

DENNIS PRAGER: It is important to recall that the only reason for the war in 1948 was that six or seven Arab nations tried to destroy Israel when it was formed. That’s the whole reason there were any deaths or refugees.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, but was there any immorality on the part of the Jews forming the State of Israel in terms of the treatment of the Palestinians or the displacement of the Palestinians from the territory?

DENNIS PRAGER: There was because every war has elements of immorality. There were German prisoners of war who were executed by American soldiers during World War II. That was wrong, but nobody believes the Nazis were the victims.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, you’d say that the Jews during the formation of the State of Israel were at least no worse than any other actor during a time of war?

DENNIS PRAGER: They were better than every other actor because of the comparatively minimal number of deaths caused by Israel’s formation. The entire focus on the Palestinians is the result of Israel being the one Jewish state. That’s the whole key to it. Nobody would know about Palestinian refugees and Palestinian deaths if it weren’t a Jewish state that, to a certain extent, led to those displacements and deaths.

The left around the world is anti-American, and the left around the world hates Israel. The left hates Israel because it embodies Western civilization in an area hostile to Western civilization.

The Western elite, such as those in the media and academia, hate Israel for the same reason they say men can become women and women can become men—not because it’s true, but because it is the antithesis of Judeo-Christian values and Western civilization. And therefore, the left makes this absurd assertion about men and women to sow chaos. The assertion that Israel is evil is absurd. But the left is dominant in academia and the media, the two great opinion-makers in the Western world

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why does the left want to sow chaos?

DENNIS PRAGER: You know, it’s a very difficult question to fully respond to. But, as odd as it sounds, it gives leftists what the French call raison d’être—its reason for being. In effect, whatever Judeo-Christian civilization has affirmed, the left opposes, such as the nuclear family. They consider the notion that a nuclear family is comprised of a married mother, father, and their children as biased. They call it “hetero-normative,” as if it were just one more equally plausible way to have a family.

The idea that Israel is the villain and the Palestinians are peace-loving victims has no truth to it. The fact is, the freest Arabs in the Middle East are the Palestinians living in Israel as citizens of the Israeli government. They make up approximately 20 percent of the population. That is why Israeli Arabs did not participate in the October 7 attempt to destroy Israel. So, when you speak about Jewish values, it is with great pride that I talk to you about Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian population. Have any Palestinians moved from Israel to Gaza? They could choose to live under Palestinian rule. Have any moved to the West Bank? The answer is “no.” They would rather live as Israeli citizens because Israel has a rule of law. I’ll bet you have no idea how many Israelis would pick up Gazans to take them to Israeli hospitals. The Western press doesn’t report on that. If you knew the truth, you would know that Israel does that and largely treats Palestinians in accordance with Jewish values.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How can I hold religious beliefs that conflict with science?

DENNIS PRAGER: What Judeo-Christian beliefs conflict with science?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, Genesis says the world was created in six days.

DENNIS PRAGER: Okay—I don’t take that literally, and I believe the Torah was divinely inspired. Nobody I know takes it literally. There had to be some division in the periods of creation, if for no other reason than its ultimate aim was to create the Sabbath. Also, as the sun, moon, and stars weren’t created until the fourth day, how could the first three days have been twenty-four-hour days? And when are you going to have the Sabbath, every four billion years? That’s ludicrous. So, I’d like to know where science and the Bible conflict.

The idea that human beings created themselves, the idea that everything came about on its own, by accident, somehow that’s not assailable? Only the Bible’s depiction of creation is flawed? Also, science changes constantly. As new discoveries arise, science changes. This is not an indictment of science—it’s just a fact; whereas religious principles are eternal, such as “man was created in God’s image.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What about Noah’s flood? The whole world was flooded for forty days?

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, forty, as I point out in my commentary on the Torah, means a divinely created period of time; it’s not merely the number that follows thirty-nine.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, but the story says the entire world was flooded.

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, I don’t know. Was there a flood? Apparently, there was, since almost every ancient culture had a flood narrative. That story was quite widespread. Anyway, even if it were proven that there was no flood, I would accept that, and it would have no bearing on my belief in religion. My belief in religion is not predicated on this or that miracle. If it were proven that God did not separate the seas, I would say, “Okay, in the Jews’ eyes, that’s what happened.” But it doesn’t make or break my religious faith.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why not?

DENNIS PRAGER: Because my religious faith is not based on the efficacy or the literal truth of a miracle. And God does not want us to use miracles as our source of faith. There’s a Hebrew saying, “Don’t rely on the miracle.” Anyway, is the functioning of the human body not a miracle? To some, it is. And to others it isn’t. I think it’s a miracle. I think an egg and a sperm uniting to form a human being is a miracle. Others may not think so. Your belief in science or religion should not depend on how you regard that remarkable event. I think it’s a miracle; you may think it’s a perfectly natural thing.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, so it sounds like your faith is built on how Judeo-Christian values have transformed the world. That’s an argument for something greater than us.

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, it’s predicated on many things, including reason. I find the notion that the world created itself far less rational than that the world was created by God. People should be aware that whether or not God split the sea or whether Jesus walked on water does not determine the truth of religion. Religious truth is to be found in its values and how those values impact the world.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The atheist, Sam Harris, argues that we don’t need God. We can use science to determine when and how much people suffer and use those findings to determine what serves the well-being of society. Those findings could be used to create a framework for morality instead of using religion to do it.

DENNIS PRAGER: So, there’s no God in Harris’s world. What, then, makes murder wrong? He would say it harms the well-being of the population. That would be his answer. Okay, why is preventing harm to the pleasure, the “well-being,” to use his term, of the population necessarily an objective good? When the Catholic Church was spreading Catholicism in the early Middle Ages, the group that they found the toughest to convert was the Germanic tribes, who argued that they found nothing wrong with murder. They relished it. The strong can kill, and the weak are targets for killing. They didn’t understand why it was wrong to kill if you could.

Take the question we discussed of whether one saves their dog or a stranger. It’s entirely possible that scientific analysis could determine that, in general, society feels more pain over the loss of their dog than the loss of a stranger. In that case, the moral thing to do would be to let the stranger drown. And what if members of a society preferred to save a unique and highly valuable item they owned that was sinking in the water rather than a drowning stranger? The moral thing to do would be to save the item and let the stranger drown.

What if the “well-being” of society argues for letting the elderly die? Massive amounts of money are spent keeping the elderly alive, particularly in their last year of life. The argument for not caring for them would be that it is for the well-being of society. Anyway, what does the well-being of society even mean? There’s no objective definition of “well-being.” As I said earlier, it’s a statement of faith as much as “I believe in God” is a statement of faith. So Harris is just substituting one statement of faith for another.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, if God does not exist, is there any other way we could still have objective morality?

DENNIS PRAGER: No—the answer is absolutely “no.” Objective morality is dependent upon an objective reality. An objective reality is dependent upon God’s existence.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Something higher than us.

DENNIS PRAGER: Yes, but I want to call it God. I don’t know what else is higher than us that objectively exists.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Doesn’t religion control people?

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s largely correct, although the question is revealing. That people think it’s a bad thing that they’re being controlled says a lot about the world in which we live. It should be self-evident that the key to a good life is controlling oneself. Read Lord of the Flies , a story about a group of boys who try to govern themselves with disastrous results. There’s a Hebrew saying from the Talmud: “Who is strong? He who conquers his inclinations.” Who would we say is stronger, the one who eats what he wants or the one who conquers his urge to eat whatever he wants?

Stating that religions control people is an odd objection. People who don’t control themselves do a lot of bad things. So if religion has taught people how to control themselves, it has done a lot of good. Having said that, there’s no question that at times, religion can be too controlling. For example, excessive guilt can be instilled for non-observance of some rituals.

Secular law exists to control us as well. Between religious and secular control, the only question is whether the control betters or worsens society, and, since the beginning of the twentieth century, Judeo-Christian religion has clearly controlled humanity for the better.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What if I don’t believe everything my religion holds?

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, what do you believe in?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I believe in God, but I don’t believe in all of the biblical stories.

DENNIS PRAGER: I see. Then what exactly about God do you believe? Do you believe He created the heavens and the earth, or is that a biblical myth? If you don’t believe God created nature, then it’s a different God. Did your God create and give the Ten Commandments? I’d like to know what you believe about this God. That’s an important question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, well, I believe in God and some of the biblical stories, maybe even the majority of the biblical stories, but I find some of them hard to believe. The killing of the firstborn in Exodus. That’s too hard for me to accept. While I want to accept all of my religion, certain things are hard for me to believe.

DENNIS PRAGER: I have no issue with that. Nobody’s asked you to take it all—hook, line, and sinker. Religion is worth it, whether you believe every single thing or most things. That’s why I’ve narrowed it down to the Ten Commandments. Do you believe God gave the Ten Commandments? If you don’t believe that, then we really do have different gods. But if you believe that, whether or not you believe there was a flood over the entire world is secondary.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, but you’ve limited Judaism to the Ten Commandments, while there are 613 commandments in the Torah. If we’re to follow all of them because they all came from God, I don’t see how you can limit Judaism to the Ten Commandments.

DENNIS PRAGER: Regarding the commandments, I’ve found, if I look into them enough, they have practical reasons. Furthermore, if humanity did live by only the Ten Commandments, the world would be a beautiful place.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Doesn’t religion lead to war?

DENNIS PRAGER: Whereas secularism has led to love and brotherhood? More people have been murdered, butchered, and enslaved in the twentieth century by secular regimes than by religious regimes. The human species is a troubled species, and people will take any opportunity to do evil. It’s a sad fact. There are no guarantees against evil. There are no secular guarantees, and there are no religious guarantees. But, unlike secularism, Bible-based religions offer guardrails against evil.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, but you constantly reference the twentieth century. What about before the twentieth century?

DENNIS PRAGER: Before the twentieth century, every doctrine, every individual, every society was religious. So it’s an irrelevant question. When there was finally competition between secular and religious societies, the secular out-murdered and out-slaughtered the religious by an enormous margin. Before the twentieth century, there were no secular doctrines that permeated societies, so it’s irrelevant. People can take any doctrine, no matter how beautiful, and use it to do evil. That’s the human condition.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What good has religion done for the world?

DENNIS PRAGER: It was the Judeo-Christian world that abolished slavery. It was the Judeo-Christian world that gave women equal rights. It also put an end to human sacrifice. The list is endless concerning the good that was and continues to be done. That’s why people are often preoccupied with the bad—because if they concentrated on the good that Judeo-Christian religion has done, it would more or less end the issue. Catholicism established the notion that men should marry women, and that did a lot of good for men and society. Basically, virtually everything that good people cherish is a product of Judeo-Christian values. Liberal democracy and the separation of powers—both of these concepts were developed in the Judeo-Christian world. People in the rest of the world move in the millions to the Judeo-Christian world: Virtually no one in the Judeo-Christian moves to the non-Judeo-Christian world. So, the question, the honest question, is not what bad did the Judeo-Christian world do—because that bad was universal—the question is, what good did it do that no other value system could accomplish? In this regard, the accomplishments of Judeo-Christian religions are unmatched.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, do you think everyone should have the same values?

DENNIS PRAGER: The same ethical values, yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you think everybody in the world should have the same religion?

DENNIS PRAGER: That is the Christian view. As far as Judaism is concerned, though Jews have always welcomed converts, the Jews’ task is not to bring the world to Judaism. The Jews’ mission is to bring the world to God and His morality. The term for that—and this is the only fancy term I’ll use here—is ethical monotheism.

Ethical monotheism means:

It is the Jews’ task to bring the world to the one God and His value system. That’s the task for which God chose the Jews.

Christianity later picked up this mantle. Because enough Christians in Britain had Judeo-Christian moral and ethical values, slavery was abolished. The only way to prevent evil is for people to have good values. The Jews’ job is to bring the world to God-based ethics, not necessarily to Judaism.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Can’t you teach people about good values without teaching them religious beliefs?

DENNIS PRAGER: People in the West have been trying to teach values without reference to God and the Bible since the late eighteenth century, and in America since World War II. This has been a moral and intellectual failure. The most secular—meaning the least Judeo-Christian—institutions, the universities, have produced the worst ideas.

As I’ve mentioned previously, ethics cut off from their biblical roots are like flowers cut off from their roots in the soil. Flowers removed from their roots in the soil look like they can survive without those roots. But after a few days they wither and die. Likewise, ethics cut off from their Judeo-Christian roots look like they can survive without those roots. But they, too, will wither and die—not after a few days, but after a few decades or, at most, a few generations.

So, yes, you can teach people good values without faith. And I wish we would—that is certainly better than teaching bad values or no values. But without God and the Bible, they won’t last.

Goodness without God isn’t as strong as goodness with God.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You’re saying there’s one, like, universal value. But at school, I’ve been taught that everybody has different values, and they should have different values.

DENNIS PRAGER: Yes, I know that. Boy, I hope that’s on tape. I know that, and that is why I fear for America and the West. I want people to have different cultures but not different values. That is exactly what I have been getting at. You have perfectly expressed my worry. Tell me, do you really want people to have different values? Do you want some people to think it is okay to steal from a department store?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes.

DENNIS PRAGER: Okay, then you and I differ. But, frankly, I don’t think you really believe what you just said. If you really want people to have different values, you have no basis for condemning murder, rape, torture, theft, child abuse, or any other evil. If, God forbid, you were raped, it is hard for me to believe that you would react by saying, “Well, rape is okay in his value system.”

You’re unaccustomed to hearing somebody say there are actual rights and wrongs, irrespective of your feelings. That’s not the culture you are being raised in. I’m well aware of that, and there’s not much I can do about that. Just please understand that I am aware of the jolt you might have experienced when somebody seems to have the chutzpah to say, “You’re wrong. There is a right and a wrong, and whatever you feel doesn’t matter.” I understand that can be disconcerting.

I understand, too, that it could be disconcerting that I would seem to have a lot of answers, or think I have a lot of answers for the challenges you raise. In some ways, it might sound to you as if I don’t hear everything you’re saying, that I have prepackaged responses. I don’t have prepackaged responses, and I hear every word you’re saying. Sometimes and in some ways, I hear what you’re saying more clearly than you do. And so, when I have an answer, there’s a good chance I have heard your objection before, not only from others but from my own wrestling with that issue. Everything you have heard from me is the product of a lifetime of battling and I’m here to offer you the fruit of those battles.

Some of you said that I was imposing my values and ideas on you. But I wasn’t imposing. “Imposing” means forcing. “Imposing” means “If you don’t listen to me, I’ll jail or shoot you.” The task of those of us who hold biblical values is not to impose; it is to persuade. Those of us who believe in God and God-given moral law, such as the Ten Commandments, want to persuade the world that there is a more ethical way to live and there is a higher source of those ethics called God.

I’m now going to talk to you about human nature but, before I do, are there any questions about what I’ve said so far?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How far are you willing to go with your values? You said you bought something from this place that burned down, and you owed them $1,200, and you paid them. But what if you owed them three million dollars and, to pay your debt, you had to sell your house and move to some skid row place? Would you still do it?

DENNIS PRAGER: A man once wrote me a letter about that issue. He declared bankruptcy and was therefore legally absolved of his debts. But he wanted to know what he should do morally, not legally. He also noted that he had children with all the expenses involved in supporting a family. His situation was almost exactly what you just described.

I wrote him back: “As you earn money, you should reimburse the people you owe. Morally, you should reimburse the people to whom you are in debt. Even though bankruptcy laws don’t compel you to pay them, you’re only off the hook legally, not morally.” In your illustration, I would not be morally off the hook, but at the same time, I wouldn’t put myself on skid row. For one thing, I would never be able to pay my debts from skid row. For another, I wouldn’t put myself in the position of becoming a beggar. Most of you know there is a biblical law to give charity. But you should know that there is another, post-biblical, law that states you should not put yourself in a position where you would need to take charity. That law compels my response.

Your point is well taken. To summarize, you should not put yourself in an irresponsible position to begin with. If you do, you still have the moral obligation to pay your debt even though you’re no longer legally required to do so.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you believe that feelings and behavior are not equivalent?

DENNIS PRAGER: Absolutely.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Behavior could change something about your feelings. Feelings could be an outgrowth of behaving in a certain way.

DENNIS PRAGER: That is exactly what I believe and exactly what I advocate: Let your actions shape your feelings rather than letting your feelings shape your actions. Act, and your feelings will follow. Act happy and you’ll feel happier. Act as if God exists, and you’ll eventually believe God exists. Act decently and you will become more decent.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You said that we are obligated to share the values of ethical monotheism. Could you explain again why we should try to make everyone believe them?

DENNIS PRAGER: First, I never said “make.” We should persuade and model good values. Only rarely should we make people adopt the values of ethical monotheism. Examples include not murdering, not engaging in sexual sin such as incest, not stealing, not eating the limb of a living animal; proper treatment of animals is a Bible-based universal ethical demand.

Let me go back to human nature. I told you there was only one more idea that would be jolting. The rest of the discussion should be much easier to accept.

The first two ideas we talked about were the necessity of holding values above feelings and attaching values to a God Who is higher than all of us.

One of you beautifully picked up on where I was heading: Given that I don’t trust people who act on their feelings, I must not think people are basically good. That’s the third big idea for this dialogue: People are not basically good. Let me clarify that point. I am not saying people are basically bad. But I emphasize that human nature is not basically good because the belief that people are basically good has led to a lot of bad things. Because so many people believe that human nature is basically good, most people are not taught the key to goodness: fighting one’s nature.

People are not basically good, and they are not basically bad. We are a mixture of both. Most people are a mixture of kindness and selfishness, of meanness and love. These impulses tear at most of us simultaneously, and we then have to decide how to act. To live a good and decent life, we have to fight many of our instincts.

Since people aren’t basically good, we have to acknowledge that our feelings will frequently not lead us to do the right thing.

Whenever I mention that people aren’t basically good, the first question I am asked is, “What do you mean people aren’t basically good—look at babies. Aren’t babies beautiful, adorable, and innocent?” The answer is yes. Babies are beautiful, adorable, and innocent, but they’re not good. Innocent is not the same as good. Babies are, in fact, the epitome of selfishness: “I want mommy, I want milk, I want to be held, I want to be comforted, I want to be played with, I want attention, I want to be comfortable—and if you do not do all of these things for me right now, I will ruin your day.” If a baby could speak, that’s what a baby would say.

A baby is preoccupied with numero uno. When I was your age, there was a very popular saying in America—everyone should “look out for number one.” Babies are experts at looking out for number one, looking out only for themselves. I readily admit that babies need to do so or they would suffer and perhaps even die. But let’s not get carried away and claim that babies are “good.” They are neither good nor bad. That’s why the Torah quotes God saying, “The will of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” From youth, not birth.

Now let’s move on to kids who are a little older. I’ve actually heard people say, “I never met a bad kid.” Anyone who says this hasn’t worked with kids. There are most definitely bad kids. I love kids so much that I worked as a camp counselor and camp director for ten years, and let me tell you something: You probably see more cruelty percentage-wise among kids than among adults.

I’ll give you a simple way to predict the amount of violent crime in a country: Find out how many young single men there are. The more young single men, the more murder, rape, assault, and burglary. That’s not to say girls are wonderful. If you’ve ever seen a clique of teenage girls picking on a girl outside their clique, you will concede that girls do their killing verbally, not physically.

At camp, if one poor kid was particularly fat, short, or clumsy, the other kids in the bunk would bully him constantly—in one case I know of, to the point of humiliating him by urinating on him. They considered that a way of having fun. Ask any parent what it’s like to send their child to a summer camp if the child is not quite the norm emotionally, physically, or in any other way. They well know their child risks being mercilessly picked on.

This happens because goodness doesn’t come naturally. For one thing, it often takes courage to be good. It is the very rare boy or girl who stands up to an individual or a group bullying another kid, because it takes courage to do so. And courage is the rarest of all the good traits. There are many kind people, many generous people, many honest people, but there are very few courageous people.

Also, while selfishness, cowardice, and meanness come naturally, goodness must be learned. Let me give you a musical analogy. How many of you play a musical instrument? Almost half of you. Now, the half of you who don’t play an instrument could play an instrument—if you were taught to do so. You all have an innate ability to play an instrument, but it hasn’t been developed. The same is true with being good. Everyone in this room has an innate ability to be a good human being. But it has to be brought out.

Are there any questions about human nature?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How does a baby become bad?

DENNIS PRAGER: I said babies are not bad, I said they’re selfish. I’m knocking the idea that babies are good, I’m not making the point that babies are bad. If that’s not clear, I’ll keep dialoging.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I understand why you think that because they say, “Feed me and change me” and stuff, but how can you say they are selfish when they don’t know how to do anything? How can you say they are selfish if they just started in the world and they have to learn how to do stuff?

DENNIS PRAGER: Do you think that when I call babies selfish, I’m attacking them? I’m not. I love babies. I’m not attacking babies; I’m describing them. Babies are selfish. Selfish means “preoccupied with self.” Now, you wouldn’t want an adult to say, “Give me, feed me, touch me, hold me, attend to me, do this to me, do that to me, and I don’t have to do anything for you.” Babies never think, “You know, I’ve just been keeping my mommy up for the last two days, she’s sleep deprived, she’s had no chance to have private time with my daddy. So, you know what? Unless I’m in real pain, I’m going to shut up for a while so that they can get rest and remember who they married.”

Babies don’t do that. They can’t do that. I’m not saying they’re bad, and they’re certainly not evil.

To be good means realizing there are others I need to consider. Volunteering to help people living in difficult, even dangerous parts of another country or, for that matter, your own country. Or being a whistleblower at your place of work with regard to, for example, corruption or some other serious unethical practice at the risk of losing your job. It means, as I said, always considering those around you. Babies can’t do that, so they cannot be good. That is not attacking them, that is describing them. I just don’t want you to walk around with a romantic view of human nature or even babies’ goodness, that’s all.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You said babies are not good because they can’t, like, take care of other people, and they’re selfish. How about, like, intellectually disabled people who can’t do that stuff either?

DENNIS PRAGER: Important question. It depends on which kind and what degree of challenges we’re discussing. For example, people with Down syndrome tend to be more loving than those of us who don’t have Down syndrome. On the other hand, it is extremely difficult for schizophrenics to control their antisocial instincts.

So, it truly depends on which type of mental challenge you speak of. In general, I would say that people who are disabled to the extent they are incapable of caring for another, cannot be described as good, but they certainly couldn’t be described as bad either. We cannot make a moral judgment about people who do not have free will. We don’t morally judge animals for that reason—they don’t have free will. That’s why I cannot call a dog that attacked and killed a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp evil—any more than I could call a hammer that made a gas chamber evil. At the same time, I can’t call dogs that save their owners’ lives good. Dogs aren’t good or evil. I only use good and evil with human beings who have free will—not babies, and not some of the mentally ill. I say “some” because I have an autistic stepson and there is no question that he knows the difference between good and evil. The vast majority of people who commit evil are not mentally ill. And the vast majority of mentally ill people know murder is wrong.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, you’re saying there is good within us, but you have to learn how to develop it?

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s exactly right. It has to be developed, just like playing piano. Just about everyone can play piano, but with rare exceptions, the ability to play piano must be developed.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What’s wrong with saying that we have people who are good but are not perfect? Why does that disqualify them as being good?

DENNIS PRAGER: Let me address your two points. First, of course, we have people who are good. My point is that few people are born basically good. Second, no human is perfect, nor do humans or God expect anyone to be.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I heard you say that we’re not born bad, but I also heard you say we’re not born good. Are you saying that after you steal or after you’ve done this or that, you’re a bad person?

DENNIS PRAGER: If you’re asking, “Are there any bad people?” of course, there are. If we judge people by how they behave—and that is the only way to judge people—clearly, there are bad people. To deny that there are bad people would be the same as denying that there are good people.

But if you’re asking what exactly constitutes a bad person, that is a different and far more complex question. Some cases—like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot—are clear. But most cases are far more complicated. For example, I would not necessarily call someone who shoplifted bad even though shoplifting is bad. It would depend on how often the person shoplifted and at what age. If someone regularly shoplifts as an adult, that person is a thief. Thieves, at the very least, are not good people. But I would hesitate to call a twelve-year-old who shoplifted a candy bar a thief.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: As I get older, I realize some people are bad, but there are some people we cannot change.

DENNIS PRAGER: We would both agree that some can be bad and decide to change. You are asking about people who cannot change. You may be right. But I have never met a person who cannot change. I have met people who do not want to change. In that sense, they are not changeable.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why don’t more people emphasize goodness like you do?

DENNIS PRAGER: A major reason for the lack of emphasis on goodness is that very few parents make that their priority. And there’s a good way to prove it, which I’ve done for twenty-five years on the radio. I’ve asked parents to ask their child a simple question, whether their child is five or fifty: “What do you think I most want you to be—happy, successful, smart, or good?” Many parents are sure their child will answer “good,” and are surprised to learn the child’s answer is usually one of the other three options.

I’m adamant about this and raised my boys this way. I’m not bragging. I’m simply using myself as an example. I told them from a very early age that I was much more interested in their character than their grades. How many parents say that to their child? Two percent? Three percent? And my sons knew it was true. I really didn’t care about their grades. I cared about their character. Unfortunately, that’s relatively rare among parents, and it’s certainly rare for a parent to actually say it. It’s interesting that the thing parents most want from their children is the thing they least emphasize with their children.

Parents brag about their children’s grades. They have these bumper stickers which say, “My child is an honor student at XYZ school.” I would never put that on my car. Imagine parents who have a bumper sticker that says, “My child is a particularly good human being.” Think about that. People would think the parent was weird.

Trophies are given for spelling bees and basketball championships, but they’re rarely given for excellence in goodness. If a parent displayed such an award, others would believe they had nothing else to boast about. From a very early age, children are raised to believe they will be honored most by their parents and by society for accomplishments unrelated to their character. That’s a pretty big lesson.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Are you confident that today, if parents were asked the question about the four choices, that the majority would say they preferred their child first be “Good”?

DENNIS PRAGER: I don’t know the answer to that. I think fifty years ago, the answer would have been easy, but I don’t know what the answer is today.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I know the real problem. A society becomes a bad society when good people are meek and do not speak out against the bad.

DENNIS PRAGER: I agree — if the good are meek, then the good aren’t so good.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why?

DENNIS PRAGER: Why? My friends, there were Polish, Hungarian, and German gentiles who did nothing; they didn’t kill a Jew, and they didn’t report Jews to the police. Would you call them good? No. While they were certainly not on the same moral level as the murderers or snitches, I would not call their meekness “good.” That is a common misconception. If you are not strong and courageous, you cannot be good. You are only not bad. Not murdering and not stealing doesn’t mean you’re good. It just means you’re not a criminal. This is a critical point. You have to be strong to be good, and you have to do good to be good.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, you’re saying the people who didn’t help the Jews were meek. What if they knew that if they were caught helping Jews, they would be killed?

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s an excellent question. In fact, that was the case in Poland. The Nazis killed a Pole caught hiding a Jew, sometimes along with his or her family. That’s why I don’t judge them.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Then why did you say they were meek?

DENNIS PRAGER: They were meek, meaning they weren’t strong. This was particularly true with regard to Germans. Unlike the Poles, they were not put to death for hiding a Jew. But I don’t judge them all as necessarily bad. I was just pointing out that to be good, you need to be strong. I do not judge the non-Jew who did nothing. Had I been in that situation, I don’t know if I would have had the courage to help, though I certainly hope I would have. My point is that it takes courage to be good.

You don’t need the extreme case of the Holocaust. This is true in your life as well. If a kid at your school is being bullied, your easiest choice is to do nothing. Most kids do not stand up to bullies. That takes courage, once again arguing against the idea that the meek are good. They may not be bad, but they’re not good.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Are you saying Noah was not good? You said to be good, you have to stand up to the bad, so Noah must not have been good because he didn’t stand up.

DENNIS PRAGER: We have no idea what Noah did or didn’t do; the Bible is silent on that point. From the Bible’s description, all we know is that he was a “pure, righteous man in his generations.” A statement that makes a very important point: We are to judge people in comparison to their generation, not ours.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: With your definition of goodness being more than not doing bad, that you have to stand up to bullies and so on, there’s probably only one or two people in here that fit that definition. I mean aren’t you being a little hard on us?

DENNIS PRAGER: You may be right; there may only be one or two of you in the room who are truly good people. If it’s any consolation, I’m just as hard on myself. On the other hand, for all I know, there are more than a few good people in this room. However, you make an excellent point. Goodness is very much an achievement, and a relatively rare one at that.

Just as many of you would like to be good students, Judeo-Christian religions demand that you be a good person. Don’t walk around thinking, “Hey, I’m already so good that I don’t have to work on myself.” Hopefully, I have caused you to wonder whether you are that good or whether you go through life doing whatever you want so long as you think you’re not hurting anybody, as if that’s the definition of goodness.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, you know how you said that you have to be exposed to musical instruments, that you have to develop that ability to play them?

DENNIS PRAGER: That goodness has to be developed—yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, how can you expect goodness to be developed if you’re not going to believe in the person and give him that exposure in the first place?

DENNIS PRAGER: Yes. I said that most people don’t have a natural ability to play a musical instrument but almost anyone can if taught to do so. I compared it to goodness. Almost anyone can become a good person if they are taught to be one and work at being one.

So, then, to use your words, I believe in every one of you. You all have the capacity to be a truly good human being. But that doesn’t develop on its own. You have to want to be a good person, you have to work on it, society has to work on it, and family has to work on it. Every one of you knows you have to work hard to play the violin well. It is tougher to be a good person than a good violinist. I understand most of you are not exposed to these ideas. Generally, you think, “As long as I think I’m not hurting anybody, I’m good.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, isn’t “good” relative because, let’s say right now, in our society, that something we do is good, but then the whole world evolves, and the whole world also does these really good things, so those good things eventually become common. So, aren’t good and bad relative to how society behaves at the time?

DENNIS PRAGER: There are two answers to your question. The first is, you are right. To use your example, once all of society became opposed to slavery, you were not a particularly good person for opposing slavery, whereas in the nineteenth century, with the beginning of the abolitionist movement in Britain, those people were exceptionally good.

Likewise, the Torah makes clear Noah was a good man “in his generations,” a strong implication that in a good generation, he would not have stood out. Therefore, I think it’s fair to have both an objective and comparative view of goodness. In the land of murderers and rapists, the man who only shoplifts is a better person than the rest of the people in his land. That’s just common sense. But that does not negate the fact that shoplifting is morally wrong. So, I am in no way advocating moral relativism. Moral relativism is moral nonsense. It means that everybody, or every society, decides what is good. That reduces morality to opinion.

And once you do that, there is no such thing as morality, just as if you reduced mathematics to opinion, there would be no such thing as mathematics. Morality, like math, must have objective truth.

A comparative view of people’s goodness simply means we can compare one’s goodness to that of others. This is not the same as moral relativism; the fact that some people are better than others in no way denies that morality or goodness is objective. To use the math example, math consists of objective truths; morality, like math, is not determined by personal opinion. And while some mathematicians are better than others, math is not relative; it remains objective. Likewise, moral truths are unrelated to personal opinion. We can compare our goodness to others.

For example, I told you earlier that many students in my high school cheated on tests. In this regard, those who did not cheat were better people. On the other hand, not cheating on tests in high school doesn’t compare to devoting one’s life to helping a disabled relative.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I see what you’re saying—like, I guess it kind of fits under “If I’m only for myself, what am I?”

DENNIS PRAGER: Right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But don’t you also have to take into consideration the first part of that statement, “If I’m not for myself, who will be for me?”

DENNIS PRAGER: Also right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You can’t always consider the welfare of other people before you consider yourself.

DENNIS PRAGER: You’re 100 percent right. But I didn’t think the primary message I needed to bring to a group of young people was that you should be more self-centered.

The ancient Hebrew saying is Im ain ani li, mi li, uv’she ani l’atzmi, mah ani? “If I am not for me, then who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, then what sort of person am I?” So, your point is well taken.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, I believe that not being bad means you’re good. And I think you’re wrong, so prove you’re right.

DENNIS PRAGER: Imagine two children of an elderly parent who had a stroke. One takes constant care of the parent, the other does not. By your definition, did the second child do bad? The point I’m making is that neglecting to do good is frequently the equivalent of doing bad.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don’t think we need religion. As we eliminate poverty, people will commit less crime.

DENNIS PRAGER: I’m always amazed that people still believe poverty causes crime. So let me ask you a question. Do you believe rich people are finer human beings than poor people? I’ll bet no one here believes that. They may commit fewer murders, but they are hardly less inclined to do bad things. The link between poverty and crime is almost zero.

To give you an example, the murderous hijackers of 9/11 all came from well-to-do families. It’s truly the realm of myth that holds poverty causes crime. I remember when I was a child and first talked to my grandfather, I thought, “Well, if my grandfather lived by that rule, as he was quite poor, he would have been a murderer or thief. And then the thought made me laugh. It was inconceivable that my grandfather would be a thief or murderer because of his poverty. He was a truly decent man because of his values. He did not refrain from crime because of his wealth. He had no wealth. He refrained from crime because of his belief in biblical values.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: According to everything I’ve read, there has been a decline in personal ethics. Students are cheating more, people are filing more fraudulent insurance claims, and so on. Isn’t it because of how they were brought up in this society? We’re not, like, living in the 1950s anymore. People aren’t raised like that; children don’t sit with their elbows off the table anymore. I mean, things change. It is a whole different world and, with that, values change. So, people’s values aren’t the same, and it is not their fault.

DENNIS PRAGER: You are certainly right about the ethical decline. I used to live in New York where the theft of car radios was so common, people put signs on their cars saying, “No radio, already been stolen.” You would see those signs all over Manhattan, something you would not have seen forty years earlier.

I remember when I filed a claim for my car radio, an acquaintance asked me, “How much are you putting down?” I said, “Two hundred fifty dollars.” He said, “You’re crazy, nobody does that.” I said, “I don’t understand. That’s what I paid.” It amazed me that people just assumed you add to the value of the item, and it amazed him that I didn’t.

So you don’t hold people who cheat responsible? You hold society responsible?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, society goes along and doesn’t say it’s cheating.

DENNIS PRAGER: Do you blame the people who do these things at all?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, but I also blame society.

DENNIS PRAGER: Okay, fine. So long as you blame them, I don’t care who else you blame. What you cannot say is, “Well, I cheated but, don’t blame me—blame society for not telling me that I’m cheating.”

And, by the way, your argument perfectly makes the case for God-based ethics. Irrespective of what society at any time says, God says cheating is wrong.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you think the ends justify the means? Is that ever right?

DENNIS PRAGER: It depends on the ends and it depends on the means. There is no one answer to your question. Some ends justify the means. Bringing World War II to an end justified killing Japanese and German soldiers. Killing is normally wrong, but obviously that end justified that killing.

To give you one more example: Is it wrong to lie? It nearly always is. But what if a man with a gun is chasing someone and you know where the other man ran for safety? When the would-be murderer asks you, “Hey, where did that man go?” should you lie?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, I have another question. Do you think we would be better off without feelings?

DENNIS PRAGER: No, not at all.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You are, like, telling us no matter how it feels, to compare everything to a value. It sounds like you’re saying we should always just ignore our feelings.

DENNIS PRAGER: No, I want you to be in touch with your feelings. I love feelings. Without passion, life is worthless. I’d rather be dead than live without feelings. I just don’t think feelings should determine behavior. Feelings are important to me, but with regard to what should determine all people’s behavior, how people act toward others is what matters most and that’s where values come in. While my values are higher than my feelings, that doesn’t mean feelings aren’t important. Listen, oxygen is more important than nitrogen, but nitrogen is also necessary for the mechanics of our lungs. You would not want to be limited to breathing only oxygen.

Feelings matter, but I want your behavior to be more important to you. That’s what the Bible teaches and that’s what I’m arguing for. Everyone else wants that, too—they care most about how you act. That’s why I gave the one-dollar and fifty-dollar examples. Oh, yes—the guy cried, but he only gave her a dollar, so his tears didn’t mean much. They may have meant a lot to him as he walked away feeling compassionate. But it is how you act that matters.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What would happen if everyone had feelings of compassion but nobody did anything to help? Then it’s not really compassion.

DENNIS PRAGER: Fine, then you agree with me. If you don’t act on it, then don’t think you are compassionate because you have a feeling.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Go back to the feelings issue; are you saying that if we emphasize feelings over behavior, we are not fulfilling our duties as Jews?

DENNIS PRAGER: When it’s ethical behavior, that’s correct.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But I think I’m as Jewish as the next guy, and I let guilty feelings help decide what’s good, is that wrong or—

DENNIS PRAGER: It doesn’t matter to me. I need to know what you are doing.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, I don’t go to synagogue, observe Shabbat, or any of the Jewish holidays.

DENNIS PRAGER: Then you didn’t fulfill your religious obligations.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, am I bad?

DENNIS PRAGER: No, I said you didn’t fulfill your religious obligations. It’s for you to fill in the rest.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay.

DENNIS PRAGER: The Jew who fulfills those obligations has done a better job as a Jew than the one who hasn’t. The same is true for a lawyer or a baseball player—if you keep making errors at first base, then you haven’t fulfilled your task as a first baseman.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don’t think you can judge Jews based on what and how they fulfill their obligations.

DENNIS PRAGER: You don’t?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No.

DENNIS PRAGER: I see. Can you judge Jews on any basis?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No. Jews are—there are a million different kinds. I mean, everyone is different from everyone else.

DENNIS PRAGER: So there’s no way to judge?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Right.

DENNIS PRAGER: But you wouldn’t say that about a first baseman. So, we can judge how first basemen perform, but not how Jews perform?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: That’s right. Baseball isn’t only a sport, it’s a job. How can you compare Judaism to baseball?

DENNIS PRAGER: It is your job. You don’t have to accept it, I admit that. You’re in a free country, and you can chuck it. But I consider it my job. I don’t mean that I get paid for it. I get paid to do other things. Judaism is every Jew’s job.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The baseball player is getting paid to perform.

DENNIS PRAGER: So, we don’t get paid. Judaism is a voluntary job.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What is your point in life? I don’t understand, because I don’t think there are very many people in here who agree with what you are saying, so what are you trying to do with us, or what are you trying to tell us?

DENNIS PRAGER: First, I’m trying to explain that thinking more highly of our feelings than good values will result in behavior that hurts people and results in a crueler world. Second, it is necessary to have God as the basis of those good values. And third, since we’re not basically good, we need to be taught goodness. You may not agree with any of those points, but if not, please tell me why.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I mean, just the way you are saying everything—you’re twisting all of our words around and stuff. That’s all. I just wanted to know what your point in life was.

DENNIS PRAGER: You just made a charge, so tell me: How am I twisting your words?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You just—we will ask you a question, and then you will give us this crazy answer that—

DENNIS PRAGER: Tell me.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Every single thing you’ve said in the past two days.

DENNIS PRAGER: How many people think I’ve twisted your words?

(Pause)

DENNIS PRAGER: All right, three. I expected that to happen, that three of you would feel that way; I just dissent from your disagreement.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You said we would have, like, a very cruel world if we value our feelings more than values.

DENNIS PRAGER: Yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: That wouldn’t be true in all situations, though. In fact, in some situations, wouldn’t it be a much better world if we valued our feelings more than if we put our values before our feelings?

DENNIS PRAGER: Give me an example of when you should put feelings before values.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Oh boy . . . can you come back to me on that?

DENNIS PRAGER: Sure can, and I’d love to know.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’ve got an example. Let’s say there’s one Jew who goes to the synagogue every day and just says his prayers without feeling. Now let’s talk about a Jew who goes to the synagogue every day, prays, and really means it.

DENNIS PRAGER: You are 100 percent right, but that is not in the ethical arena. That’s between man and God, and it is a very separate area. When it comes to the laws between man and God, I couldn’t agree more. How you feel is more important.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: That’s good.

DENNIS PRAGER: But in our treatment of human beings, how we act is more important. You can’t torture, abuse, or rape God, but you can do all of that and more to people. God doesn’t need your charity; people do. So, in your treatment of people, your behavior is more important than your feelings. In your relationship with God, I fully agree that your feelings are more important. That’s a very significant distinction.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think maybe I have an example that is more man-to-man. Are you familiar with the book Huckleberry Finn ?

DENNIS PRAGER: I read it too long ago, so remind me.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Huckleberry Finn was on the river with Jim, the runaway slave, and he had an opportunity to turn him in. And he’d been raised to believe, you know, that black people were property, that they weren’t even really humans, and that was, like, his value system. But he felt that Jim was his friend, and so he didn’t turn him in. Now, wasn’t that the right thing to do?

DENNIS PRAGER: Yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But that wasn’t what his values were; that was his personal feeling.

DENNIS PRAGER: You’re 100 percent right—the value was bad. I prefer moral feelings over bad values. A feeling can only be moral if it’s consistent with Bible-based moral values. Nazis and slave owners had bad values. Bad values are the biggest problem; in fact, worse than bad feelings. People with bad values think they’re doing the right thing when they’re really doing evil.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, how do you convince someone that their values are bad or wrong?

DENNIS PRAGER: With regard to convincing any one person, I have found that the use of reason can be very persuasive. Ask the person if he or she believes that murder is wrong for everyone. Not killing, but murder. If the person says “yes,” ask them why they hold that position. That question forces them to confront the problem of personal opinion with regard to evil.

We live in a very difficult world, and the task of spreading biblical values is very, very hard. I don’t promise you a solution in your lifetime. I’m only saying that we have this three-thousand-year-old task, and it’s worth living it, joining in it, and helping to make this world a better place. Realize that we’re having this conversation only fifty years after the most cultured continent on Earth, Europe, decided to make mattresses from Jews’ hair. It’s a very, very long and difficult task to bring good values to the world.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, let’s say when you get home to LA, you’re walking into your office and a lady comes up to you—she has a daughter who needs money for cancer surgery, and you know she’s telling the truth. Would you give her 10 percent of your income?

DENNIS PRAGER: The problem there is logistics. To tithe means to give away one-tenth, and I do tithe. I’ve tried to do it in both time and money. Theoretically, I could fulfill the principle of tithing by giving the entire 10 percent to one person. But what about the next day, when the next cancer victim comes? “Sorry, I gave it all to Mrs. Smith yesterday.” The problem is that if I give her the tenth, no other cancer victim gets any of my money. That is why we give to huge charities that can pool the funds and dispense huge sums to needy people.

It is an endlessly difficult question. Tough issues are involved. Why not 20 percent? How much should you spend on yourself and your family? How much should you donate? These are good questions, and that’s why one of you asked how many of us are good. I don’t know. It’s a tough question for me, too. I hope you’ll wrestle with it for the rest of your life.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You said behavior is the only thing that matters.

DENNIS PRAGER: No, I said behavior matters more than feelings.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What about the Ten Commandments, where it tells you not to covet—isn’t that a feeling?

DENNIS PRAGER: Very good question. That is why I said it is not the only thing that matters. Coveting is not the same as envy. Envy is when you think that another person has more than you and you feel bad about it. The commandment doesn’t say, “Thou shalt not be envious.” It says, “Thou shalt not covet.” Coveting is wanting to take a specific thing—a spouse, a house, an animal—that belongs to a specific person. It’s not merely wanting what the person has; it is wanting to take away what a person has. It says, “Thou shalt not covet.”

Don’t leave here thinking that I’ve said feelings are not important. I’ve said that behavior toward people is more important than your feelings about them. That’s all I’m saying, but that’s a big “all,” because I’m asking you to monitor how you act. It’s easy to think you’re a good person if you just monitor your feelings—none of you wants to hurt anybody. But if you start monitoring your actions, if you ask yourself, “Did I stop the other kids from bullying someone?” or “Did I stop others from making fun of a girl behind her back?” then you begin to see how much behavior counts.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, isn’t there a line where feelings can become more important than behavior? Because let’s say that, in the beginning, there was a guy who gave forty-nine dollars and cried and everything, and the guy who gave fifty dollars did it just ’cause the Bible says so.

DENNIS PRAGER: Yes, that’s a very good observation. At a given point, like that one, I prefer the forty-nine-dollar guy who cried. But don’t ask me at what point I would differ; it depends on the circumstances. The point one of you made earlier was correct—money isn’t all we can give people who are suffering. Giving them our love and attention is part of being a good human being. But you can’t buy a surgeon with love. To get surgery, you need money. Surgeons aren’t paid with hugs; they are paid with checks, and that’s what the girl most needed at that time.

I’ll give you a perfect example: If you told me, “Dennis, you have a very bad tumor. We have two surgeons. One is an unbelievably kind man, and the other is not as kind. In fact, he’s somewhat like a medical automaton, but he’s a genius at surgery. Which surgeon do you want?” I want the automaton who’s a genius at surgery. I’ll get compassion from my friends; from my surgeon, I want great surgery.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you see yourself as good? And why?

DENNIS PRAGER: You know, I’m stuck here. If I say “no,” then you may think, “Who the heck are you to talk to us about this stuff?” If I say “yes,” then you might say, “This guy is completely taken with himself.” No matter which answer I give, I am up the creek. Nevertheless, as I am willing to be up the creek in this lovely state of beautiful rivers and creeks, I’ll answer it. I strive to be good, to behave with goodness. I think that’s the most honest answer I can give you. That I am far from perfect is a given because I’m human. But I try very hard to meet the standard of goodness the Bible sets for all people.

To confirm that, as for me personally, I would have you ask a question, not of me, but of the janitors at the radio station where I work. If you asked them, “Which talk-show host treats you the best?” I hope they’d say me.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, you said you try hard to be good, so do you think that you are as good as you can be?

DENNIS PRAGER: No, I’m not as good as I can be. But there are three measures of goodness: Compared to what I can be, compared to what others are, and compared to an ideal.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is there anything that you, or anyone, can’t help that stops you from being better?

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s a good question. I think there are limits to goodness in everyone. I am capable of certain good deeds that others are not, and others can perform good deeds that I can’t. I can’t do what Mother Teresa does. I could not spend my life taking the dying off the streets of Calcutta. That is an area of goodness where she just dwarfs me. On the other hand, I have had a lot of courage standing up for victims of aggression, and I have taken a lot of flak for doing so. I’ve smuggled religious articles in and out of the Soviet Union for Soviet dissidents at some risk to myself. So, in other words, I have tried in certain areas. But most important is not that heroic stuff, it is the daily stuff. Do you want to know when it is most honestly assessed? When you die. There’s a saying in Oregon that you never know the height of a tree until it’s cut down. You never really know the height of a human being until the person is gone. And then you realize whether the person is truly missed, not just by immediate friends and relatives, but by other people whose lives had been touched by that person.

Can you say, after you died, that, thanks to you, the world was a drop better? These are questions all of us should ask. When you want to do something, how often do you restrain yourself because it’s not the right thing to do? I’ve given you theoretical ideas so far, but later I want to give you specifics. How does a person become a better human being on a day-to-day basis? That’s where I think the genius of the Bible comes in. It gives you specific recommendations, like tithing 10 percent of your income. It’s powerful. Tzedakah, commonly known as “charity,” comes from the Hebrew word for justice, tzedek .

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Where do you draw the line establishing that you are good enough? I guess you could take care of things, pick up after yourself, and be nice. But it’s hard to know for sure because there’s probably always something else you could do.

DENNIS PRAGER: Almost none of us is good enough. It may be an impossible goal to achieve because you would have to define “enough,” and no one can do that. To assess your goodness, among other things, you need to compare yourself to others. Remember, Noah is described in the Bible as righteous in his generations . Was he good enough? Well, God thought he was good enough to be saved from the flood. And remember the other criteria—comparing yourself to an ideal and comparing what you’ve done to what you could do.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, back in the 1800s, slavery was legal, and it was considered a good value by those in America. Abraham Lincoln didn’t learn from his parents that slavery was bad, he didn’t learn from God that slavery was bad, he didn’t get that from anywhere—he just said, “I feel that slavery is bad,” and so he decided to change it. And now slavery is considered a bad thing.

DENNIS PRAGER: In other words, Lincoln got his opposition to slavery from feelings, not from values. Is that your argument? I want to respond first to what you are arguing. It’s a good point. Lincoln very likely had feelings about it, but I have a question for you. Why, in all the world, did only people in the West, particularly in the United States and England, abolish slavery? Don’t you think people in Africa, Asia, and Europe had similar feelings? The answer is, they generally didn’t, because Americans had certain values that influenced feelings.

For example, our Declaration of Independence holds that all men are created equal, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. The idea that God gives us rights is a founding principle of the United States, and Lincoln believed that. Even Jefferson believed that, though he held slaves. The feelings he had emanated from these values.

You see, Abraham Lincoln wasn’t working from just a feeling. The first formal abolitionist society in America was created by Christian Quakers in 1775. Lincoln’s parents were part of a Baptist movement that was aggressively opposed to slavery.

That is why our society, along with England, which was also based on these ideas, was the first society to abolish international slavery. Slavery wasn’t abolished in Africa.

Remember, in the West, white Christians bought the slaves, but black Africans and Arab Muslims sold them. It was here, in the West, in England and America, that the slave trade ended, not there. It ended here because of the value system here. This is pretty important stuff, but, unfortunately, it’s not the stuff that’s politically correct to preach today.

DENNIS PRAGER: Now, somebody asked me an excellent question today: “How do you know if you’re a good person?” I’d like you to think for a moment: Do you know anyone whom you could say is a truly good person? Raise your hand if somebody comes to mind. I’m not talking about a good doctor or a good athlete, but a good human being. I would like to know what traits that person has.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You—a man who goes and talks to high school kids about what’s important in life.

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, it is very sweet of you to say that. That’s very kind of you.

Yes? Did you have someone in mind?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, I know someone who stands up for people who are being bullied.

DENNIS PRAGER: Is it someone your age?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s great. You know someone your age who stands up for people who are being made fun of. How old is she?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: She’s turning fifteen.

DENNIS PRAGER: This girl, tell me a little about her. What do you think motivates her to do that?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Her mom.

DENNIS PRAGER: How so? Tell me.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: ’Cause she’s very close to her mom, and her mom is very good. Her mom is, like, one of her best friends.

DENNIS PRAGER: And her mother encourages her to do that sort of thing.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah.

DENNIS PRAGER: Let me hear more examples because real-life human examples are the most powerful lessons we have in life.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The person I’m thinking of, well, he just does everything right. I mean, it seems like he does his homework all the time, and he always does it perfectly. He’s nice to everybody, and he’s just a good person. He’s, like, perfect.

DENNIS PRAGER: He’s nice to everyone. And how old is this person?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Sixteen.

DENNIS PRAGER: Sixteen. Okay, does anyone else have an example?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: This person goes out of their way to, you know, help you out and, you know, just say something nice to you, so they will make you feel better about yourself or whatever. They are sort of an all-around good person and nice to everyone.

DENNIS PRAGER: And how old is this person? Okay, fourteen years old. Yes, you have a person.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The person I’m thinking of is very honest.

DENNIS PRAGER: Very honest.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: And trustworthy.

DENNIS PRAGER: And trustworthy. How old?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Forty-eight.

DENNIS PRAGER: Forty-eight?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s really old.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Laughter)

DENNIS PRAGER: Okay, that’s wonderful. Does anyone else want to volunteer?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I know someone who is honest, hardworking, and doesn’t ever make you feel bad if you do something stupid or you’re out in left field. He’ll always go along with it, even if you screw up something big. Along with everything else, he never gets upset—

DENNIS PRAGER: He’s even-tempered. That’s great, no question about it. Okay, these are good things to remember for your own life when you ask the question “How do I know if I’m good?” If I were to ask ten people who know you to name a truly good person, how many of them would choose you? That might be one of the best ways to answer the question “How good am I?” What I want to argue, my friends, is that for a lot of people, being good is not the most important achievement. Being popular, being smart, and being accomplished are often the most important.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You can’t say what’s good necessarily, though. It’s like, what’s good art? Over time, things change, and people have different opinions, so how do you consider that?

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, part of the problem is that in our age, everything has become personal opinion. One can say some art is real shlock. Do you know what the ultimate judge is? Time. I know that a hundred years from now, people will still be buying Rembrandt. I’m not sure, and I’d be very curious to know, whether they’ll still be dying to buy Jackson Pollock. I think throwing paint from a ladder isn’t quite the same as Rembrandt.

Using time as a standard, the Ten Commandments have withstood the test of three thousand years as a universal guide to human behavior.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How do you account for bad religious people?

DENNIS PRAGER: The number one reason there are bad religious people is that many do not regard religion as a vehicle to goodness. That’s a very important point. How do you account for people who read Shakespeare and gain no wisdom? The answer is that they’re not aiming to gain wisdom; they’re just reading Shakespeare for entertainment. If you are religious and do not believe the primary goal of religion, at least of Judeo-Christian religions, is to be a good person, then you’re far less likely to be one. People forget or never learned that the point of religion is goodness. That’s a very big problem.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How do you come to the conclusion that the point of religion is goodness?

DENNIS PRAGER: Because we are created in God’s image and God is good. That’s one way. Another is the fact that seven of the Ten Commandments concern ethical behavior. And when God is described in Exodus as passing Moses in His goodness, that’s very important. Throughout the Bible, the message is constant: “What does God want from you, O’ man? Only that you pursue justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8) That’s what it’s all about. I must admit that I become confused when I meet religious people who are dishonest. I want to say to them, “Do you not know that a primary purpose of religion is to be a good person?” I think they would find that comment a bit odd.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Are you talking about the Jewish community or the Christian community as well?

DENNIS PRAGER: Both.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, religious Jews would say the point of Judaism is to follow Torah laws, and Christians would say the point of Christianity is to have salvation through faith in Christ? But many would add that true faith in Christ leads people to perform acts of goodness.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s right. That’s correct.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How can you ask us to follow the laws of the Torah when so many of those laws are antiquated? For example, there’s a law in the Torah that says a man whose brother dies must marry his brother’s wife, right? That sounds antiquated.

DENNIS PRAGER: It is only practiced now in very small communities of the Arab world. It simply died through the ages. But the principle is eternal: The brother was obligated to marry his deceased brother’s wife if she had no children. The idea was to give her children so they would provide for her later in life. The underlying ideal is that a widow without children had to be given that which she most wanted and needed: children. Somebody has to take care of a widow. That’s what the law is about, and that’s very powerful. Someone has to take care of your brother’s widow.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, even if the law seems antiquated, you look at the reasons behind these commandments?

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s exactly right. Is the red light meaning “stop” and the green light meaning “go” eternal? I have no idea. But the point behind the law is that we should practice safe driving through the use of those lights. The purpose of the lights is eternal. Likewise, we should always look at the eternal purpose of the Torah’s laws.

DENNIS PRAGER: Today at the hotel, I picked up the Omaha World-Herald , not expecting to find the perfect article to show you. I mean, it is mind-blowing. Look at this:

“Caring People Closer to God, Study Suggests.” Is that incredible? In today’s paper. That’s eerie. It’s like God said, “Prager, you need more material. Here.”

(Laughter)

That is how I felt when I picked up the paper; it cracked me up. It exactly touches on my point concerning our relationship with God and how it affects our relationship with others. This article concerns a study done by a Harvard psychologist and a Boston University psychologist, people with no religious agenda. They said the data demonstrates that the closer people feel to God, the more likely they are to be caring toward other human beings. There’s a relationship between the two.

I know that is true for me. I don’t have as close a relationship with God as many people have, so why am I so motivated? I believe God wants people to say “Be good, because that’s what God wants,” and that’s the reason I’m here. This study makes perfect sense to me. If I weren’t animated by the belief that God authored the Bible, I couldn’t have done this for twenty-two years. I’d go out of my mind. But I don’t go out of my mind; in fact, I love it; it invigorates me.

When you have a sense you’re walking, as it were, with God in your life, you feel a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. I know that in secular life, this stuff sounds like, “Oh, who is this guy, a ‘Bible-thumper’?” I understand that secular life has almost inoculated you against taking God seriously. Do you know how sad that is? That when you talk about God among secular people, they sort of think you’re a “Bible-thumper” talking to them. You can’t talk about God without being suspect in some people’s eyes, without them thinking, “Is this person for real?”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What about studying God?

DENNIS PRAGER: Oh, we study God, but you could study totem poles. “Studying” is not the same as “living.” Studying only makes it a subject.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, no. I mean “studying” without, like, a class, or in school, or something like that.

DENNIS PRAGER: Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for your studying, I’m just saying it is not the same thing as living it. What the Bible wants is for you to study it, but study it in order to be a better human being.

DENNIS PRAGER: How does the Bible relate God to ethics? The best example is one of the Ten Commandments, Shabbat, or the Sabbath. It is the only so-called ritual law of the Ten Commandments. Even if you only follow the Ten Commandments, you are still instructed to keep the Sabbath, to keep Shabbat. What is Shabbat? According to the Torah itself, Shabbat is the primary way to ritually demonstrate that God created the world. I want to talk about this for a moment.

The Ten Commandments say you are to keep the Sabbath to announce that God created the world and then stopped creating. You, too, are to stop creating for one day a week as a reminder. This Commandment plays a massive role in my life. It is the one day of the week I don’t broadcast or even go to the office. It is my way of affirming to the world that, yes, there is a God who created the world; it didn’t just happen by chance. Every time someone keeps Shabbat, he or she is saying to the world that there is a Creator-God.

By the way, regarding “God the Creator,” I’d like to bring you an interesting thought: I don’t know how many of you have ever heard of Daniel Boorstin. He is one of the leading historians in America, and in the 1970s and 1980s, he was the librarian of the Library of Congress. He wrote a book called The Creators , about the global history of human creation in art, beauty, architecture, poetry, and philosophy. He’s not a religious man, but his first chapter is called “The Creator God,” and he makes an interesting point: “The legacy of the Bible was a world of words. The power of the Word would inspire Western creators in all the arts—in literature, painting, sculpture, and architecture. The Christian world would be a world of the Book, and the Book would be a fertile source of Western creativity.”

It is part of the Judeo-Christian belief that we should imitate God: We are also to create. Judaism and Christianity are said to imitate God the Creator.

These ideas have had a major effect on people. The point here is that through Shabbat, you have the best example of how you relate to God not only by feeling but through action. How many of you have a Shabbat in your home, where Friday night is distinctively Shabbat? About twenty of you. I’d guess you twenty could tell the others that on Friday night, there is a spirit in your home that is different from any other night of the week. In our home, on Shabbat, we do not watch television, listen to the radio, or use the phone except for emergencies. You don’t know what a difference it makes for that one night of the week when there is no radio, no TV, and the telephone rarely rings. Do you know what that means? It means the family and friends who come over can talk all night. There is nothing else to do. It is a day to be fully human. It is a day not for TV, not for going to the theater or out to a ballgame, but to relate to other human beings. What a combination, building human relationships because you’re honoring the belief that God created the world.

I feel bad for those who don’t have Shabbat. It is among the greatest gifts God has given us. This is as applicable to Christians and other non-Jews as it is to Jews. America has lost a lot by abandoning the Sabbath. Sunday was once a very different day from all the other days of the week for most of American history. As America became secular, Sunday became indistinguishable from other days—just another day to shop, another day to watch a movie, another day to go to a ballgame, another day on the internet, and even another day to work. My grandsons don’t use electronics on the Sabbath. Whenever I have visited my son’s home, I have watched a rare phenomenon these days: kids playing with other kids without any electronics. Visiting their home on Shabbat is like visiting America in the 1950s. Kids running around, playing with other kids, playing board games, and other non-electronic games. They actually relate to other kids in person.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why does God need our prayers?

DENNIS PRAGER: God does not need our prayers. That’s made clear in the biblical text where the Prophet Isaiah, quoting God, said, What do I need your sacrifices for? What I need is for you to treat people decently.

The purpose of rituals is to connect with God and to fill our lives with religious meaning. Just think of Passover without a Seder—the ritual Passover meal—and you realize what a loss that would be. So that’s the reason for prayer. It’s not that God needs it. When Jews sacrificed animals, it wasn’t because God was hungry. There is no notion of God needing our prayers. What God needs, and I put “needs” in quotes, is that we open up to him about our greatest yearnings. And why does God “need” that? Because God wants us to love him with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our might. If we love Him, we’re more likely to do what he asks of us and are more likely to have a fulfilled life. If you’re closed off to communicating with him, you’re obviously not going to love him.

Also, the Hebrew word for “to pray” is fascinating because it’s a reflexive verb. English doesn’t have reflexive verbs, but most languages do. So, for example, in French, you don’t say I wash my hands. You say, “I wash myself, the hands.” It’s a reflexive verb. So how could “to pray” be reflexive? Are you praying to yourself? Well, technically or literally, in some ways, you are. Because lehitpalel , the Hebrew word for “to pray,” actually means to examine oneself or to judge oneself. So, in that sense, we need to pray. We need to examine ourselves.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Examine ourselves in what way?

DENNIS PRAGER: What makes us tick? What do we really want? That’s a big one. What do we really want?

My father loved God, and that filled his life with meaning. He spoke to God every night. I can’t say he passed that trait on to me. But having a loving relationship with God was deeply consoling to him. That’s how he got through years in the South Pacific while Japanese bombers sought to destroy troop transport ships of the type on which my father was an officer.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: In the Holocaust, do you believe God played a large part?

DENNIS PRAGER: No, I did not say that. I believe antisemitism is a result of the task for which Jews were chosen: in the words of Edward Flannery, the eminent Catholic priest and historian, the Jews carry the burden of God and His moral law in history. But I do not believe God willed or instructed Hitler to kill the six million.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, I don’t believe that either, but how do you think God was involved?

DENNIS PRAGER: I don’t know God’s role in the Holocaust.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, I don’t know the specifics, but there was a rocket that Hitler was planning to build and almost finished. If he had been able to use that rocket in World War II, the Germans might have won the war. Do you feel there was divine intervention in that case?

DENNIS PRAGER: The reason I wouldn’t ascribe that to divine intervention is that I don’t like to only give God credit and no blame. Some religious people say it was miraculous—God didn’t let Hitler build the V-2 rocket, but then why did He let Hitler develop Zyklon B, the gas that was used in the gas chambers? I don’t like having a one-sided case on behalf of God. If you’re going to say God is responsible for the good, then you also have to say God is responsible for the bad. I don’t know when God intervenes. It is so life-filling for me to know that, as a Jew, I carry God’s message into history rather than try to answer questions like “Did God make sure Israel would win all its wars?” That is something I just can’t answer. Others think that way. I don’t relate to it, but I don’t say they’re wrong.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why does God intervene for some and not others?

DENNIS PRAGER: I don’t have an answer. You have to read the literature of truly religious, faithful Jews and how they related to God during the Holocaust. There were Jews who were connected with God until their last breath in the gas chamber. The statistics are interesting. The same number of Jews who entered the Holocaust religious came out religious, and the same number who were irreligious ended up irreligious. There was some transition between the groups. Some religious Jews became irreligious, and some irreligious Jews became religious, but the numbers were stable.

How could someone see his entire family murdered and still believe? One Hasidic rabbi who lost all ten of his children along with his wife, his parents, his brothers and sisters was asked after the war how he could still believe. His answer was powerful: He said for the non-believer, there are no answers, and f or the believer, there are no questions. That is how that man answered. “I’m a believer in God,” he was saying, “and that is the way God operates. I do not understand it; I don’t understand God. I am just a human being.”

Generally speaking, I have found there is no correlation between suffering and dropping faith. Jews today are more secular, more irreligious than any other group in America, yet Jews don’t suffer more than any other group in America. Why are they so irreligious? The truth is, the affluent have a harder time believing in God than those who are poor and suffering because the affluent think they don’t need God.

For those of you who live comfortable lives, the question of where God comes into your life is a bigger one than for some poor people who believe that even though they have no possessions, at least they have God. Ironically, the trick is to be with God when things are going well.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, do you think God has a different impact on poor people than on rich ones?

DENNIS PRAGER: I suspect—not know—that many people who have it good in life believe their need for God is less than it is for people who have a tough life.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, are you saying poor people are less actively religious?

DENNIS PRAGER: No, I’m saying the opposite—that poor people are more apt to believe in God. I said it’s the affluent who have a difficult time. Jews, who are one of the most affluent ethnic groups in America, are also the least religiously active group in America, and I think there’s a correlation. When things are going well, people think they don’t need God, and when things are not going well, they start thinking of God frequently.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, but I would think if someone’s life is full of problems, that they have no job or money, they’re probably thinking, “If God’s so great, if he cares about me so much, why won’t he get me out of this mess?”

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s the way you think, but it is not the way the poor think. I would like you all to read the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold Kushner, a man who came closer to God as a result of experiencing some of the greatest suffering a human can endure: the loss of a child. He had only two children, and one of them died before his eyes at the age of twelve. Since then, he has come closer to God. He doesn’t say, “God, if you were God, you would have saved my kid.” He asks those honest questions, but what he came to understand is that through suffering, people often come closer to God because believing that a good God governs the universe is comforting, even though we do not understand Him and His ways. I don’t understand God’s ways. As the prophet Isaiah said, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my [God’s] ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

If you think God’s purpose is to give us what we want, that is not a good thing. “God, if you are really there, how come you didn’t give me X , Y , and Z ?” It is like the people who pray for a victory for their team before a game. It ticks me off. Earlier, we spoke about using God’s name in vain. “Oh God, give my team a victory”—that is an example of using God’s name in vain. Do you know why it is stupid? (a) Does God give a hoot which team has a basketball victory? And (b) Isn’t the other team praying for the same thing? Who is God supposed to listen to? To pray for a victory is wrong in my opinion.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What if all they do is pray for strength?

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s different, very different. That’s what Harold Kushner prays for—the strength to deal with his suffering over the death of his child. That’s what we can pray for: “God, give me the strength to bear up under my ordeals.” That’s perfectly fine. If the athletes pray for strength, that’s beautiful, and I will bless them for it. But to pray for a victory is wrong.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Isn’t it right that we pray for the poor to have more?

DENNIS PRAGER: I’m not familiar with people who actually pray to God that the poor stop being poor, but if there are such people, then I would say it is not God’s job to fix all of humanity’s problems. That’s humanity’s job. The poor aren’t praying every day, “Oh God, send me a winning lottery victory.” There’s no question that some might, just as some pray for a basketball victory, but the poor generally relate to God because that’s what they have in life.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was wondering how people could believe in God if they are, like, poor or hungry or something. Because, like, when I visited the concentration camp, I found it hard to believe in God.

DENNIS PRAGER: Let me tell you something: When you truly suffer in life, you come to realize that the only thing left is God. If there is anybody who can tell you about God and faith, it’s people who suffer. Most American young people don’t suffer. I don’t mean that you never have serious problems or that you don’t have anxieties. I’m talking about physical suffering—beatings, rape, torture, starvation, all of which were common in history. I’m referring to people who truly suffer, and that includes any of you who have lost a loved family member, a parent, or a sibling.

More than any other, it’s often these people who realize what really matters in life. If you lose a child, does it matter how much money you make? It certainly helps to pay bills, but we realize it doesn’t mean nearly as much as you might think. I’ll prove it to you; I frequently ask people to think about what they would do if the doctor told them they have a year to live. What would you do? I read a book by a Swiss lawyer who had that experience.

He was told by his doctor that he had a year to live, and that’s what he had—about a year to live. He kept a diary and, among the things he did was to stop watching television. He realized how much time he had wasted watching television. One of the personal suggestions I make to people who want to grow and lead a full life is to always imagine you have a year left to live. You may be thinking, “Wow, that is so dark,” or “That is so weird.” It is not weird. You don’t know how long you’ll live, you don’t know when you’ll die, but if you did, it would change your priorities.

In fact, there’s a statement in the Talmud: “Don’t believe in yourselves till the day you die.” In other words, you don’t know everything, and you can’t know when you will die. It is a very good way to assess your priorities, and I’ll bet if you only had a year to live, at least a few of you would consider your connection to God very carefully. That would become very meaningful.

I went to the camps. I did not learn from Auschwitz not to believe in God. I learned not to believe in man, not to believe in the innate goodness of human beings. While I originally learned that point from the Torah, it was powerfully reinforced when I saw the gas chambers and the torture rooms. How people believe in humanity after knowing about that is a riddle to me, not how they still believe in God.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I feel funny about becoming religious because my friends will think I’m strange and incapable of thinking for myself.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s probably true. That a lot of your friends would think that shows how powerful the brainwashing has been. Secular people are generally not as deep as religious people. It’s unbelievable to me that this kind of response is so pervasive. It’s like the lie that more people have been killed in the name of God than by secular people. It’s just not true. Far more people have been killed, certainly in the twentieth century, by secular people than by religious people. I’m not defending all religious people. Many of them leave a lot to be desired. Part of the reason for your discomfort is that a lot of religious people come across as quite stuffy. They turn me off as well. And there are certainly decent secular people. I make that point all the time, yet people go around saying Dennis Prager says you can’t be good if you’re not religious. I’ve never said that in my life. What I am saying, however, is if you care about society and not just individuals, you’re betting on the wrong horse if you bet on the ethics of secularism.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, what do you recommend for people who feel so uncomfortable about becoming religious? How do they manage that discomfort?

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, my older brother told me something when I was about ten years old and knew I was frightened by horror movies. He said the best way to get unscared is to watch a lot of them. So I started watching a lot of monster movies. Eventually, I concentrated on the makeup and the costumes, and the movies did not affect me. That’s the way it works. You have to confront the issue. Every good change has a level of discomfort and that includes taking religion seriously. Look, you’d feel this discomfort if a group asked about your favorite music and you said Bach. Your discomfort hardly argues against taking Bach seriously. But, ultimately, when done right, a serious religious life is the best way to live.

DENNIS PRAGER: There’s one sensitive subject I have not yet talked about. It is about interfaith dating and interfaith marriage. It is a very important and sensitive subject. I want to explain why I kept this for last.

Only if you have a conviction that it is worth perpetuating your faith and your religious community does the issue of interfaith marriage make any sense. I would never say to someone who couldn’t care less about their faith, “Don’t intermarry,” because that would be a meaningless statement. Only if you want to perpetuate your religion is it important that you make a home with someone who shares your faith.

If your faith means nothing, if the sense of religious mission, if the biblical ideal of God, the biblical ideal of ethics, everything we talked about means nothing, then what difference does it make whom you marry? It is only when you understand that you have a role as a member of a religious community, a role that I believe comes from God, that it makes a difference who you marry. That’s why I waited to talk about it. First, we had to establish that it means something to be religiously committed. If it doesn’t mean anything, then I have no argument.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Could you just give one general suggestion to us about interfaith dating?

DENNIS PRAGER: My suggestion for interfaith dating is that unless you are completely secure in your religion, so much so that no matter the intensity of love you experience, you know you will not marry someone of another religion, then it’s probably not a great idea. That doesn’t mean you don’t have dinners with those of other religions.

For example, I have as many non-Jewish friends as I do Jewish friends, and it is somewhat of a joke because the only time I get a chance to see them—after all, I broadcast every night—is Friday night. There is one non-Jewish couple we’re very close to, and I don’t think I have seen them outside of Shabbat more than twice in my life. It is somewhat of an ongoing joke between us. They already know the entire Kiddush, the blessing said over wine for Shabbat or a holiday.

(Laughter)

Anyway, I believe interfaith dating is not a good idea but having friends who are of a different religion is, and I admit there is a tension there. Orthodox Jews don’t have this tension. They tend to stay among themselves. That’s not a criticism; it’s just a fact. But you don’t need to stay only among yourselves; you just need to know there is a tension. Even if you’re in love, you have to be willing to say, “I want to be with you, but I won’t marry you unless you accept and participate in my religion.”

Please understand there is that option. Many religions accept converts. That’s an important factor, but if the person won’t convert, it’s a statement that they are not willing to share one of the most important aspects of your life. And that should be a sign that, as much as I love this person, this marriage likely won’t work.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why is there such an obligation in religion to marry and have children?

DENNIS PRAGER: First of all, religion wants you to grow up, and the two greatest vehicles to growing up are getting married and having children. Some single people have grown up, but they’re the exceptions. There are mature single people and there are foolish married people with children. But that doesn’t negate the point that if you want to grow up, you get married and have children. Ask anyone who is married about the difference between being married and being single and they’ll tell you the difference in how they see themselves and how others see them is massive.

It’s a modern phenomenon that leaders of countries do not have children. For all of history, that was almost disqualifying, but we live in a different age. Today, many couples decide not to have children so they can have more free time, eat out more often, and travel. They want to go where and when they want to go and don’t want to stay home, so they can eat out more. It’s a form of narcissism, and we live in a very narcissistic age.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You think that we should mix with other cultures and stuff like that, but you don’t think we should become close enough to marry them. I don’t understand how you can say that.

DENNIS PRAGER: Yes, it’s a great point. I’ll go back to the word I used earlier and admit to you that there is a certain amount of tension there. Yes, we should be close to the rest of the world. If we hide from the world, how can we influence it?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, I mean, what would you say to a person whose value system says that love is more important than religion? Because I know religion isn’t that important to some people, and it is very important to others.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s correct. To someone who says love is more important than religion, I would say, “I’m sorry, my relationship with God and perpetuating this Bible that I believe comes from God comes before love.” If you want to join me in this pursuit, we can have both love and religion together, but if you are asking me to choose only one, I will have to choose my religion.

You also have to know that when people marry, a lot of things bond them or don’t bond them. Look at the divorce rate. Shared values create very strong bonds between people. Love doesn’t conquer all.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: They could still have the same values in different religions.

DENNIS PRAGER: Yes, you could have certain values that are the same, but you certainly won’t have the same religious values. In other words, what you have to become then is like a homogenized couple with a general value: “I believe in not hurting anybody.” For the two of you to say you don’t believe in hurting anyone is not enough; you won’t share anything distinctive. Depriving your children of a specific way of relating to God deprives them of something very precious and important.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Don’t you give children the right to choose what religion they want to be in?

DENNIS PRAGER: Do you know what they choose? Nothing. I’m telling you the statistics. The statistics are that a large number of children of interfaith marriages do nothing with religion.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I mean, as they grow up, they can still decide what religion they want to follow.

DENNIS PRAGER: Yes, of course. You’re talking theoretically and, theoretically, you’re right. I’m giving you the statistical reality. Children of interfaith marriages often wind up irreligious. We live in a secular culture. There’s nothing to drive a kid to religion—nothing. Unless they are raised with it, the vast majority of people raised without religion will remain secular. Mormons, born-again Christians, and Muslims proselytize; Jews don’t. In part, because they proselytize, Islam is the fastest-growing religion.

While I suspect your child will choose nothing, if they do choose something, it likely won’t be your religion. That prospect is something to keep in mind. You may say to me, “So?” That’s why I devoted this event to answering that question. If you don’t believe God is behind whatever mainstream faith one chooses to follow, then it won’t matter much to you whether your children live religious lives. That is why the God issue is critical. Theoretically, you are right about kids growing up and making their own choices but, in practice, please understand what would happen. Life doesn’t follow theories; if it did, the world would be as Marxism said it is. Marxism is theoretically beautiful. In reality, it just gave us a lot of poverty, misery, and death. The world doesn’t work according to beautiful theories.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: In that situation, if there were a Christian parent and a Jewish parent, I guess the child would be a Christian because if you look around, that’s what happens.

DENNIS PRAGER: Exactly. That’s my point. It is the majority culture. We’re not in Israel. In Israel, the child of an interfaith marriage would probably identify as a Jew, or at least as an Israeli.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, wait a minute. If the only issue with two people of different religions marrying is, like, religiously confusing their children, then what if they didn’t have children? They’d be fine then, wouldn’t they?

DENNIS PRAGER: Theoretically, you’re right, but not in reality, and I will tell you why. Thank God, I’m happily married. And one of the sources of happiness in my marriage, in fact, probably the greatest source of happiness, is that I share everything with my wife. If I couldn’t share this very deep part of me, my faith, with my wife, that would be a barrier between us. If, on Saturday morning, I went to the synagogue and she said, “Bye, darling, have a nice time with your religion; I’ll be watching TV or reading the paper while you pray to your God,” there would be a barrier between us.

As someone who has both divorced and remarried, I can tell you the more you share with your spouse, the more likely you are to have a good marriage. By that, I mean the more you share in every possible way. The more you talk to each other, the more you share physically, emotionally, mentally, philosophically, and religiously, the better your marriage is likely to be.

So why, when it comes to the deepest passion of my life, my religion, would I say, “Well, my wife and I have a great deal in common, but the one thing for which I have the most passion, I can’t share with her. But she respects my right to practice it.” I don’t want a wife to only respect my right to do something. I want to share it with her. I like sharing movies with my wife. Why wouldn’t I want to share religion with my wife?

So please understand that your question is correct in theory but, usually it doesn’t work out that way.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But it could be the same thing if you were both of the same religion but you were religious and she wasn’t religious. I mean, you could say the same thing if both of you had different opinions and stuff. It doesn’t mean that just because you are both of the same religion that you have the same, like, attitudes and the same beliefs.

DENNIS PRAGER: You’re right. And you know what? The more different the attitudes between spouses, the less they will have to share in marriage. If you marry someone of your faith who couldn’t care less about it, it is virtually the same as marrying someone who was not of your faith who couldn’t care less about it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I didn’t say if they didn’t care at all. You know, what if one were just not as religious?

DENNIS PRAGER: Not as religious could mean only a minor difference. You know, everything in life is context. There are virtually no very religious people married to irreligious people unless, in the beginning, they were both irreligious and one became very religious later. By the way, the divorce rate among those couples tends to be higher than average. That’s how different their lives become. This is not only true about religion but about everything important. For example, for most couples, significant differences in political views are a source of tension. In most cases, a staunch liberal married to a staunch conservative will have a troubled marriage. They will either never talk about their political views or, if they do talk about them, the discussion will end up in a serious argument.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Are you saying it is wrong to marry someone of another religion if they are not going to convert?

DENNIS PRAGER: It is not morally wrong. I think it is unwise.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, if I marry a Christian, you’re saying it is not going to work out?

DENNIS PRAGER: Unless either you or she is willing to suppress your faith or is already secular, it likely won’t work if you want to live a religious life that your spouse won’t share with you. On the other hand, as I often say, an irreligious person of one religion marrying an irreligious person of another religion have a lot in common—they both believe in nothing religious. I’m very realistic about this. But I’m basing my answer on the assumption that your religion is important to you. If it is not important to you, then the question is irrelevant. And even then, you are marrying on the assumption that the religion into which you were born will never become important to you. But that is often not the case. As people get older, many of them start taking God and religion more seriously, especially if they have children. Will you baptize your child? Will you give your child a religious education? Will you give your son a bris—a ritual circumcision? These are questions that most young people in love do not ask. But you should.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don’t understand how other groups are so successful in promoting their religion so fast.

DENNIS PRAGER: Let me tell you something. When you raise people with no religion, they will look for a substitute. Most people want something that gives their life meaning outside of going to work and raising kids. Those don’t suffice. Some will choose politics. Some will choose an “ism,” like environmentalism, feminism, socialism, and the most popular of our time, egalitarianism. But they want something else to add meaning to their lives.

And what if you can’t have kids or you don’t find someone to marry? Then you have to ask the question, “What am I here for?” In America, you have a big, beautiful banquet table of religious choices, from Christianity to Judaism to God-knows-what.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You’ve talked about the importance of being religious. So, how do I become religious?

DENNIS PRAGER: You become religious the same way you become anything. You start by wanting to be religious. That’s my view on happiness. You first have to want to be happy—which, by the way, not everybody does. But you have to want to be X . Then you work at being X . That’s the only way to become anything. You want to be happy? Then you have to work at being happy.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: How would you define religious?

DENNIS PRAGER: There are really two working definitions. One is being active in one’s religion. You can’t be religious without a religion because that’s what the word comes from.

The second way we say somebody is religious is when we mean the person is committed to religious principles. But again, it involves a specific religion in almost every case.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Right, but why? Why couldn’t I make up my own religious system?

DENNIS PRAGER: You could. No one says you can’t. But the question is whether it would work. It’s pretty tough to establish your own religion, make it effective, and then sustain it for generations. You would need to make up a value system for yourself, but by definition, it has to apply to all human beings.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Which religious community should I join?

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s a very common question and a good one. And I have a generalized answer. For those who were raised in a particular religion, I would investigate that religion first. For those raised in no specific religion, how do you determine? Generally, on its prospects for success. You’re much more likely to want to join the team with a high moral batting average than a team with a low moral batting average. In morality, the batting average is deduced by how many good people it produces, not the percentage of its adherents who are good people. So, I would measure a community by its results. People say what you have to do is seek the truth. Well, that’s true, but that doesn’t quite answer the question of which religion I want to join. If I’m interested in discovering a moral community, then the community that produces moral people will be my first choice. Moral truth is determined by acting morally, not by dogma. Religious truth is goodness. That’s the core of religious truth. In other words, it’s not the statements of faith of any given religion. Theoretically, people could believe in oddball ideas, but if they produce good people, then who am I to say that religion does not have truth? You can’t judge religion by its beliefs alone. It’s not possible. You have to judge it by its results.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But aren’t you making your own subjective determination that goodness is the standard to measure religion? What if somebody says, “Look, I think it’s how close I feel to God and how spiritually elevated I feel, and not morality. It’s the feeling of spiritual elevation I experience.”

DENNIS PRAGER: Morality is measurable. Your closeness to God is subjective. You know, a lot of awful people, evil people, felt close to God. Hitler thought God was on his side and that God had saved him from all the assassination attempts made on him. So, feeling close to God is not a particularly good criterion.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, higher consciousness, something like what the Buddhists believe, would be invalid for what reason?

DENNIS PRAGER: Because it’s not measurable. That’s the reason. As I’ve just mentioned, you have to consider how many good people the movement has produced. And how can one measure the good done by those seeking higher consciousness, because the concept of higher consciousness is completely subjective?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You talked about having moral feelings being better than bad values. How do you know when the bad values shouldn’t be followed and you should go by your feelings instead?

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s a tough question. That’s where you have to use a combination of faith, reason, and therefore consequences. I’ll answer this way: How does a scientist know when he has a bad experiment? He evaluates the result. How do you know Nazism and Communism are bad values? One: Based on my religious faith, murder is wrong. Two: I look at the consequences. Am I happy? Do I believe that the world is better thanks to Nazism and Communism? Then I ask, is the world better thanks to the Ten Commandments?

In other words, just as there are scientific experiments, there are moral and religious experiments. Do I think the world is better thanks to the Bible and the many religious communities that spread their teachings? Absolutely. So, I employ thousands of years of history to evaluate whether a value is good. That’s why, when new values arise, I’m very suspicious. It doesn’t mean I reject them; I’m just suspicious. I want to understand the consequences of overthrowing a long-established value system.

DENNIS PRAGER: I don’t want you all saying, “Yes, you’re right—you’re right.” Do you know what Israel means? The name of the Jewish people is “Israel.” Do you know what that name means?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Struggle?

DENNIS PRAGER: The Bible itself, in Genesis, gives the definition “struggle with God.” A woman once called me on my radio show. She said, “I’m a Muslim woman. I want to ask why you aren’t a Muslim?” Just like that. I said, “Without giving you a long explanation, the answer lies in the names of our two religions. The name of the Jewish people in Hebrew is ‘Israel,’ and the name of your religion is ‘Islam.’ ‘Islam,’ in Arabic, means ‘surrender to God.’ ‘Israel,’ in Hebrew, means ‘fight with God.’ I’d rather fight with God than surrender to God.” And she said, “Thank you. Good answer.”

I’m asking you to struggle with God because when you struggle with God, you are taking God seriously. A child who just says, “Yes, Mommy, yes, Daddy,” doesn’t have a relationship with a mother and father. He’s just a robot. The goal is to interrelate with a parent and to interrelate with God. You can reasonably ask: “God, how do you let six million Jews die?” “How do you let two million Cambodians die?” “How do you allow Africans to be enslaved?” “How do you allow so many women to be raped?” Those are good questions, but don’t think there aren’t answers.

Your job is to strive to find answers. Anybody can ask questions. It doesn’t take a great brain to ask questions. It takes a great brain and great character to seek answers. I want you to understand that anybody can say, “Hey, God, how do you let kids get pneumonia?” That doesn’t take any thought. The trick in life is to search for answers and then ask deeper questions. That’s why the Bible says, “Love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might,” and “These words that I give you this day shall be in your heart, with you when you walk, when you lie down, when you sit, when you stand”—you should be constantly aware of these things. It’s a long answer to a short question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a question—what happens if you don’t have a relationship with God, like, twenty-four hours a day? I mean, you don’t think about Him twenty-four hours a day, but only once in a while.

DENNIS PRAGER: What happens if you don’t relate to God twenty-four hours a day, but just once or twice a day? The question is, what do you want to do with your life? Very few of us relate to God every waking hour, but do you feel that is a worthwhile goal? Do you remember we discussed working to be a good person? It is also worth working to be a person who relates to God. That elevates us. The more you do it, the more it can elevate you.

It is very difficult for me to talk to you about God, just as it’s hard to talk to people who don’t have a lot of love in their lives about the importance of love. If you haven’t experienced it, it is very difficult for me to convince you. I can only tell you that the Bible wants you to relate more to God, and it provides guidelines for doing so. After all, as God is invisible and untouchable, it’s not easy to relate to him. I don’t expect you to go from twice a day to every waking hour, but how about from twice a day to four times a day? That’s all I’m saying.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I do pray to Him every day and everything . . .

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s great.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don’t do it frequently—you know, I do it every other night or whatever.

DENNIS PRAGER: Obviously, you can’t think about God all day; you’ll never get any work done. That’s not the issue. The issue is bringing God into your daily life through the acts you do. I’ll explain it another way: We have a choice in life: Do we live like animals, or do we elevate ourselves? Take eating—you can eat like an animal, or you can elevate the act of eating. How do you eat like an animal? You could stuff your face in a bowl and lick it all up. That’s eating like an animal.

(Laughter)

Judaism wants you to separate yourself from the animal world as much as possible. I understand that not all of you are dying to hear this, but I would ask you to understand what the Torah’s commandments are trying to do, even if you are not ready to implement them all at this time. I want you to appreciate what Judaism is trying to do. By elevating the everyday act of eating, Judaism makes it holy, meaning it’s related to God. Judaism wants to make everything a little more elevated.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I find it very difficult to be religious when the religious services I attend are so incredibly boring.

DENNIS PRAGER: What you said is true for many people. That’s why I founded my own synagogue. When I was a kid in Orthodox Jewish summer camp, we were so bored during the service that we played prayer-book baseball or “Siddur baseball.” “Siddur” is the Hebrew word for the prayer book. It was very simple: You opened the book to a random page and, if the first letter on the page was an aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, you got a single; bet, the second letter of the alphabet, a double; gimmel, the third letter, a triple; and vav, the fourth letter, was a home run. Every other letter was an out. If you looked, you would see rows of kids saying, “Man on first, two out” while opening and closing the siddur. Boredom is a big problem. That is one of the reasons I have conducted Jewish High Holy Day services for more than fifteen years. In my view, the first rule of all communication—podcasts, radio shows, or anything else—is “be interesting.” That’s true on a date, and it is true when you speak. It sounds trivial, but it is enormous. Be interesting.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay, but that’s for somebody who’s leading the service. You’re talking to a group of high school students. You’re telling us we need to become religious. We need to identify with a religious institution. We need to be part of a community, and being part of the community means attending religious services and being bored. So, how are we supposed to connect with the community when we’re constantly bored by the service?

DENNIS PRAGER: It’s a challenge. There is depth in every service, even boring services. So you try to connect with the depth, and that will help a lot.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, where have you found depth in your services?

DENNIS PRAGER: I find depth in the words of the Jewish service when the Torah is returned to the Ark and we say, “Return us God unto you so we can renew our days as of old.” And then my favorite line, “All of the Torah’s bodies of water lead to peace.” I find it meaningful to be with fellow Jews (and in the case of my synagogue, a number of non-Jews) singing familiar melodies with moving words. These are just a few examples of how I’ve tried to find meaning in religious services.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You’ve asked us to become religious, but I find prayer and all the rituals too difficult to follow. How am I supposed to become religious under those circumstances?

DENNIS PRAGER: First, I would distinguish between prayer and religious observance. In Judaism, observing the Sabbath is a religious observance. You could observe the Sabbath and pray very little. Taking one day of the week away from work and secular concerns is valuable unto itself, whether or not you pray. I find prayer difficult, but I love ritual observance. Second, like everything else in life, we establish a goal and then we pursue it. Saying that we can’t pursue it is not valid. You can pursue anything you decide to pursue. If my goal is to play the piano, I pursue it by taking piano lessons. I work at playing the piano. And that’s true for all goals in life. The question is, do you want to achieve that goal or not? And I would say that playing piano is not all that different from practicing a religion. You either pursue it or you don’t. The question is, do you think it’s a worthy pursuit?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Why? Excuse me. Why would somebody think prayer and rituals are a worthy pursuit, or even just the rituals alone?

DENNIS PRAGER: Because you will be a happier person with a community of like-minded, or at least like-practicing, people. That’s one reason. What worthy goal in life could be realized if all we pursue is what we like? The question is whether a goal is worthy of pursuit rather than only considering if one likes all the steps necessary to achieve it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, besides community, are there any other benefits to pursuing a ritually observant life?

DENNIS PRAGER: Yes, you’ll lead a deeper life. Most people don’t pursue a deep life, which is very sad. You’ll be a deeper person. You will think more about the great issues of life, and that’s a big deal.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What about ritual observance will get me to dwell on the deeper issues in life?

DENNIS PRAGER: Religion causes people to focus on the deeper issues in life. Let me give you an example. I was visited in the hospital by a close friend. A Jewish man. And he said, “Can I come to see you? I have some questions for you.” I assumed he wanted to ask me about God and suffering, the meaning of life, and so on. His questions were, what was my favorite knish shop in Brooklyn, and do I prefer mashed potato or baked potato knishes? He had five questions like that. If someone had said, “My Orthodox Jewish friend has five questions for you,” I assure you, they would not include my favorite knish shop in Brooklyn. Religious people tend to think more deeply than most secular people. There are superficial religious people, and there are deep secular people. But, as a general rule, religious people tend to think more about profound matters than secular people.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, the reason somebody might think more deeply if they’re ritually observant is to think about the purpose behind this ritual and that commandment?

DENNIS PRAGER: It’s not the observance alone that causes or forces one to think deeply. It’s taking religion seriously. Religion asks the deep questions. Why am I here? Is there a God? Did God make me? What is good? What is evil? These are largely religious questions.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Okay. But I could observe just the ethical commandments and still have those questions. So, how does ritual observance help in that way?

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s true, you theoretically could, but it doesn’t work out that way. I have never met anybody—I’m not saying such a person doesn’t exist—but I have never met anybody who said, “You know, I’m a very observant Jew or a very observant Christian. I observe all the ethical laws but not the rituals.” It doesn’t tend to work that way.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, the ritual observance helps to sustain the ethical observance?

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s right. That’s exactly right. The holy protects the ethical. When you ignore the holy, you will end up ignoring the ethical. That’s one of my chief theories. A secular example of the same thing is the Broken Windows theory. It is the brilliant idea of two professors who came up with the concept that if you allow broken windows to remain broken or graffiti to be scrawled on walls in a city and do nothing about it, you will end up with worse crime and chaos. It doesn’t stop with graffiti and broken windows.

That’s why I’m against public cursing. Because, very often, it leads to other bad behavior. If it’s a longtime friend and he periodically throws a curse word into our private conversation, that’s one thing. But if some guy is cursing regularly and doesn’t even know me or how I would respond to it, that’s something else. I would rather loan money to a guy who rarely curses than to a guy who regularly curses. And I would like each of you to think about that. If the only thing you knew about someone was how much they cursed, would you draw any conclusion regarding how much you would trust them with your child or your money?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, how does cursing tie into ritual observance?

DENNIS PRAGER: Well, not cursing is a ritual observance. No religion encourages regular cursing. It’s not coincidental that religious people curse a lot less than secular people. It’s just a fact. It doesn’t reflect well on a person. The downside to cursing in common speech is that nothing is holy.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I still don’t understand how the Torah is going to make me a better person. Could you give me examples of some laws that you think would do that?

DENNIS PRAGER: There are many examples, but here are some prominent Torah laws that come to mind:

DENNIS PRAGER: First, I told you that the Torah has a principle of giving 10 percent of your income to charity, which in Hebrew is called tzedakah. Judaism holds that if you don’t donate some of your income, you’re not just being uncharitable, you’re being unjust. That’s what the Torah holds, and that’s why it emphasizes that you should give 10 percent. Remember, we compared the one-dollar man to the fifty-dollar man. Is there anybody who would still argue that the one-dollar man who cried acted more morally than the guy who gave fifty dollars because of Jewish law?

Just how many would still argue that? Well, we’ve certainly made some progress, and I understand not everybody will agree. However, for those of you who still vote to give one dollar, how do you think impoverished people would vote? Hearing it from a truly needy human being will be more persuasive than hearing it from me. The Torah tells you it is more important to do good than to feel good. Remember, it cares about how you act. That is why it is a religion of laws.

DENNIS PRAGER: Let me give you another example. There’s a law in the Talmud, an extensive commentary on the Torah, that helps us to be better human beings. It says you cannot ask the shopkeeper the price of an item if you already know you won’t buy the item because you’re not allowed to raise the hopes of the storekeeper for no reason.

Let’s say you are interested in a camera. But you need to decide on the make and model number. So, you go to a store and take up twenty minutes of the salesman’s time, thank him, then go home and order it online. If you do that, you have violated the shopkeeper law. In effect, you have stolen the shopkeeper’s time and raised his hopes for no reason because you knew you wouldn’t buy it, but you implied that you might. Are there any questions about that law? Does that make sense?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: So, what are you supposed to do?

DENNIS PRAGER: Excellent question. Here’s the answer. You know what? I’m not going to give you the answer. Can somebody answer her question? What should you do in such an instance?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, you should go into the store and tell them you’re not going to buy it. Then ask for information anyway, just so they don’t have their hopes up.

DENNIS PRAGER: That’s right, that would be one answer. But understand that you have to walk in and say, “Sir, I’d like to take your time to figure out which camera I want, but I must tell you that no matter which camera I decide to buy, I won’t buy it here.” And of course, you realize what would happen. He’d never show you anything. He’d say, “Then please don’t waste my time.” That proves the purpose of the law is not to fool someone into thinking you might make the purchase.

So, what should you do? Well, either be honest, as she pointed out, or you could simply say, “Sir, I want to give you the business if I decide to buy the camera, but I could get it online for this price. Because of your overhead, I know you can’t match that price, but can you come close?” Otherwise, you have tricked and, in a sense, stolen from the person.

DENNIS PRAGER: Let me give you a third example of how a Torah law helps one to become a better person. Have any of you heard of lashon ha-ra ? It means “evil tongue.” It is like gossip.

The Torah knows the mouth can get people into terrible trouble. Saying bad things about a person behind their back is a big sin in the Torah. This law is yet another example of how we can better ourselves. It is difficult to follow, though, because people love talking about other people. You can talk about other people but be very careful not to say anything you’re not prepared to say in front of that person. Otherwise, you’re committing an act of gossip or slander, which can destroy someone’s life by destroying their reputation.

DENNIS PRAGER: A fourth example is cheating. There are laws in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy against cheating. I won’t ask how many of you have cheated on a test, but for most people, it is possible to cheat daily. As I mentioned earlier, people cheat on their résumés by making up accomplishments to get a good job, they cheat on insurance claims by inflating the value of their loss, and so on.