The Christian Digest [#15]
Presents
A Jewish Conservative Looks at Pagan America
By Don Feder
(Lafayette, LA.: Huntington House Publishers, 1993)
(May, 1994)
Don Feder is a syndicated columnist and editorial writer for the Boston Herald, the second largest daily newspaper in New England. Following are excerpts from a book he compiled from some of his columns over the past decade. (Readers unfamiliar with some of the words and expressions used will find a list of definitions on page 20.)
Introduction
A WORD ABOUT THE TITLE of this book. By Pagan America, I do not mean the New Age movement.
By Pagan America I mean that this is no longer a Judeo-Christian nation, animated by the ethical vision of the Bible, with its special emphasis on honesty, hard work, caring, and self-discipline. Instead we are evolving into the type of Canaanite culture (unrestrained hedonism, ritual prostitution, child sacrifice and the civic virtue of Sodom), which my ancestors encountered at the dawn of moral history.
A nation will have one God or many. Ours is increasingly polytheistic. While 40 percent of us attend church or synagogue services on Saturday or Sunday (the highest percentage in the industrialized world), the God of Israel isn't among the deities worshiped on weekdays.
The gods of late twentieth century America include the doctrines of radical autonomy, of absolute rights divorced from responsibilities, of gender sameness, of self-expression which acknowledges no higher purpose, of moral relativism and sexual indulgence. Their temples are courtrooms, legislative chambers, classrooms, news rooms, and the executive suites of entertainment conglomerates and publishing firms. We are one nation under God no more.
If my book could be summed up in a single sentence it would be this: Ideas have consequences. First the elite, then to a lesser extent (imperceptibly, almost subconsciously), the masses embrace certain toxic notions. The consequences fill our prisons, drug rehab centers, divorce courts, shelters for the battered and abused, rape crisis centers, mental hospitals, singles bars, and the roster of guests on the "Oprah Winfrey Show."
In the richest, freest, most tolerant nation on earth, the impoverishment of the spirit has led to a values depression. We have enough social pathologies to occupy every medical faculty in the land for an eon: family dissolution, the flight from parental responsibility, an illegitimacy crisis (a situation where 60 percent of minority children are born out of wedlock), a sex-and-violence saturated "entertainment" media, drug abuse (an ancient vice corroding the soul of a modern society), an underclass mired in misery, rampant crime, venomous race relations, labor that has lost its meaning, and the futile pursuit of pleasure replacing virtue as our greatest ambition.
When the United States Supreme Court in effect declares that it's unconstitutional to read the Declaration of Independence at a high school graduation, due to its multiple references to the deity, you can gauge the success of the crusade to expunge Judeo-Christian ethics from the public sector.
When a public school teacher may describe the most bizarre sex acts, in the crudest detail, but it's considered the mutilation of the First Amendment to post the Ten Commandments on a classroom bulletin board, when a ten-year-old is told that if she quietly reads her Bible on a school bus it is tantamount to the establishment of a national church, we have achieved a society that the Pilgrims, the founding fathers, and even our own grandparents would barely recognize.
When social organizations like the Boy Scouts are censured and penalized for refusing to bend the knee to immorality, when government tells us that presenting a condom to a thirteen-year-old or giving a needle to an addict is an act devoid of moral content, when the governor of a major industrial state declares that post-viability abortions (i.e. infanticide) is the price we have to pay for freedom, when politicians openly court the votes of degenerates, when a court rules that a sex killer has a constitutional right to his collection of violent pornography--we are on the verge of moral collapse.
When a rap song that calls for the murder of cops climbs to the top of the charts, when taxpayers are told that their objections to subsidizing a photograph of one man urinating into the mouth of another constitute censorship (when critics consecrate the same as the highest expression of the aesthetic), when a presidential candidate informs voters that whether or not he violated his marriage vows is none of their business, we may as well declare intellectual bankruptcy and have the nation placed in moral receivership.
When the law takes the position that parents have no legitimate interest in whether or not their fifteen-year-old daughters have abortions (in the same jurisdiction where parental approval is required for a school nurse to dispense aspirin), when commentators can look at the devastation wrought in the inner cities by fatherless children and pronounce the problem a paucity of welfare spending, when we are informed that playing with toy guns warps the psyche but pornography has no effect on character development--hope fades to a glimmer.
Pray, do not tell me that America is now a pluralistic society, that it is impossible to speak of values when there are so many value systems to which the public adheres. That many of our fellow Americans tacitly reject the Judeo-Christian ethic is a cause for lamentation, not resignation.
We can have the strongest economy in the world, America can achieve strategic superiority which verges on global hegemony, and it will all be for naught if we lose our moral bearings. Not that we could have either a strong economy or the will to defend ourselves without healthy social institutions, the family first and foremost among them.
My friend Gary Bauer, domestic policy advisor of the Reagan White House, currently head of the Family Research Council, speaks of a cultural civil war raging across the nation.
This book--dispatches from the trenches--covers the most controversial aspects of a debate whose outcome will determine whether the paganizing of America will proceed apace or if, as a society, we will rediscover traditional values.
Conservative Protestants and Catholics loyal to Rome will feel completely at home with this perspective. After all, our values derive from the same source. We learned them together at the foot of a mountain in the Sinai peninsula. I want Christians to know that there are Jews (not Jews by birth, but Jews by conviction) who are every bit as anguished as they over the moral decline of this nation.
Religion takes a bashing in the courts
(20 June 1991)
In ancient times, when Norman Vincent Peale and Bishop Fulton Sheen roamed the earth, religion was treated with the utmost deference. Doctrinal differences notwithstanding, religion was considered a public good--its practice beneficial to the moral vitality of the community. This was reflected in Forties films, with their invariably benevolent priests, magnanimous ministers, and wise rabbis.
Deference has turned to disdain, particularly for fundamentalist faiths. We're uncomfortable around people who take God seriously and are anxious to segregate them.
Discrimination against the religious is the one respectable form of prejudice left. Far from an establishment of religion, the governmental apparatus has become a bureaucratic griddle, at which the faithful are regularly flambed.
* Last year a federal district court upheld the authority of a St. Paul suburb to evict a storefront church on the grounds that the area where it had been located for two years is zoned commercial, and a church would contribute to the economic decline of an already depressed district.
Zoning laws then can be used to keep churches out of both residential and commercial areas. What does that leave? Can't put them in rural surroundings. Choir practice might agitate the cows. Dirty little secret: courts have allowed smut shops greater First Amendment rights than churches in contesting restrictive zoning.
* The Gospel Lighthouse Church is suing Dallas, arguing a municipal ordinance makes it practically impossible to construct a Christian school in the city. In Dallas, if 20 percent of the neighbors object to the location of a church school, the site must be approved by three-quarters of the city council. One church spent $100,000 in a futile attempt to get a building permit. Naturally, public schools are exempt from the requirement. As each student removed from the public system saves taxpayers an average of $4,800 you'd think promoting religious education would be a public priority.
* An inquisition is underway to remove the vestiges of religion from public education. Under threat of legal action, a Norman, Oklahoma elementary school agreed to let eleven-year-old Monette Rethford read her Bible on the playground. (The case was referred to by Bush in his June 6 speech to the Southern Baptist Convention.) Initially the fifth grader was informed the pernicious practice was a First Amendment violation.
* Sidewalk ministers have been harassed and arrested in a number of cities. The war on drugs? Forget it! Psalm-singing preachers are the real threat to public order.
Protecting kids from God
(11 June 1990)
Each month, an estimated 3 million students are victims of in-school crime. The statistic includes 2.5 million robberies and thefts, 282,000 assaults, and 2,500 acts of arson. In the same period, 1,000 teachers sustain injuries--inflicted by their charges--serious enough to require medical attention. Half-a-million students say they're afraid most of the time while in school.
Of those high school seniors who use cocaine, 57 percent reported "scoring" at school. The average inner-city pupil is safer on the mean streets of his neighborhood than in the classrooms and corridors of the local temple of learning.
Yet with the keenest discernment does the National Association of State Boards of Education perceive that it's Bibles, not bullets, which constitute the real threat to our kids. Thus the organization sought to overturn the federal Equal Access Act, which forbids discrimination against student religious groups.
In upholding the act last week, the Supreme Court brushed aside the admonitions of the association and its allies in the ACLU and People for the American Way that Bible study groups, meeting during periods set aside for extracurricular activities, represent a flagrant First Amendment violation.
Humanists and their bureaucratic allies are on an ideological search-and-destroy mission, determined to expunge even the mildest manifestations of religious values from public education. They have had notable successes: a graduating senior in New Orleans whose valedictory address was censored because she quoted the words of Christ; the child who was forbidden to read her Bible on a school bus; the third-grader who couldn't display her valentines because they contained the inscription "I love Jesus," the teens who were prohibited from distributing religious pamphlets on school grounds.
The Supreme Court encourages this lunacy by its persistent efforts to determine the number of celestial beings who can comfortably cavort on a comma in the establishment clause. Voluntary school prayer is out, says the institution which begins its sessions with the supplication that the Almighty "save this honorable court." Ditto a moment of silence. Students might be encouraged to think about You-Know-Who. Publishers have followed the trend, by excising religious references from texts.
Posting the Ten Commandments is an intolerable display of favoritism toward the ethos on which our nation was founded. Christmas carols are okay, if they're interspersed with "Frosty the Snowman" and other non-sectarian ditties. Likewise, crches may be displayed on public property, as long as they're carefully camouflaged, by Santa Clauses, plastic reindeer, and giant candy canes.
It has reached the point where public school students can experience anything--things the average sailor on shore leave doesn't encounter--except God. Sex education, suicide studies, lifeboat ethics, condom distribution, abortion pleading, highly explicit descriptions of homosexual acts--which, when taken together, constitute the propagation of the humanist creed--all are essential aspects of the public school experience in the 1990s. It's only prayers, Bibles, and references to a supreme being which offend the sensibilities of secularist puritans.
Please note which side employs coercion to advance its cause, the same which insists that refusing to subsidize obscene art is a form of censorship. No one is suggesting that children be forced to pray or compelled to profess beliefs which run contrary to their values. It is secularists who make war on conscience. No professions of faith, however voluntary, no religious activities, however far removed from institutional auspices, will they tolerate.
We may fail to teach our students the rudiments of literature, science, and history. Twenty percent of high school graduates may be functional illiterates, or semi-literate. We may be unable to maintain even a semblance of order in our urban schools, which increasingly resemble happy hour in Beirut. But, hallelujah, we sure know how to protect kids from God.
Give us that old time religion
(30 April 1990)
The trial of religion, first conducted by eighteenth century philosophers, is repeated in each generation. It's just the charges that keep getting sillier.
A friend clipped a news story about a fundamentalist minister who had declared war on the Easter Bunny (a pagan symbol, says he) and sent it to me with the following notation: "More proof that religion is essentially idiotic, for the intellectual coward and miserably humorless."
A typical, well-educated young American, she has been broiled and basted in skepticism by her professors, peers, and the mass media.
It's easy to focus on the more absurd proponents of any doctrine and then project this fanatical fringe as representative of the whole. Even the village atheist might scorn this line of attack as shooting Swaggarts in a barrel.
At least my correspondent didn't cite the Crusades, Inquisition, and the Ayatollah in her bill of particulars. This is the other shopworn accusation against religion: its alleged responsibility for some of the bloodiest wars and oppressions in history.
It may be the easiest charge to refute. As it must be implemented by fallible creatures, any ideal can be corrupted. Dennis Prager, my favorite Jewish commentator, observes that more people have been murdered in this century in the name of man than were killed in all previous centuries in the name of God. The slaughterhouses of the godless creeds span the globe. From Auschwitz and the Katyn Forest to the Ukraine, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Cuba, how many have been massacred in the name of self-determination, brotherhood, and compassion?
On to the indictment at hand. Religion idiotic? Is it any more rational to assume that our marvelous minds are a biological accident, the product of the random collision of molecules? Is it logical to suppose that, in the final analysis, life is futile, that after three score and seven years of struggle and achievement we sink into oblivion?
Can it be that most of the giants of Western history (towering intellects and believers all) were imbeciles? The Christian apologist C.S. Lewis put it so well when he wrote: "Really, a young atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side."
Should America be a Christian nation? It comes down to this: in any society, someone's values must prevail. If America isn't animated by the Judeo-Christian ethic, it will be governed by less enlightened doctrines. For the consequences of the latter, check out the latest statistics on drug use, date rape, and mental illness.
Returning Christ to Christmas
(25 December 1988)
Here's a novelty, a religious Jew who wants to put Christ back into Christmas.
As a lad, I was bemused by a billboard sponsored by the Knights of Columbus, which urged the public to "Keep Christ in Christmas." I considered the appeal superfluous, as I could not conceive of the holiday devoid of Jesus.
That was in the 1950s, when both America and I were young and innocent. Today, Christmas is increasingly observed in a secular way. At times, that way seems overwhelming.
Seasonal television programming--from "It's a Wonderful Life" to various versions of "A Christmas Carol" to "A Very Brady Christmas" and everything in between--is a paean to generosity, devotion, and other commendable conduct, without reference to religious aspects of the yuletide.
One can wander through weeks of blinking colored lights, plastic Santas cavorting with snowmen on suburban lawns, kamikaze shoppers, and red-nosed-reindeer music, without ever hearing the name of Jesus of Nazareth spoken.
For all it matters, Christmas might as well be just another national holiday, an opportunity to take time off from work, overindulge in food and drink, and engage in a senseless orgy of gift-giving.
Yet the holiday should be a solemn, as well as a joyous, occasion. From a Christian perspective, its importance cannot be overstated, marking as it does the most direct intervention of God in human affairs--the birth of the Messiah.
The drama begun in the manger on Christmas Day wends its way through the religious calendar to a commemoration even more laden with sacred significance--Easter, and the climax of the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
This is not my theology, my way of encountering God in history. Still, I can appreciate its importance as a moral mentor for those inclined to believe. I am secure enough in my own religion not to be intimidated by the professions of faith of others who follow a different tradition. You might say I'm pro-Christmas, in a spiritual sense.
Both Christianity and Judaism came into a blood-drenched pagan world and civilized it with their concept of an omnipotent God who demands righteous conduct. This is the principal reason twentieth-century paganism (Nazism and communism) despises both faiths and has labored so assiduously to eradicate them.
Ethical monotheism is the only antidote to the moral blight of our age, the only hope for a generation consumed by the worship of false gods: sensory indulgence, relativism, utopian political creeds, and the flight from personal responsibility.
The more Christian, in the true sense of the word, America becomes, the more morally sensitive it will be and the better for all of us--Christians and non-Christians, atheists and agnostics alike.
Frankly, I'd rather live next door to a committed Christian than a secular humanist or, what's more often the case, a practicing hedonist. At least I won't have to worry about my Christian neighbor stealing my lawn mower, having wild beer bashes that spill over to the front yard, or molesting my cat.
Pope's moral message to U.S. meant for people of all faiths
(7 September 1987)
One can almost envision a band of secularist Paul Reveres galloping across the landscape, sounding the alarm: "The pope is coming; the pope is coming!"
As P-day approaches, the media has rolled out its heavy artillery to rout the papal invasion. An NBC News special, broadcast on Aug. 25, presented a compendium of complaints from television's favorite Catholics, fussing and fretting about the Vatican's stand on abortion, homosexuality, divorce, and a host of church-related concerns.
Be sure that in days to come we will hear increasingly from the theologically disaffected with demonstrations, protestations, and fulminations by nuns who would be priests, priests who would wed, outraged abortion advocates, homosexuals who want their lifestyle validated, and feminists who demand that the pontiff amend the laws of nature to suit their purposes.
Please note, the networks never--but never--interview loyalist Catholics for these programs.
The Sept. 7 issue of Time magazine has a cover story titled "U.S. Catholics: A Feisty Flock Awaits the Pope" which reports, in excruciatingly minute detail over five pages, on the differences between the pope and those it chooses to designate American Catholics. The magazine breathlessly informs us that of the latter, 53 percent believe priests should marry, 52 percent approve of the ordination of women, 76 percent would permit divorce and remarriage within the church, only 24 percent believe artificial birth control is wrong, and so on.
The intent, of course, is to diminish the significance of the papal sojourn, to rebut the pontiff's words, before they're even uttered, by demonstrating how many of the unfaithful are in fundamental disagreement with John Paul.
Quite frankly, I'm bored by opinion polls of pseudo-Catholics, those who attend mass twice a year, who regularly violate church doctrine, and whose trinity consists of Andrew Greeley, Phil Donahue, and Robert Drinan. Really, who cares?
Can you imagine where Catholicism would be today if, during the Middle Ages, church dogma had been determined by a plebiscite of the peasantry?
Picture Moses descending Mount Sinai with George Gallup at his side. Before each of the Ten Commandments is promulgated, the prophetic duo takes a survey to determine if it comports with the proclivities of a solid majority of the Children of Israel. ("Idolatry. All opposed? Let's see a show of hands!")
Still, the plaintive cry is heard from modernists of all stripes and denominations: "Why must John Paul be so inflexible, so intolerant of diversity..." Clich, clich. The answer was eloquently provided by a traditionalist Catholic newsletter, when it recently observed: "Our pilgrim Pope wills to redeem the times, not appease them."
Just so. The pope is a gentle rebuke to a godless age, as he calls us back to our spiritual roots. He is not of my faith. Nevertheless, despite doctrinal differences, all religious souls resonate to his spiritual message, his call to self-restraint, sacrifice, biblical morality, and the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God.
The critics and protesters are whistling past the graveyard. Their show of bravado masks a subconscious fear. His authority and humble assurance are a disturbing challenge. Lurking at the back of their minds is a nagging doubt. Possibly there is, after all, a higher law. Perhaps personal conduct should be determined not by wish or whim, but conform to the dictates of a force beyond man.
"Abuse" not always what it seems to be
(2 April 1989)
Joel Steinberg, who killed his six-year-old illegally adopted daughter, is going away for a long time, but not long enough. His sentencing provoked another outpouring of expert opinion, so-called, on the subject of child abuse--much of it hazardous to the health of American families.
On the day sentence was pronounced, Dr. Eli Newberger, a physician on the staff of Boston's Children's Hospital and a member of a newly-created state task force on child abuse, confided that the problem cuts across socio-economic lines. ("Disclosures of sexual abuse appear to be particularly prevalent in affluent homes.")
Like many professionals in the area, Dr. Newberger seeks an ever-expanding definition of child abuse. In his estimation, spanking is a form of violence to children which must be carefully monitored and prosecuted at the first sign of a bruise. The message of the Steinberg case, the doctor gravely pronounces, is that "most child abusers look just like you and me." So as soon as you see anything suspicious, folks, grab that phone and report your neighbors to the appropriate social service agency.
Need it be said? Joel Steinberg and Hedda Nussbaum are hardly Ozzie and Harriet. Joel was a drug lawyer, coke head, and sadist (who freebased cocaine as his daughter lay dying); Hedda, his unmarried mate, gave new dimensions to the term masochistic. If this sounds like the folks next door to you, I suggest you consider relocating, posthaste.
Has child abuse reached epidemic levels? It's certainly in the interest of the child abuse industry to make us believe so. Their stock in trade is citing alarming statistics: i.e., 2.1 million cases reported in 1986. They neglect to note that 60 percent of all reports prove to be unfounded. Even that figure overstates the situation, as zealous social workers often stretch the criteria to fit any family believed to be in need of "intervention."
The view that child abuse is rife among intact middle-class families is ludicrous. Douglas Besharov, former director of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, states: "Families reported for maltreatment are four times more likely to be on public assistance" than the general population. Researchers at Canada's McMaster University established that in 1985 "preschoolers living with one natural and one stepparent were 40 times more likely to become child abuse cases than were like-aged children living with two natural parents."
Sexual abuse prevalent among ordinary families? Not according to political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain, who discloses that: "In two-thirds of all cases of father-daughter incest, the offender is not a biological parent but a stepfather or live-in roommate of the mother." In other words, if child abuse is indeed on the rise, it was fostered by welfare, easy divorce, and single-parent families--endowments of the same ideology which now proclaims its intention to combat the crisis by massive intrusion in the American family.
Almost any excuse for intervention is seized upon. Writing in the New York Times, Susan Pouncey urges us to eliminate child abuse by banning corporal punishment. Imagine having the cops batter down your door because a neighbor saw you give your child a swat on the behind?
I went to college in the Sixties with kids who were raised by the book--Dr. Spock's baby book. Their parents never spanked them, rarely raised their voices in anger. A more obnoxious bunch of spoiled brats I hope never to meet. Political violence and the drug culture were their temper tantrums.
Emotional abuse is the latest just-discovered contagion, even worse than physical abuse, the experts say (leaves psychological scars that never heal, don't you know). The day is not far off when yelling at little Yolanda, as she attempts to flamb the family cat, will have the child abuse hot line ringing off the wall.
Where might all of this lead? In a 1988 issue of Family Law Quarterly, Claudia Pap Mangel proposes licensing parents as the most efficient way to check violence against children. Prospective parents would need state certification before they're allowed to procreate.
Elder abuse tied to devaluation of life
(10 May 1990)
When society signals that the value of human life is relative, the results are always ugly.
Last week a subcommittee of the House Select Committee on Aging released a report which should shock the nation. According to the study, an estimated 1.5 million elderly (one in twenty) are annual victims of abuse, an increase of 500,000 in the past decade.
The report is filled with appalling examples: an elderly woman who weighed sixty pounds and had maggots crawling on an open leg wound when she was brought to a hospital; a sixty-nine-year-old who'd suffered a stroke, found naked, lying on the floor in her own excrement; a man (malnourished and covered with insect bites) tied to his wheelchair; a woman with deep purple bruises on all of the uncovered parts of her body. It's a frightening mosaic of elders beaten, starved, robbed, and neglected by their children.
In examining the origins of the crisis, the report serves up a generous helping of sociological gobbledygook about "unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse and crowded living conditions."
Makes sense, doesn't it? You're out of work, your apartment is too small, so naturally you'll want to burn your aged mother with cigarettes or beat her with a knotted electrical cord.
The subcommittee's report notes: "Sometimes, after parent and child have been separated emotionally or geographically for lengthy periods, the elderly parent's return is viewed as an intrusion." Also, "many middle-aged family members, finally ready to enjoy time to themselves, are resentful of a frail, dependent elderly parent."
In a society oriented toward self-indulgence, the old, the young, the terminally ill are viewed as intolerable burdens. That which detracts from the quality of our lives is often ignored, lashed out at in anger, obliterated.
Every day, in diverse ways, society tells us that certain lives simply are not worth living. When our culture was governed by a religious ethos, all of life was endowed with an aura of sanctity. No more.
Since 1973, nearly 23 million unborn children have been disposed of by women and men who considered their existence inconvenient.
Each year, at the bequest of their parents, thousands of Down's syndrome babies are deliberately starved to death in hospital nurseries. Courts allow families to remove feeding tubes from comatose patients.
Former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, the Grim Reaper's publicist, makes explicit what others only suggest. In a 1984 speech, Lamm advised the elderly ill that they have "a duty to die and get out of the way."
They are wasting precious resources, the futurist fumed, wealth which "the other society, our kids [need to] build a reasonable life."
The Ten Commandments are grouped into two general divisions: those that relate to man's obligations to God and those which touch upon his relationship to others. The Fifth Commandment, honor thy father and mother, has traditionally been assigned to the former. Parents were viewed as God's agents on earth, the conduit for His instruction.
The society which turns its back on God, which views individual autonomy and personal gratification as the highest purpose of existence, ultimately will devalue the elderly, our link with eternity.
In your declining years, how will you be viewed by your children: as God's surrogate or a parasitical consumer of scarce resources?
Evolution vs. creationism
(21 May 1990)
On the subject of evolution, there is an anecdote about Rabbi Moshe Finestein, the greatest Torah sage of his generation.
On a flight to Tel Aviv, the rabbi was seated next to an Israeli labor leader. Throughout the flight, a girl would periodically approach the rabbi, inquire after his comfort, fluff his pillow, ask if he needed anything.
At last, his curiosity piqued, the union official asked who the child was. "That's my granddaughter," the rabbi replied. The other snorted: "One of my grandchildren wouldn't cross the street for me." "Ah," said the rabbi, "here's the difference. Religious Jews believe that we are all the descendants of Adam. My grandchildren look at me and think: `He's two generations closer to God's unique creation.'
"You are a secularist and an evolutionist. Your grandchildren look at you and think: `Two generations closer to the monkey.'"
Judaism and gays: A faith divided
(25 July 1990)
While the National Association of Reform Rabbis has determined to ordain homosexuals, an Orthodox rabbinic court announced it had excommunicated the gay Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank for "desecrating the name of God and the Jewish people."
Orthodox Judaism bases its stand on the biblical injunction against homosexuality. Reform counters that the Jewish faith has always stressed tolerance and compassion.
Into the fray steps Dennis Prager--author, lecturer, and probably the most perceptive Jewish thinker in America today. Yeshiva-educated, Prager is the co-author of two highly acclaimed books about Judaism and gives more than two hundred lectures a year to largely Jewish audiences. In the latest installment of his Los Angeles-based newsletter, "Ultimate Issues," he confronts the controversy head on.
Prager begins by noting that Judaism alone among religions of the ancient world opposed homosexuality. In Greece and Rome, among the Phoenicians and Canaanites, a man's preference for other men, or boys, was of no more consequence than another's choice of beef over mutton.
Judaism was the first religion to insist that sex be confined to marital relations. The Torah excoriates homosexual acts, calling them an "abomination," a term reserved for the gravest offenses: idolatry, human sacrifice, and ritual prostitution. The Torah warned Jews that if they followed the customs of the Canaanites, sodomy among them, the holy land they were about to inherit would "vomit them out."
Prager observes that Judaism started a moral revolution, carried forward by Christianity, in demanding that sex be sanctified, raised from an animal to a spiritual plane. These Judeo-Christian ethics made civilization possible.
While he believes that homosexuals deserve understanding, Prager firmly opposes the central idea of the gay rights movement: social sanction for homosexuality.
"It is impossible for Judaism to make peace with homosexuality," Prager writes, "because homosexuality denies many of Judaism's most fundamental values. It denies life; it denies God's express desire that men and women cohabit; and it denies the root structure of Judaism's wish for all mankind, the family."
Remember the old joke: God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. No kidding, says Prager. As His reason for forming Eve, the Bible explains: "It is not good for man to be alone." Adds Prager: "Now, presumably, in order to solve the problem of man's aloneness, God could have created another man, or even a community of men.... Man's solitude was not a function of his not being with other people; it was a function of his being without a woman."
Judaism, says Prager, worries about the social consequences of men without women--the unrestrained sexuality, the violence, the live-for-the-moment ethos. Unlike other religions, far from esteeming celibacy, Judaism holds it a sin. In ancient Israel, an unmarried man could not become the high priest. A man without children couldn't serve on the supreme religious tribunal--all a testament to Judaism's belief in the humanizing qualities of marriage and families.
"The union of male and female is not merely some lovely ideal; it is the essence of the Jewish outlook on becoming human. To deny it is tantamount to denying a primary purpose of life," Prager observes.
To the claim that homosexuals are simply following their nature, Prager responds that the preponderance of evidence contradicts this. Even if it is true that certain individuals are thus inclined, so what? Doubtless, some are inclined to seeking sex with children and other perversions. As the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom explained in his paper on AIDS, the bedrock of Jewish moral teaching is on man transcending his nature.
In those societies where homosexuality was condoned (such as Athens, which idealized masculine nudity and wrote homoerotic poetry), the practice flourished. Prager warns: "A society's values, much more than individual tendencies, determine the extent of homosexuality in that society." Hence the peril of gay rights laws, legal sanction for gay marriage, and presenting homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle in school curriculum.
The gays' advance: implacable, deadly
(24 February 1992)
A healthy society is life-affirming. Homosexuality is the metaphysical negation of life. Incapable of reproduction (giving life), it can replenish its numbers only by seduction. Many of the sex acts preferred by homosexuals involve pain, degradation, or a combination of the two--conducive to neither physical nor psychological well-being, one reason there are such high percentages of mental disorders and sexually-transmitted diseases among homosexuals.
Whose morality matters?
(3 June 1991)
How fortunate we are to live in an age in which moral instruction is both plentiful and accessible. Our liberal friends are always on hand to teach us virtue.
A letter from a reader, complaining about a piece I wrote on sexual ethics, made me painfully aware of my own shortcomings in this regard and anxious to remedy the situation. "I recently read yet another of your heartless, narrow-minded articles," the letter from Martin begins. He somehow overlooked "insensitive" and "mean-spirited," choice invectives from the liberal lexicon.
"I really need to ask you a question," my correspondent continued. "Who has made you God? What makes your morality better than other people's morality?" After a few paragraphs of unsolicited psychoanalysis, he closes with: "Compassion and tolerance is (sic) something you need to work on."
Whether or not he realizes it, the writer is asking: What makes the Judeo-Christian ethic superior to modern paganism? What makes the volunteer at a drug rehab center better than a schoolyard pusher? What makes someone who runs a shelter for battered women better than a wife-beater? What makes the morality of those who hid Jews during the Holocaust superior to those who killed them?
If morality is subjective, who's to say one choice is preferable to another? Every vice and depravity to which humanity is heir has its intellectual champions. If you doubt this, read the Marquis de Sade, a leftist thinker who argued passionately for sexual brutality.
What makes my morality better? Well, Martin, old buddy, old pal, when my repressive, Victorian values were in vogue, we didn't have one million teenage pregnancies annually, 60 percent of black children born out-of-wedlock, a third of married respondents to a survey confessing they commit adultery, and half of all girls between fifteen and nineteen sexually active.
We didn't have twenty thousand homicides a year, multi-generational welfare families, or one out of two marriages ending in divorce. A 62 percent increase in the rate of teenage syphilis in a two-year period and half of all high school seniors reporting they've used illicit drugs were beyond our wildest imaginings. As a visit to any prison, morgue, or VD clinic will attest, moral choices have consequences.
But, perhaps I'm wrong. They say everyone has something to teach us, and liberals constantly hold themselves up as models of rectitude. To whom among them should I turn for instruction in compassion?
I'm eager for instruction in decency from the AIDS activists who disrupt church services and throw condoms at priests.
I'm sure I could learn a lot about tolerance from the politically correct bully boys who roam our college campuses, assaulting speakers, shouting down those who dissent from their dogma. Hollywood--which regularly reviles priests as fornicators, ministers as larcenous lechers, and devout Christians as superstitious bigots--can further sensitize me. There's so much to learn from the paragons of the left. Surely they can help to heal my heartless ways. I only fear there may not be time enough in one life to absorb all of their invaluable lessons.
Assimilated Jews, liberal politics: They never learn
(7 September 1992)
Those who are waiting for the Jewish electorate to come to its senses and abandon the reflex liberalism so inimical to its interests will wait in vain. Shrimp will learn to whistle "Hava Nagilah" before American Jews escape the liberal ghetto.
A friend who's active in Jewish-Republican politics is thoroughly frustrated by what he's hearing from the community in the wake of the GOP convention. "When those Republicans in Houston started talking about God, it gave me the willies," a prominent Jewish leader told him.
It takes an understanding of authentic Judaism to appreciate the irony of this remark. The Jewish mission is precisely to talk about God, to make humanity aware of His dominion, to remind us of the necessity of God-based ethics. Absent that, there is no logical reason for the continued existence of the Jewish people.
Largely ignorant of the teachings of their faith, the political imperative of Jewish voters apparently is to promote every ism--feminism, environmentalism, welfarism--save Judaism.
Except for blacks, Jews are the most liberal voting bloc. In 1988, 70 percent of Jews cast their ballots for Michael Dukakis. Jewish support for the Democratic nominee exceeded his vote among the unemployed (65 percent), union households (64 percent), Hispanics (66 percent), and even his fellow Greeks (55 percent).
The only bright spot in this otherwise dreary picture is Orthodox Jewry. The President [Bush] carried Orthodox neighborhoods in New York by anywhere from 72 percent to 86 percent of the vote.
Some people assert that Jewish voting patterns are at variance with the rest of the white electorate because Jews put their values before self-interest.
But there's nothing even remotely Jewish, in a theological sense, about those values. Support for abortion on demand, legitimizing homosexuality, and banishing religion from the public sphere are the very antithesis of normative Judaism, as can be seen in the pronouncements of groups like the Orthodox Union, the Rabbinical Council of America, and Agudath Israel, whose policies reflect the Torah ethos.
Jewish liberalism can only be explained as a matter of blind faith. Liberalism is the secular creed of the non-religious. Jews are perhaps the most secularized community in the nation. Only 11 percent of American Jews go to synagogue once a week, compared to the 42 percent of the general population that attends religious services on a weekly basis. The vast majority of American Jews are Jewishly illiterate, not knowing halacha (Jewish law) from humram (a popular Israeli dish).
For those who've abandoned or--more precisely--never known traditional religion, liberalism frequently fills a void. It is the ersatz faith of 20th-century America, providing its followers with a world view, an explanation for the existence of evil (unbridled capitalism, militarism, sexism, religious fundamentalism), and a vision of salvation (the welfare state).
It gives its adherents a set of guiding principles--in the words of pop psychology, allowing them to feel good about themselves. Its dogma is comprehensive: Thou shalt raise taxes, spend more on the poor, enlarge the public sector, institute quotas for disadvantaged minorities, combat intolerance (religious values), and bow down to the rain forest.
That Jewish voters cling tenaciously to this dogma in the face of massive evidence of its failure--a multigenerational welfare class, declining productivity, staggering deficit, and stifling bureaucracy--proves the commitment is based on faith, not reason. Believers to the end, American Jews may be the last acolytes to tend to the sacred flame of liberalism.
Does Judaism have a mission to humanity?
(Speech to 13th anniversary dinner of Yeshiva Migdal Torah, Chicago, May 21, 1992.)
Let us admit it at the outset: American Jews are a parochial community. When we speak of "Jewish issues," we mean Israel, anti-Semitism, intermarriage, and assimilation. This perspective is perhaps quite natural, given our minority status and unhappy history. To rephrase Rabbi Hillel's famous dictum: If we are not for ourselves, who will be? But we neglect at our peril the second half of the sage's equation: If we are only for ourselves, what are we?
We live in a country where Jews comprise less than 3 percent of the population, a figure which sadly is declining. We inhabit a planet where Jews barely register on demographic scales, nearly lost among 4 billion people.
During most of the Diaspora, while Jews often had a substantial impact on the cultures in which they lived, persecution and the constant struggle for survival caused them to look inward.
In modern times, the pendulum began to swing back. Colonial America was heavily influenced by Jewish concepts: the dignity of the individual, equality before the law, a written legal code, a nation without a monarch governed by the will of Providence. The founding fathers identified closely with the children of Israel, believing they too had come into the wilderness to escape oppression, eventually establishing a new nation dedicated to freedom and justice.
So strong was this attachment that Cotton Mather, the noted Puritan theologian, wanted to make Hebrew the official language of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the colonial era, children often were given names from the Jewish Bible: Moses, Levi, Jeremiah, etc. A verse from our Bible, from Leviticus, was chosen for the inscription on Philadelphia's Liberty Bell (which tolled to announce the adoption of the Declaration of Independence): "Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land, Unto All the Inhabitants Thereof."
Regrettably, in the modern age the message which Jews have brought to humanity too often has been secular in nature (advocacy for utopianism, feminism, sexual liberation, and internationalism) instead of an authentically Jewish message, to the great detriment of Jews and non-Jews alike. As has been noted, not without a sense of irony, those Jews that the world should hear from most, it actually hears from least, and those it should hear from least it hears from far too often.
Today religious Jews confront a world in the process of moral disintegration, a world not so very different from the one which Judaism encountered at its inception. In the modern industrialized nations, gross immorality seems to be the order of the day. Promiscuity, perversion, pornography, violence, and drug abuse all are rampant--Sodom and Gomorrah with cable television and alternative lifestyles.
Legion of latex recruits in school
(5 December 1991)
Condom distribution in public schools has nothing to do with disease control and everything to do with normalizing a sexual ethic. That simple fact is all you need to know about the prophylactic assault on America's school children.
Last week, New York launched its condom campaign in the public schools. In one of life's tantalizing little ironies, the drive kicked off at John Dewey High, named for the pragmatist philosopher who rejected eternal values in favor of secular salvation, to be achieved by educational indoctrination. Somewhere in humanist heaven, Dewey is doing handstands.
Closer to home, Cambridge and Falmouth, Mass., both have condomized their schools. In Boston, a junior high student stated that Mayor Ray Flynn--father of six--was naive in suggesting that condoms promote sexual experimentation. The latest contraceptive crusade is based on the following dubious assumptions:
1) That New York City high school students have no idea of where to obtain condoms; 2) that teens with their $150 hightops can't afford condoms; 3) that children whose vocabulary would make Andrew Dice Clay blush are too shy to purchase them in drugstores. If you believe any of the foregoing, your reality quotient is such that you immediately qualify for an administrative position in the New York public school system.
If our concern is AIDS, kids don't need the latex devices. Assuming neither is an intravenous drug user nor the sex partner of a homosexual, their risk of contracting the contagion approaches zero.
In the current issue of Commentary magazine, Michael Fumento informs us that out of 188,348 diagnosed cases of AIDS in this country, whites who say they acquired the disease through heterosexual contact account for exactly 727--less than one-half of 1 percent. In 1988, the AMA estimated one's chances of getting AIDS from a single encounter with someone not in a high risk category as one in five million. As an AIDS preventive, most kids need condoms about as much as they need to be immunized against the bite of the African tsetse fly.
Which is just as well. Were they at risk, condoms wouldn't help them much. Read the disclaimer on a package of Trojan's finest: "may help reduce the risk of catching or spreading many sexually transmitted diseases."
Condoms leak; condoms slip; condoms break. As a birth control device, they fail anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of the time. For AIDS prevention, they're even less reliable.
While AIDS may not be a problem for them, there are a lot of other nasty infections kids can pick up from the biological experiment being urged upon them. Since 1988, the rate of syphilis in their age group has increased fifteen times. In a viral sea, condoms are a deflated life jacket.
Dr. Theresa Crenshaw of the Presidential AIDS Commission did a straw poll at a conference of over eight hundred sexologists. How many recommend condoms for their clients, she inquired? Most hands went up. "I (then) asked them if they had available the partner of their dreams, and knew that person carried a (venereal) virus, would they have sex, depending on a condom for protection? No one raised their hand."
Now the legion of latex is neither ignorant nor stupid. It knows how the disease is spread and the degrees of risk for various groups. It has read the studies on condom failure rates. In short, its advocacy is philosophical, not medicinal.
And yet, for public consumption, the same people who will strenuously maintain that cigarette advertising sends a powerful message of societal approval to adolescents will declare with a perfectly straight face that there is no moral content to condom distribution in the public schools.
When a school nurse or health teacher bestows a prophylactic on a juvenile, there is an implicit message attached to the act: That we adults know you kids can't control yourselves, so please be careful. That what's really important here (other than philosophical niceties) isn't ethics, but taking the proper precautions.
School days, school days, good old lubricated latex days. By sacrificing morality for safety, we shall have neither.
When educators get away with one outrage, they up the ante. First sex education, then AIDS education, then condom distribution. What next, combination classroom-motel rooms, so safe sex can be properly monitored by concerned educators?
Where's media's spirit, soul?
(25 December 1989)
In disparaging religion, Hollywood believes it is helping to free humanity from emotional repression and intolerance. In reality, it is liberating our less elevated instincts.
In the January issue of its newsletter, the American Family Association published an inventory of prime time smears of Christianity over the past year. In almost every program in which they appeared, clergy and laity were depicted as sinister hypocrites, bigots, or boobs.
Here's a brief sampling of TV's gentle treatment of the followers of Jesus, as described in the AFA's Journal: "Jan. 31: NBC's `In the Heat of the Night' revolved around an adulterous preacher in fictional Sparta, Mississippi... Feb. 17: ABC's `Just the Ten of Us' continued its negative portrayal of the show's Catholic priest, presenting him as a buffoon ... March 19-20: ABC's `The Women of Brewster Place' contained the stereotypical Christian hypocrites, including an adulterous preacher and a Christian woman who is mean and harsh. Sept. 15: CBS's `Unholy Matrimony'... In the movie, the Rev. Samuel Cory ran a chain of bordellos, and also helped his bigamist friend murder his wives... Oct. 9: NBC's `Dream Date' had a Christian woman who watches a healing evangelist on TV and is depicted as a demented nymphomaniac."
No other group is so consistently maligned on prime time television. These defamatory portrayals betray a deep-seated hostility. Perhaps TBS mogul Ted Turner articulated the unspoken values of his fellow network executives when he confided to the TV critic of the Dallas Morning News: "Christianity is a religion for losers."
"I've had a few drinks and a few girlfriends and if that's going to put me in hell, then so be it," says Turner. This is typical of the media mindset, which views the Judeo-Christian ethic as a code for killjoys. It's time to assign the anachronistic creed to the dustbin of history and proceed with our happiness agenda, the entertainment industry seems to be saying.
A cautionary note to my media colleagues: Ridiculing religion may be great fun, but it does not a better society make. The individual released from the very necessary constraints of ethical monotheism doesn't become noble in his savagery, merely savage.
New TV season makes a real killing
(24 August 1989)
Imagine a group of drug dealers making the following appeal:
If you don't like narcotics--if you believe they would have an adverse effect on the health/emotional well-being of you and your family--then, by all means, refrain from using them. But don't try to circumvent the judgment of millions of adult Americans. If enough people simply stop buying addictive substances, drug trafficking will disappear. Let the market decide.
Ridiculous, no? Yet this is precisely the theory advanced by broadcast bigwigs against industry-wide standards to reduce the amount of sex and violence on television.
Earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill exempting the networks, cable companies, and independent operators from certain provisions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to enable them to devise such a voluntary code.
Network executives--who have the motto Mammon ber Alles tattooed over their shriveled hearts--reacted predictably. "The bottom line is consumers vote on our programming several times every night when they hit their remote control button. If the public thinks there is too much sex on television or violence on television, the best way to get it off is not to watch it," says CBS Vice President Martin Franks. This from the very responsible folks who nightly dump metric tons of psychic waste in living rooms across the land. Between the ages of six and eighteen, the average American youth will spend sixteen thousand hours in front of a television set. In that time, he will witness eighteen thousand dramatized murders. He will also become intimately acquainted with the sanguinary exploits of maniacal cops, bloodthirsty detectives, killer commandos, and sadistic criminals. His daily viewing fare will include killings, car crashes, knifings, rapes, fist fights, and torture.
And it's getting worse, not better. "Freddy's Nightmares," based on the Freddy Krueger character, which premiered last season, makes "Miami Vice" seem genteel by comparison. There are scenes with butcher knives, blood spurting everywhere, and severed body parts where you'd least expect them.
Dr. Leonard D. Efron, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who studied the habits of more than four hundred viewers for twenty-two years, observes: "There can no longer be any doubt that heavy exposure to televised violence is one of the causes of aggressive behavior, crime and violence in society."
Adds Arnold Kahn of the American Psychological Association: "The debate over the effects of violence on television is like the debate over cigarette smoking and cancer."
There may not be a direct casual relationship. A six-year-old doesn't watch an episode of "Friday the 13th," grab a chain saw, and slice up Sis. Rather, the impact is cumulative. Weak personalities can be inclined toward violence by a regular blood-and-guts diet. Like the hero of action films, he comes to perceive the answer to all of life's little problems in a large caliber weapon.
Normal people also are affected. Televised slaughter is desensitizing. Watch enough of it, and you can't help but become less responsive to the very real suffering around you. Tens of thousands of hours viewing spectacles of death, with breaks for lite beer commercials, does not heighten feelings of compassion.
As a writer to the Wall Street Journal points out, the inanity of the switch-the-channel argument may be readily perceived by applying this rationale to other forms of pollution: Water pollution: Just don't drink the water. Air pollution: Don't breath the air. Trash in the streets: Don't use the streets.
Even assuming the channel-change argument is applicable to mature adults, many viewers are neither. Between the hours of ten and eleven, when this ocean of gore reaches its high-water mark, a quarter of all grade school children are still tuned in.
Like drug kingpins, TV executives are making a killing (literally as well as figuratively) marketing poison. It matters not into whose veins it flows, or its corrosive impact on our society, as long as the blood money keeps rolling in.
Hollywood sullies Jesus as symbol
(28 July 1988)
All that stands between America and rampant censorship, religious intolerance, nay, theocracy itself, is the vigilance of Universal Pictures. At least that is the implication of an ad the studio ran in the New York Times on July 21.
The advertisement was in response to critics of The Last Temptation of Christ, scheduled for release this fall. The blasphemous flick portrays Jesus as a paranoid, self-doubting, obsessive, guilt-ridden individual. Mary Magdalene, Jesus' ex-girlfriend in the film, is the object of His incessant fantasies. On the cross, there is a hallucinatory sequence in which He imagines that He's having intercourse with her, which--needless to say--is graphically portrayed.
It's hardly surprising that Last Temptation depicts Christ as a psychotic degenerate. With Martin (Taxi Driver) Scorsese directing the movie, it's a wonder Jesus isn't shown mowing down the Temple moneychangers with an uzi.
Yet Christian leaders are understandably perturbed by the vile production. The Rev. Lloyd Ogilvie, of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, calls it: "the most serious misuse of film craft in the history of filmmaking." Bill Bright, of the Campus Crusade for Christ, offered to reimburse the studio for the cost of production, if it would cancel the film.
It was to this proposal that Universal responded. "While we understand the deep feelings and convictions which have prompted this offer, we believe that to accept it would threaten the fundamental freedoms of religion and expression promised to all Americans under our Constitution," the studio self-righteously remarked.
After lecturing us on the dangers of "monolithic authorities" dictating "artistic expression and religious beliefs," the ad piously proclaimed that in America "no sect or coalition has the power to set boundaries around each person's freedom to explore religious and philosophical questions, whether through speech, books or film." Take that, you Bible-banging, book-burning bigots!
Does freedom of expression require that every concept be explored; must every idea, no matter how bizarre and abhorrent, be articulated? Not merely expressed, but turned into a silver screen extravaganza? Is it essential to the furtherance of religious inquiry that Hollywood concoct a sex life for Jesus?
Reasonable limits, self-imposed, are not the same as censorship. The boundaries should be set by decency and sensitivity to the deeply held sentiments of our neighbors.
Contrast the salacious slander of Last Temptation to the respectful treatment of Islam in Muhammad, Messenger of God, produced a decade ago. In this dramatization, the prophet isn't shown on the screen or his voice heard by the audience, for fear of affronting devout Moslems. Though Islam does not consider Muhammad God incarnate, still this acute deference was afforded its founder.
Christians are the only group Hollywood can offend with impunity, the only creed it actually goes out of its way to insult. Clerics, from fundamentalist preachers to Catholic monks, are routinely represented as hypocrites, hucksters, sadists, and lechers. The tenets of Christianity are regularly held up to ridicule.
But why would Universal go to such a provocative extreme? Quite simply, because the entertainment industry has managed to degrade every other value: love, the family, patriotism. After gut-wrenching violence, simulated sex, and the display of every perversion catalogued in the annals of degeneracy, what is left for shock value?
Movie audiences have grown jaded with films which graphically present incest, fornication, sadomasochism, mutilation, and slaughter for their titillative effect. Hollywood must constantly seek new forms of exhibitionism, to stimulate box office sales.
In this competition of the sensational, Universal hit on a sure-fire winner: portray the man worshiped by 90 percent of the American people as a Judean Jimmy Swaggart. It isn't enough that Universal commit sacrilege in the pursuit of profits. While surrendering to the sweet temptation of Mammon, the studio insists on being congratulated for its fancied defense of the First Amendment.
Why stop at abusing Christians? Now that Hollywood has determined to enter the business of debunking sacred symbols, every faith can become a target for exploitation. Why not cinematic offerings showing Moses as a maniac, Muhammad as pedophile, Buddha doing drugs, and Krishna selling vinyl siding or engaging in some other loathsome activity?
As a Jew, I doubt I can be accused of sectarian bias in the controversy at hand. I do not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. I do believe in respecting the faith of those who regard Him as their savior. Calls for Hollywood to exercise responsibility and a bit of charity are not the equivalent of censorship.
The music that debases
(28 August 1985)
Parents are right to remonstrate against sleaze marketed as entertainment. Songs promoting drug abuse, promiscuity, perversion, suicide, rape, and murder saturate the airwaves.
This filth is purveyed by some of America's most popular recording artists. "Sugar Walls'" (Sheena Easton) describes the pleasures of orgasm in graphic detail. "Eat Me Alive" (Judas Priest) concerns forced oral sex at gunpoint. "Darling Nikki" (Prince) is a girl who performs an autoerotic act with a magazine. "Murder by the Numbers" (Rolling Stones) advocates the killing of family members.
Consider the inherent sadism of the punk rock ditties: "Let Me Put My Love Into You" ("Don't you struggle. Don't you fight; Let me put my love into you. Let me cut your cake with my knife.") and "Whiplash" ("We are here to maim and kill 'cause this is what we choose.")
Are they just kidding? Is it all a put-on? Can an eleven-year-old tell the difference?
Look at the dead eyes staring out at you from album covers. Note that many rock legends (Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix) died of drug overdoses, more are addicts. Recall that punk rocker Sid Vicious murdered his girlfriend before destroying himself.
Those leading the assault on porn-rock maintain they like rock music per se. It's only the most bizarre manifestation of the genre they find objectionable.
I, on the other hand, have always loathed rock-and-roll. Some of it is barely acceptable (the Beatles song played by a symphony orchestra), tunes to listen to when you can't find a classical station on the car radio.
For the most part, rock bears only a passing resemblance to real music. It is blaring, discordant noise--the savage beat of the jungle, primal man shrieking his despair at a universe beyond his comprehension. Rock's chaotic sound naturally lends itself to the expression of primitive emotions.
Rock is a symptom of a far deeper malady afflicting western civilization. Musicians who can barely spell the word philosophy would be incredulous on hearing that their songs reflect the sentiments of philosophers long dead.
Their lyrics are a call to spiritual anarchy, a rhythmic advertisement for nihilism. They proclaim the futility of existence--a life without purpose where salvation is found only in unrestrained sexual indulgence, rebellion, and violence.
The pseudo-sophisticates who claim no one was ever hurt by an idea must also believe no one was ever helped by the same. In fact, ideas can be deadlier than bullets.
Rock lyrics do indeed have an effect on listeners, particularly those lacking the discernment which comes with maturity. "You can't use a rhetoric for long without assuming the virtues and vices that lie behind it," says poet Tom Landess.
The words of popular songs, like other forms of artistic expression, can elevate or debase. They can clothe man in dignity and prompt him to aspire to nobility, or condone the expression of his basest passions. As rock increasingly fills the latter role, it should be shunned by civilized people.
Planned Parenthood's hidden agenda
(2 March 1989)
You'd think the Planned Parenthood Federation of America would blush to speak of the hidden agenda of its adversaries. But then, candor and consistency have never been its strong suit.
The cavaliers of contraception have launched another media blitz, aimed at selling their program to an administration whose existence they ardently opposed in the last election, The campaign's theme is: "A Kinder, Gentler America Begins With Family Planning" (but not for a million and a half unborn children a year, for whom Planned Parenthood's brand of kindness in the pursuit of family limitation consists of a curette or suction device).
Each ad is more illogical and offensive than the last. But one in particular caught my eye. In a national news magazine, the group ran a full-page polemic featuring a photo of a maniacal-looking gent, screaming into a loudspeaker: "I don't think Christians should use birth control."
The ad copy alerts us: "Leading `pro-lifers' are usually careful to avoid condemning birth control in public. Yet they lobby behind the scenes, and have already succeeded in shaping federal policy and limiting family planning assistance."
In alleging covert causes, Planned Parenthood is treading on perilously thin ice. From its founding, the organization has always had its own clandestine platform discreetly shielded from the general public behind a facade of mom, apple pie, and the intrauterine device--a program including radical feminism, sexual liberation, and population control.
Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood's founder and patron saint (referred to by Faye Wattleton, current national president, as "our courageous and outrageous leader"), was far more open than her successors. An advocate of what her era termed "free love," Sanger denounced monogamous marriage as a "degenerate institution."
She viewed motherhood as the enslavement of her gender. Birth control and abortion were intended to liberate womankind from this biological servitude. In 1914, in her periodical Woman Rebel, Sanger set forth her feminist credo--a woman's right "to live, to love, to be lazy, to be an unwed mother, to create, to destroy."
Initially a socialist ("I look forward to seeing humanity free someday of the tyranny of Christianity no less than capitalism"), late in life Sanger became a convert to racial eugenics. In this period, her favorite slogans were "More children for the fit, fewer for the unfit" (the latter encompassing all non-Nordics) and "Birth control to breed a race of thoroughbreds." The April 1933 issue of Sanger's Birth Control Review, devoted entirely to eugenics, included an article by Dr. Ernst Rudin, a leader of Hitler's forced sterilization/euthanasia program.
While sex is good, an end in itself, in what Planned Parenthood perceives to be a critically overcrowded, ecologically imbalanced world, children are viewed as a contagion. Sexologist Mary Calderone, former PPFA medical director, bemoans the fact that: "We are still unable to put babies in the class of a dangerous epidemic, even though that is the exact truth."
In 1969, then PPFA President Alan Guttmacher foresaw the "possibility that eventually coercion may become necessary" in the population control crusade, particularly "in areas where the pressure is greatest, possibly in India and China." Not surprisingly, the regulators of reproduction have nothing but praise for the People's Republic, whose kindness includes forced third-trimester abortions.
Like the mother of their movement, Planned Parenthood views abortion as the key to realizing the feminist millennium. Women are disadvantaged from birth by the ability to conceive. Only by offering free and unrestricted access to abortion can "real equality between the sexes" be achieved. A revealing 1985 PPFA ad in Ms. Magazine has a woman insisting "the right to choose abortion makes all my other rights possible."
As it pockets our tax dollars and lectures us about benevolence and compassion, this is the covert course charted by Planned Parenthood. I can hardly wait for the first ad explaining this agenda to the American people.
Parents in the dark on abortion
(11 December 1989)
Despite the claims of its proponents, abortion isn't the medical equivalent of having your hair styled. A Canadian study of 84,000 teen-aged abortions disclosed a high rate of complications: laceration of the cervix (12 percent), hemorrhage (8 percent), infections (7 percent), and a perforated uterus (4 percent).
In a letter to U.S. Sen. Gordon Humphrey, Sue Liljenbert, who had an abortion at seventeen, related the following: "When I questioned the development of my baby, I was told (by a clinic staffer) that it wasn't a baby yet, and that it looked like a tadpole.... I had no scientific facts that day, only biased opinions. I was not told what abortion itself could do to me in the years to come, only that it was `safe and simple.'
"I was not told that I would abuse myself with alcohol, try to kill myself, develop an eating disorder, and have terrible dreams. Worst of all, I was not told that I might never have another child. It has been 14 years since my `safe and simple' abortion, and I will never be able to have another child."
Therefore choose life: Judaism and abortion
(Speech delivered at Dartmouth College, 12 November 1991)
In many ways, the Torah Jew in contemporary America confronts a society not so very different from the pagan world his ancestors challenged and ultimately conquered: a world where violence and brutality are exalted in the entertainment media, then reenacted in our streets; a world of sensual license, where people vie with each other to plumb the depths of depravity; a culture in which the world-weary numb their senses with drugs, where excrement is celebrated as art. Feticide--the wanton destruction of 1.5 million unborn children a year in this country--could well be considered the modern equivalent of pagan sacrifice, a burnt offering to the voracious gods of modernity: radical autonomy, gender sameness, sexual liberation. Overturning these idols is a task worthy of a modern Elijah.
Too many rights will kill us
(22 August 1991)
An obsession with individual rights is destroying our society.
To voice concern about the current rights proliferation is not to deny the importance of fundamental freedoms. Most of us have ancestors who hailed from lands where common people were chattels of the elite. My maternal grandfather came from a country where he couldn't vote, own land, obtain an education, or pursue most vocations. He was, however, afforded the delightful opportunity of serving in the army for twenty-five years, a privilege he declined by emigrating.
People who come from that background don't have to be told that without certain liberties, life is barely worth living. In the twentieth century, examples abound of regimes that have reduced their subjects to the status of domesticated animals, where daily existence is a gray grind. In the People's Detention Center of China, it is now a crime to wear T-shirts with pessimistic slogans.
But an excess of any good thing (food, water, even air) can kill you. The manufacture of spurious rights, of rights severed from responsibilities, is tearing our nation apart. Rights are goodies doled out by our mother state. Rights have become entitlements, the enforcement of which benefits one group as it bloodies another.
* NEA-subsidized artists demand their right to shock and offend, at our expense--a collect, obscene phone call.
* The networks have a right to pollute the airwaves with obscenity and sexual suggestiveness, promote promiscuity, and attack religion. Hollywood has a right to produce lurid fare that causes riots in theaters and feeds sick psyches. Syncopated savages have a right to set their fantasies to music, to croon their gentle invitations to date rape at concerts.
* Doctors with AIDS have a right to privacy, even at the cost of patients' lives. Addicts have a right to "treatment on demand."
Like bawling brats, we petulantly demand our imagined rights, not from any disinterested commitment to principle but because we believe life owes us (plenty): "I gotta right to a job!" "I gotta right to have my sexual preference validated!" "I gotta right to control my body, or to have the consequences of a lack of self-control disposed of conveniently."
Absent a delicate balance--rights and duties, freedom and order--the social fabric begins to unravel. The rights explosion of the past three decades has taken us on a rapid descent to a culture without civility, decency, or even that degree of discipline necessary to maintain an advanced industrial civilization. Our cities are cesspools, our urban schools terrorist training camps, our legislatures brothels where rights are sold to the highest electoral bidder.
Current rights inflation could eventually lead to the demise of liberty. People can't exist indefinitely in a state of near anarchy. Democracy in the streets--spiraling violence, group warfare with the property of the toiling classes as spoils--ends with the advent of jackbooted legions. The license of Weimar Germany was midwife to the repression of the Third Reich.
America loses its work ethic
(6 April 1992)
America's industrial decline is no laughing matter. My real objection to the Buy American frenzy is that it distracts us from the underlying problem. That U.S. products have fallen out of favor with both foreigners and Americans is symptomatic of the virtual disappearance of the work ethic in this country.
To understand these disastrous trends, you could do no better than to read a slender volume by Chuck Colson and Jack Eckerd: Why America Doesn't Work.
The authors trace the productivity slump to the demise of the work ethic, itself a result of a loss of faith. The men who built this country (who settled our shores, farmed the land, worked the factories and mines), no less than those who built the great cathedrals of Europe, believed they were doing God's work.
In the beginning, God created, Genesis tells us. In imitation of Him, man is called upon to work and by his effort complete creation. Work gets favorable mention in the Ten Commandments ("Six days shall you labor and do all of your work.... ") "It is good and proper for a man ... to accept his lot and be happy in his work--this is a gift of God," Ecclesiastes instructs.
This Jewish doctrine was a radical departure from the pagan perspective. The Greeks and Romans viewed work as contemptible, demeaning to the man of culture and refinement, fit only for slaves. By ennobling work, first Judaism and then Christianity taught people to value what they did more than their social status.
Our founding fathers were imbued with this spirit, the authors note. "Choose that employment or calling in which you may be most serviceable to God," exhorted Puritan writer Richard Baxter. "Choose not that in which you may be most rich or honorable ... but that in which you may do most good...." Or, as my immigrant grandfather, a tailor, used to say: A man should never be ashamed of honest work, however menial.
Under the skeptical, modernist impulse, we lost the work ethic early in this century. Like a plant whose roots are severed, America continued to thrive for a few decades longer, carried along by momentum. (We knew work was good, but forgot why.)
Now we have two extremes: the relentless pursuit of leisure and the workaholic--work for its own sake. Among collars of all colors (white and blue alike), cynicism is pandemic: what's-in-it-for-me replacing loyalty to employer, pride in workmanship, and application as an expression of transcendent values. In a recent survey, only 16 percent said they were doing the best job they could.
Instead of buying American, we'd be better off buying back into the value system that made American goods worth buying in the first place.
Education "hand writeing" is on the wall
(22 February 1990)
In 1986, the National Assessment of Educational Progress released the results of an exhaustive survey of the writing ability of 55,000 students in the fourth, eighth, and eleventh grades. Among the findings: Fewer than one in four college-bound students writes well enough to succeed at higher education or future employment.
Of the eleventh-graders, less than 25 percent could handle the simplest analytical writing assignment. Fewer than a third could expound their ideas on paper.
Despite a massive increase in education spending during the Reagan years, the situation has not improved in the interim. Last year, Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos pronounced the nation's school system stagnant. Boston University President John Silber, currently on leave while campaigning for governor of Massachusetts, said it all: "What a high-school diploma tells you is that a student was institutionalized for about 12 years. You wouldn't know whether the student had been in a prison colony, a reform school or a place for mental defectives."
Much the same could be said of college education. In his book The Irrelevant English Teacher, J. Mitchell Morse reproduces the writing samples of college English majors. (Please welcome America's future educators.) "She was pure as a vestigial virgin," wrote one scholar who had obviously confused anatomy with theology, while another disclosed that "Chaucer was the greatest middle-aged writer." Yet another urged: "In are (sic) times the responcable (sic) writers must read the hand writeing (sic) on the wall so he can asses (sic) the human conditions." The "hand writeing" is indeed on the wall, in depressingly large script.
Today colleges are too busy indoctrinating, raising social consciousness and eliminating Western bias in curriculums to bother with such mundane matters as teaching their charges to express themselves coherently in their mother tongue.
Public education is hopeless. As with other socialist institutions, reform is impossible. A society with even a minimal survival instinct would be moving as quickly as possible toward private schooling. Instead, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives alike pledge their allegiance to our illiteracy factories.
Cultures: They're not created equal
(16 April 1992)
The compulsion to expropriate other people's cultures is just one aspect of the assault on Western civilization which goes by the misleading moniker multiculturalism.
There's nothing wrong with studying other cultures. But is it too much to ask that children first learn about their own, to give them a basis for comparison? When the National Endowment for the Humanities tells us that 68 percent of high school seniors don't know when the Civil War occurred, two-thirds can't identify the Reformation and Magna Carta, and 64 percent can't name the author of The Canterbury Tales, clearly our schools are failing their primary function.
The mummery of multicultural shamans notwithstanding, we do have a common culture in this country, based on shared ideas developed first in the civilizations of antiquity, later matured in Western Europe.
Our political traditions come from English common law, not the Iroquois federation. Our ethics come from the Bible, not the sayings of Confucius. Our aesthetic ideals are derived from many sources, including Shakespeare, Renaissance painters, and classical music, not the chants of Ibo tribesmen and aboriginal cave drawings.
That certain blacks, Hispanics, Orientals, and Native Americans feel neglected is unfortunate but irrelevant. In a strictly biological sense, it isn't my culture either. My great-grandparents weren't reading Chaucer and listening to Mozart in Czarist Russia.
The unstated premise of multiculturalism is cultural equality or relativism. The very notion that one culture is superior to another is anathema to adherents of the creed.
Well, beat me with the collected writings of Prof. Leonard Jeffries (the melanin-obsessed academic) and call me a malignant monoculturalist, but I do not for a minute believe that Mandarin society, which crippled women by binding their feet, or Indian society, which burned widows on their husbands' funeral pyres, or Aztec society, which sacrificed virgins by the tens of thousands, are the equivalent of a culture that invented the concept of individual rights, launched the industrial revolution, and doubled the human life span within two centuries.
Cultural relativism is the alter ego of moral relativism. Its implicit message: "You may think that X is wrong, but that's only your white, patriarchal, Judeo-Christian, heterosexist tradition talking. Look at all the cultures that condone X."
Get set for the ultimate in multiculturalism. In December, the `Book-of-the-Month-Club News' offered Aztecs, by British scholar Inga Clendinnen. The author helps us to understand the lives of these `extraordinary people,' who engaged in such quaint customs as tearing the hearts out of sacrificial victims, by putting their rites in the proper cultural perspective.
The `News' informs us: "Clendinnen's achievement is that, in explaining how human sacrifice fit into the everyday Aztec worldview, she makes the violent pageants and rituals not just understandable, but also moving and even beautiful." But of course, indigenous cultures are always moving and beautiful, especially those displaced by genocidal cultural imperialists like Columbus and his successors.
Ending human sacrifice was Western (Judeo-Christian) civilization's first great achievement. Multiculturalism is literally turning the moral clock back 3,600 years. Watch out. There may be an Aztec priest in your future.
Glossary for Young Readers
Following are definitions of some of the more difficult words and terms used in this Christian Digest, in alphabetical order. Meanings given are for the use of the word in the text, and do not include every meaning of the word. Please consult your dictionary for words not listed. (Definitions condensed from the World Book, American Heritage Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary.)
acolyte: (n) an assistant; attendant; follower.
aesthetic: (adj.) having to do with the beautiful, as distinguished from the useful or scientific.
agnostic: (n) a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known about the existence of God or about things outside of human experience; skeptic, unbeliever.
anachronistic: (adj.) outdated; belonging to another period of history.
anathema: (n) a person or thing that is utterly detested or condemned.
animated: (v) made lively or vigorous; inspired or encouraged.
antidote: (n) a medicine that counteracts the harmful effect of a poison; remedy.
antiquity: (n) times long ago; early ages of history.
antithesis: (n) the direct opposite.
apace: (adv.) very soon; swiftly; quickly; fast.
apologist: (n) a person who defends an idea, belief, religion, or other doctrine, in speech or writing.
assiduously: (adv.) working hard and steadily; diligently.
auspices: (n) helpful influence; approval or support; patronage.
autonomy: (n) independence; self-government.
Ayatollah: (n) the title of a Shiite Moslem religious teacher of the highest rank, especially in Iran; title of Khomeini.
bemused: (adj.) confused; bewildered.
bill of particulars: a detailed statement.
biological: (adj.) of plant and animal life; connected with the processes of life.
bordello: (n) a house of prostitution; brothel.
bravado: (n) a great show of boldness without much real courage or real desire to fight.
candor: (n) speaking openly what one really thinks; honesty in giving one's view or opinion; sincerity.
cavalier: (n) a horseman, mounted soldier, or knight.
cavort: (v) to prance about; jump around.
censure: (v) to express disapproval of; find fault with; blame; criticize.
chattel: (n) a slave or bondman.
circumvent: (v) to get the better of or defeat by trickery; to go around.
cite: (v) to quote (a passage, book, or author), especially as an authority.
Clay, Andrew Dice: American comedian known for his extremely foul language.
coercion: (n) the use of force; compulsion; constraint.
comatose: (adj.) in a stupor or coma; unconscious.
commemoration: (n) a service or celebration in memory of some person or event.
compendium: (n) a short summary of the main points or ideas of a larger work; condensation.
comport: (v) fit; to agree (with).
comprise: (v) to make up; compose; constitute.
conduit: (n) a means by which something is transmitted.
conglomerate: (n) a large corporation that grows mainly through purchase of, or merger with, firms in unrelated fields.
conservative: (adj.) inclined to keep things as they are or were in the past; opposed to change, especially any change in traditions. (n) a person who is opposed to change, either by nature or on principle.
crche: (n) model of the Christ child in the manger, with attending figures, often displayed at Christmas.
creed: (n) statement of faith, belief, or opinion.
Crusades: (n) any one of the Christian military expeditions between the years 1096 and 1291 to recover Palestine from the Moslems.
curette: (n) a small, scoop-shaped surgical instrument used to scrape the walls of a body cavity, often used in abortions.
cynicism: (n) doubting the sincerity and goodness of human motives and showing this doubt by sneers and sarcasm.
debunk: (v) to expose or ridicule; prove incorrect or false.
deference: (n) great respect; yielding to the judgment, opinion, or wishes of another; courteous submission.
degenerate: (n) person having an evil or unwholesome character.
deity: (n) a god or goddess; divine being.
demise: (n) death; decease.
depravity: (n) wickedness; viciousness; corruption.
detriment: (n) loss, damage, or injury; harm; hurt.
devoid: (adj.) entirely without or wanting; empty; lacking.
Diaspora: (n) the scattering of the Jews after their captivity in Babylon.
dictum: (n) pronouncement; a maxim; saying.
disaffected: (adj.) unfriendly, disloyal, or discontented.
disparaging: (v) belittling; saying something is of less value or importance than it actually is.
dissolution: (n) breaking up; ruin; destruction.
dogma: (n) a belief taught or held as true, especially by authority of a church; doctrine.
Donahue, Phil: television talk show host in the U.S. famous for his practice of "tabloid television": shows which focus on unusual or bizarre aspects of human behaviour.
elite: (n) the choice or distinguished part; those thought of as the best people.
endowment: (n) a gift; grant.
eon: (n) a very long period of time; many thousands of years.
Equal Access Act: U.S. federal law which requires public schools receiving federal money to allow student religious groups to meet and worship if other student clubs are permitted at school.
eradicate: (v) to get rid of entirely; destroy completely.
ersatz: (adj.) substitute or imitation, especially something inferior.
ethical: (adj.) having to do with standards of right and wrong; of morals; morally right.
ethos: (n) the characteristic spirit; the distinctive features of a particular culture or group.
eugenics: (n) the science of improving the human race by controlled reproduction.
euthanasia: (n) a painless killing, especially to end a painful and incurable disease; mercy killing.
excise: (v) to remove by cutting.
excoriate: (v) to denounce violently; harshly criticize.
expropriate: (v) to take something out of the owner's possession, especially for public use.
expunge: (v) to remove completely; blot out; erase.
extracurricular: (adj.) outside the regular course of study; of or having to do with activities such as sports, dramatics, or clubs.
faculty: (n) the teachers of a school, college, or university; the members of a learned profession (for example, the medical faculty).
fallible: (adj.) liable to be wrong, inaccurate, or false; unreliable.
flamb: (v) to pour liquor over and set aflame.
fulmination: (n) a violent denunciation; strong criticism.
functional illiterate: a person having the basic skills of reading or writing, but little ability in using those skills.
gender: (n) the sex (male or female) of a creature.
genre: (n) type or style, especially in art, literature or music.
genteel: (adj.) belonging or suited to polite society.
Greeley, Andrew: Catholic sociologist and novelist who has often written critically about the Catholic church and religion in 24 best-selling novels and more than 100 books and articles.
Hava Nagilah: the traditional Jewish song of rejoicing.
hedonism: (n) the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the highest good; belief in or practice of living only for pleasure.
hegemony: (n) political domination, especially the leadership or domination of one state over others in a group.
homicide: (n) a killing of one human being by another.
homoerotic: (adj.) homosexual.
huckster: (n) one who uses aggressive, showy, and sometimes devious methods to promote a product.
humanist: (n) one interested in the study of human nature or affairs, as opposed to affairs of a religious nature.
ideology: (n) a set of doctrines or body of opinions that people have.
illicit: (adj.) not permitted by law; forbidden; illegal.
imperative: (n) an instinct that compels a certain behavior.
imperceptibly: (adv.) very slightly; gradually.
inanity: (n) lack of sense; silliness.
incessant: (adj.) never stopping; continual.
indictment: (n) a formal written accusation.
infanticide: (n) the killing of a baby.
inimical: (adj.) unfavorable; harmful.
injunction: (n) a command; order.
Inquisition: (n) an effort by the Roman Catholic church in the Middle Ages to seek out and punish those who opposed church teachings.
internationalism: (n) the principle of international cooperation for the good of all nations.
invective: (n) a violent attack in words; abusive speech.
irony: (n) an event or outcome which is the opposite of what would naturally be expected.
Iroquois: (n) member of a powerful group of American Indian tribes, formerly living mostly in what is now Quebec, Ontario, and New York State.
Jeffries, Leonard: Controversial chairman of black studies at City University of New York who has often criticized whites and Jews.
Judeo-Christian: (adj.) common to Judaism and Christianity.
jurisdiction: (n) the territory over which authority extends.
killjoy: (n) a person who spoils other people's fun.
larcenous: (adj.) inclined to robbery or theft.
latex: (n) rubber or plastic compound, used in making condoms.
lecher: (n) a man given to gross indulgence of sexual lust.
Lewis, C.S. (1898-1963): a British author who wrote more than 30 books. After years of experiencing religious doubt, he converted to Christianity in the 1930s. Lewis then became a leading defender of Christianity.
lexicon: (n) the vocabulary of a language or of a certain subject, group, or activity.
license: (n) too much liberty; lack of proper control; abuse of liberty.
lifeboat ethics: principles of conduct which asserts that in a situation of peril priorities should be assigned according to urgency or expediency.
ludicrous: (adj.) absurd but amusing; ridiculous.
lunacy: (n) insanity, formerly supposed to be brought about by the changes of the moon (luna).
magnanimous: (adj.) noble in soul or mind; generous in forgiving; free from mean or petty feelings or acts.
masochistic: (adj.) receiving pleasure from being dominated or physically abused.
melanin: (n) dark pigment; black skin color.
mentor: (n) a wise and trusted adviser; role model.
metaphysical: (adj.) philosophical; theoretical.
modernist: (n) a person who interprets religious teachings in a modern (often unbelieving) way.
molecule: (n) the smallest particle into which a substance can be divided without chemical change. A molecule of an element consists of one or more atoms that are alike.
moniker: (n) nickname.
monogamous: (adj.) pertaining to the practice or condition of being married to only one person at a time.
monolithic: (adj.) massively uniform, as when individuals are absolutely subject to the state.
monotheism: (n) the belief that there is only one God; worship of one God.
moral: (adj.) good in character or conduct; right or just according to civilized standards of right and wrong.
moral relativism: (n) the philosophical doctrine which maintains that what is right or wrong depends on the particular culture concerned. What is right in one society may be wrong in another, this view argues, and so no basic standards exist by which a culture may be judged right or wrong.
multiculturalism: (n) the study or blending of many distinct cultures.
mummery: (n) any useless or silly show or ceremony.
municipal ordinance: (n) a rule or law adopted and enforced by a city or other local authority; decree.
negation: (n) the act or fact of denying; denial.
nihilism: (n) entire rejection of established beliefs, as in religion, morals, government, and laws.
Nordic: (adj.) characteristic of the Germanic people of Northern Europe. Nordic people are typically tall and have blond hair and blue eyes.
normative: (adj.) relating to a norm or standard.
notion: (n) an opinion; view; belief.
obliterate: (v) to remove all traces of; wipe or blot out; destroy.
omnipotent: (adj.) having all power; almighty.
Oprah Winfrey Show: television talk show seen around the United States and in 64 countries, usually featuring unusual guests or themes.
paean: (n) a song of praise, thanksgiving, joy, or triumph.
pagan: (n) a person who is not a Christian, Jew, or Moslem; person who worships many gods or no god; heathen. (adj.) having something to do with pagans; not religious.
pandemic: (adj.) universal; spread over an entire country or continent, or the whole world.
paragon: (n) a model of excellence or perfection.
parasitic: (adj.) like a parasite; living on others.
pathology: (n) the unhealthy conditions and processes caused by a disease.
paucity: (n) a small amount; scarcity; lack.
Peale, Norman Vincent (1898-1993): American Episcopal clergyman who won fame for his writings and his radio and television programs. His most famous book was The Power of Positive Thinking.
pernicious: (adj.) that which will destroy or ruin; causing great harm or damage; wicked or villainous.
petulantly: (adv.) in an irritable or ill-tempered manner.
piqued: (v) aroused; stirred up.
plaintive: (adj.) expressive of sorrow; mournful; sad.
plebiscite: (n) a direct vote by the qualified voters of a country or state on some important question.
pluralistic: (adj.) having to do with a condition in which racial groups and minority groups are able to maintain their identities in a society without conflicting with the dominant culture.
polemic: (n) a controversial argument, especially one attacking a specific opinion or doctrine.
polytheistic: (adj.) characterized by belief in or worship of more than one god.
post-viability: (adj.) a time after which a being is able to remain alive, maintain its existence.
posthaste: (adv.) very speedily; in great haste.
pragmatist: (n) one who believes in a practical way of assessing situations or solving problems, working only with things that can be seen, tested, and measured.
proclivity: (n) tendency; inclination; bias, bent.
procreate: (v) to produce offspring; reproduce.
promulgated: (v) officially announced.
propagation: (n) the act or process of making more widely known; spreading.
prophylactic: (adj.) pertaining to a condom; protecting against disease.
proponent: (n) a person who supports something; advocate; supporter.
pseudo: (adj.) false; sham; pretended; having only the appearance of.
psyche: (n) the human soul or spirit.
public assistance: government payments under social security to needy persons.
public sector: (n) belonging to the people as a whole; public affairs.
purveyed: (v) supplied; provided; furnished.
receivership: (n) condition in which a person has been appointed by law to take charge of the property of others, usually to sell it off because of bankruptcy.
rectitude: (n) upright conduct or character; honesty; righteousness.
reflex: (n) an involuntary action. Sneezing and shivering are reflexes.
relativism: (n) see moral relativism.
resignation: (n) patient acceptance; quiet submission.
resonate: (v) to respond, oscillate or vibrate with the same frequency as the source.
rhetoric: (n) the language used, especially in persuading others.
rout: (v) to put to flight in disorder; to defeat completely.
sadist: (n) one who delights in inflicting pain on others.
sadomasochism: (n) a form of perversion marked by a love for both receiving and inflicting pain.
sage: (n) a very wise man.
sanguinary: (adj.) with much blood or bloodshed; bloody.
sectarian: (adj.) denominational; characteristic of only one sect or group.
secular: (adj.) connected with the world and its affairs; of things not religious or sacred; worldly.
segregate: (v) to separate from others; set apart; isolate.
semi-literate: (adj.) partly literate or able to read; semi-educated.
sensory: (adj.) having to do with sensation or the senses. The eyes and ears are sensory organs.
shaman: (n) a priest with supposed magic powers, such as over diseases or evil spirits.
Sheen, Fulton (1895-1979): Bishop who became one of the best-known spokesmen for the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church in the world. His more than 50 books, along with his articles, brought Catholic doctrine to millions of people around the world.
shopworn: (adj.) old and worn; threadbare.
sic: (adv.) (Latin.) so; thus. Often placed after a grammatical error in someone's writing which is quoted to indicate the error existed in the original writing.
skepticism: (n) doubt or disbelief with regard to religion.
societal: (adj.) of or having to do with society.
spurious: (adj.) not genuine or authentic, counterfeit.
subsidize: (v) to aid or assist with a grant of money.
sully: (v) to soil, stain, or tarnish.
superfluous: (adj.) more than is needed or desired; needless; unnecessary.
surrogate: (n) substitute; deputy; one who takes the place of someone else.
Swaggart, Jimmy: television evangelist whose show once reached 143 countries, but who was embroiled in scandal in 1987 after a rival evangelist had pictures taken of him outside a seedy motel with a prostitute. He was later found in a car with a prostitute when stopped by police in California. He still preaches every Sunday to a vastly smaller broadcast audience.
syncopated: (adj.) musical style characterized by stressing a normally weak rhythm.
tacitly: (adv.) implied or understood without being openly expressed.
tenet: (n) opinion, doctrine or principle held as being true.
theology: (n) the study of God and His relations with man and the universe; a system of religious beliefs.
titillative: (adj.) exciting another in a superficial, pleasurable manner, often sexually.
Torah: (n) the Mosaic law; Pentateuch.
toxic: (adj.) poisonous.
transcend: (v) to go beyond the limits or powers of; exceed; surpass.
transcendent: (adj.) going beyond ordinary limits; above and independent of the physical universe.
trimester: (n) a period or term of three months.
ber Alles: (German) Over all. A German slogan during World War II was "Deutschland ber Alles": "Germany Over All."
unbridled: (adj.) not controlled; not restrained.
up the ante: to increase the amount of money that must be put up, such as in a game of chance.
urban: (adj.) having to do with cities and towns.
utopian: (adj.) pertaining to an ideal place or state.
utopianism: (n) any ideal schemes for the improvement of life or social conditions.
validate: (v) to make valid; give legal force to.
venomous: (adj.) poisonous.
Weimar Germany: Germany between 1919 and 1933, an era known for excess and wild living, which preceded Hitler's rise to power.
work ethic: the attitude of a group or a society toward work, especially the attitude or belief that work is good for man and higher on society's scale of values than play or leisure.
yuletide: (n) the season of Christmas.
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