Thursday, December 20, 2012

Dennis Prager Explains Why America Is Still the Best Hope

by Tony Christensen at frontpagemag.comn

In sum, Prager concludes, the Left is more interested in fighting inequality of economic outcomes than in fighting tyranny or evil, and Americanism by contrast is focused on doing exactly what the Left doesn’t want to do, that is, vigorously standing up to evil and promoting equality of economic opportunity. For Prager, fighting evil is our national DNA, and it is thus incumbent on us to fight. We must preserve liberty abroad so that it is not taken from us at home, and secondly, with a “God-based liberty” given to us, we must contribute as a gesture of noblesse oblige. We are among the few nations that care, and we are certainly the most significant in the fight. In the global arena, the Left wants to engineer utopia, while Americanism wants simply to counter that and avoid dystopia. But where then are good and evil for the Left, if for the Left “equality trumps morality”? The answer is that good and evil are relative. They are just the arbitrary, selfish, and useful self-deceptions by which a country gets to its ends, and they have no objective, non-contingent status.

Contrast that to the God-based liberty Americanism cherishes, and we see quite a divide. In cases like these, Prager consistently demonstrates a ready ability to cut to the essence of things in a no-atheists-in-a-foxhole sort of way: for example, he points out that it was not peace activists, with their moral relativism and negotiations, that liberated the Nazi death camps, but on the contrary it was “people taught how to kill” who provided the liberation. But why have we gotten away from what it means to be American in the first place? Prager defers to Tocqueville for the answer: it is our religiousness that is our strength, and the attrition of that Christian religiousness that could be our downfall. Leftism is meant as a substitute religion while our most august universities have become seminaries, and all this was meant to fill the void that opened when “In God We Trust” went into partial dormancy. But Leftism isn’t up to the task of providing spiritual depth. The truth about Leftism is that it is “feelings-based,” for all its claims to Reason and Science, and it is decidedly not moral-values-based. If it were the latter, it would more eagerly fight evil, less eagerly stop those who were actually doing that fighting, and would not stand aloof in poseur umbrage at disparities in wealth.

Moreover, Prager offers a solid argument against those who would ask, “Why do they hate us?” Muslim terror is caused by Muslims, not by the Westerners against whom that violence has been leveled. The primary cause of terrorism is to be found within the behavior and morality of the perpetrators, and not within the behavior of the victims. But Islam can reject this causality because of the unconstrained view it entertains of the nature of Allah: for example, it is his will that directs the arrow to the bull’s eye, not the marksmanship of the archer. Allah is simply not subject to the laws of nature or reason or consistency as is the god of the Judeo-Christian tradition...

Read the rest here ...

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