The Founding Fathers referred to Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible, more than any other source. What is it about this book that is so special? Dennis Prager has some answers. Don’t miss it!
Reader Interactions
Comments
In order to eliminate spam comments that have historically flooded our comments section, comments containing certain keywords will be held in a moderation queue. All comments by legitimate commenters will be manually approved by a member of our team. If your comment is “Awaiting Moderation,” please give us up to 24 hours to manually approve your comment. Please do not re-post the same comment.
You can’t go wrong following the advice of the Bible, and Prager makes a strong case for doing so. He’s worth paying attention to.
Specially in conquest, plunder, war, booty, and how to treat your slaves.
“When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies.” – Deuteronomy 20:10-14
Yes a great leap forward with respect to rules for warfare.
The only leap forward is the Jews put their savagery in writing.
When people listen to a prominent scientist like Stephen Meyer and many other
such scientists speak about an Intelligent Designer – because of the intricate finely
tuned code in DNA and other fine-tuned constructs within the universe – they are
bound to begin to fear the existence of God. Especially since no scientist on Earth
today can determine how life itself began – something only the Intelligent Designer
seems to know.
If there is a higher consciousness – a designer – beyond our own, capable of such feats,
that is someone or something to fear alright.
As Deuteronomy wisely says we must fear God – and we must not have any other gods
before us. As Prager points out, that would be other gods such as Science which does
not concern itself with good and evil . . . with the meaning of life. The area where we find
God in a personal way in our constant striving to learn to love one another. And it should be
remembered that Stephen Meyer and the others emphasize that they are in no way
searching for “God” but are merely stating scientific observations and facts.
Deuteronomy was written about seven centuries before Christ yet its timeless wisdom
has reverberated with the Founding Fathers and with the modern minds of people today.
“Is God the designer of the universe? Not if A is A. The alternative to “design” is not “chance”. It is causality….
The religious view of the world, though it has been abandoned by most philosophers, is still entrenched in the public mind. Witness the popular question “Who created the universe?” — which presupposes that the universe is not eternal, but has a source beyond itself, in some cosmic personality or will. It is useless to object that this question involves an infinite regress (if a creator is required to explain existence, then a second creator is required to explain the first, and so on). Typically, the believer will reply: One can’t ask for an explanation of God. He is an inherently necessary being. After all, one must start somewhere.” Such a person does not contest the need of an irreducible starting point, as long as its a form of consciousness; what he finds unsatisfactory is the idea of existence as the starting point. Driven by the primacy of consciousness, a person of this mentality refuses to begin with the world, which we *know* to exist; he insists on jumping beyond the world to the unknowable, even though such a procedure explains nothing. The root of this mentality is not rational argument, but the influence of Christianity. In many respects, the West has not recovered from the Middle Ages.” – Leonard Peikoff
• Since there can be no illusion unless something exists to have that illusion, we know that something exists.
• The existence of unstable, radio-active elements tells us that the physical, material universe is not infinitely old and, therefor, had a beginning in real, finite time.
• However, as things that do not exist have absolutely no power to cause or do any thing, the universe could not possibly have created itself or brought itself into existence.
• Therefor, since imaginary causes can not produce real effects, the existence of a transcendent, eternally self-existent uncaused first cause is an absolute logical certainty because the utter impossibility of the converse demands it, and to deny it is therefor irrational.
Accordingly, unlike Dawkins, who, despite the utter impossibility of self-creation and uncaused effects, claimed to find atheism intellectually fulfilling, Einstein was a logical thinker who knew that every effect demands a sufficient cause. Thus, due to the utter impossibility of a self-created universe, he rejected atheism as a logical absurdity and, therefore, irrational.
His mistake is in reducing God to a “being”. The Buddhists describe God as something indescribable: The unborn, the unchanging, the undying or, as It seems to me … says below: “the existence of a transcendent, eternally self-existent uncaused first cause”. While God may sometimes appear as a being, the totality of God is ultimately beyond human comprehension. For those who have faith, which, by the way, often involves actual experience of God, it is enough to know that God IS, that He is our creator and that the universe is governed by His principles. You cannot arrive at this knowledge through mere intellectual exercise. Your mistake is in the assumption that belief in God is primitive and that the intellect is greater. That is the obstacle.
I can’t be bothered with your unknowable, your beyond human comprehension, your ineffable.
I have a mortal, supremely conditional, life to live, and to do that successfully I need knowledge and my reasoning mind to arrive at knowledge and certainty to keep on living and pursuing happiness. Dead people have no need of achieving values or pursuing happiness.
Deism is certainly less dangerous to mankind than Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism but to reduce any of those religions to Deism is to gut them of 99% of their content, but that’s a healthy and beneficent thing to do. Please continue promoting Deism.
So Peikoff has one starting point for the universe: existence.
But there is rational starting point at all, if the universe has “always existed”.
FAIK, support for Peikoff’s theory does not include any Science. It begins and ends with Ayn Rand’s circular declaration that “existence exists”, therefore we know that the universe has always existed.
Why do we know that?
Because.
It obviously exists NOW, so it always did.
That makes Rand’s statement an article of FAITH concerning an unknowable thing that she nevertheless “knew” without observation.
Because no one has observed the universe “always existing”.
Certainly not Ayn Rand (who by her own belief system no longer exists), and not Leonard Peikoff either (who by his belief system will cease to exist in a few decades).
On the contrary, the theory of an eternally existing universe has been abandoned by a good many scientists, due to the weight of evidence favoring the Big Bang theory.
But that doesn’t stop the Objectivists. They still “know” that existence has always existed.
Oddly, the only case of existence that they can actually observe first-hand is their own. And on a cosmic scale, it’s alarmingly brief — one moment they exist, and the next, they don’t.
There’s no reason for them to conclude that the universe follows any different rules.
Objectivism is not Objective or Rational.
[correction]
*But there is NO rational starting point at all, if the universe has “always existed”.
“Complexity” is an epistemological concept it refers to the degree of difficulty for human understanding of the facts of reality. There is no *intrinsic* complexity in the universe, the universe just is.
If complexity as such, by its nature, requires an Almighty Creator, then that creator would have to be more complex than the universe he created, and therefore his greater complexity would by your argument that complexity requires a creator, require an even greater antecedent creator, and ad infinitum.
• Since there can be no illusion unless something exists to have that illusion, we know that something exists.
• The existence of unstable, radio-active elements tells us that the physical, material universe is not infinitely old and, therefor, had a beginning in real, finite time.
• However, as things that do not exist have absolutely no power to cause or do any thing, the universe could not possibly have created itself or brought itself into existence.
• Therefor, since imaginary causes can not produce real effects, the existence of a transcendent, eternally self-existent uncaused first cause is an absolute logical certainty because the utter impossibility of the converse demands it, and to deny it is therefor irrational.
Accordingly, unlike Dawkins, who, despite the utter impossibility of self-creation and uncaused effects, claimed to find atheism intellectually fulfilling, Einstein was a logical thinker who knew that every effect demands a sufficient cause. Thus, due to the utter impossibility of a self-created universe, he rejected atheism as a logical absurdity and, therefore, utterly irrational.
It’s not hard to love God. He is always with me and protects me. What’s hard, is God loving me.
Prager doesnt even know who the OT is about. He is blind to the truth about Jesus who is the Messiah