We live in a world filled with evil and moral confusion. There is only one way out: affirmation of a God Whose primary demand of us is that we treat our fellow human beings decently. Faith in any god who makes any other primary demand will ultimately fail to solve the problem of evil. And any moral system that is detached from God, no matter how noble and sincerely held, will likewise fail
Those who value wisdom know that when you give people something for nothing, you produce ungrateful people; that when you obscure the differences between men and women, you end up with many aimless men and angry women; that when you give children “self-esteem” without their earning it, you produce narcissists who enter adulthood often incapable of empathy and of handling life; that if you do not destroy evil, it will proliferate; and that if you are kind to the cruel, you will end up being cruel to the kind. If you really want goodness to prevail, wisdom is a key to unlocking it. The heart is not.
I have devoted much of my life to studying, writing, and lecturing about the subject of happiness. In particular, I have advocated that people act as happy as possible even when they do not feel happy. This is, I believe, both a moral obligation to all those who are in our lives—it is unfair to others to inflict our bad moods on them—and a particularly effective way to increase our own happiness, since acting happy elevates one’s mood. This is hardly controversial—in just about every area of life, human beings deeply influence how they feel by how they act. As a rule, those who object to this idea of acting contrary to how one feels are people on the Left—because on the Left, feelings are sacrosanct.
The oft-cited charge that belief in God and religion has led to more wars and evil than anything else is as untrue as it is widely believed. Secular movements in the twentieth century alone killed and enslaved more people than any other movement in any century in history.
There is a morally flawed understanding of ‘peace.’ In much of the world (again, thanks to the left), peace has been so narrowly defined as to be morally irrelevant. It essentially means not having troops fighting in a foreign country. Thus, because the United States has troops fighting in Afghanistan and recently had troops fighting in Iraq, it is considered a ‘threat to peace.’ But Iran, with no troops on foreign soil, is not considered a threat to peace, even though it sustains terror movements, murders its own people, seeks to annihilate Israel, props up the mass murdering Syrian regime and is rapidly developing a nuclear weapon.
Only marriage combines all three forms of companionship - spouse is family, best friend, and permanent companion. This is why it is widely held that while the death of a child is the most painful loss, the death of a spouse is the most disorienting one.
A good general rule is that self-esteem for its own sake turns out to be much worse than merely reinforcing unearned positive feelings about oneself. Not only does high self-esteem (especially when unearned) not increase “social responsibility”; it decreases it. The criminologist and sociologist Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University who has spent a lifetime studying violent criminals, notes that the great majority of criminals have higher self-esteem than noncriminals. You need high self-esteem to think that rules apply to others but not to you.
There is no limit to suffering human beings have been willing to inflict on others, no matter how innocent, no matter how young, and no matter how old. This fact must lead all reasonable human beings, that is, all human being who take evidence seriously, to draw only one possible conclusion: Human nature is not basically good.
Another problem with the view that you don’t need God to believe that murder is wrong is that a lot of people haven’t shared your view. And you don’t have to go back very far in history to prove this. In the twentieth century millions of people in Communist societies and under Nazism killed about one hundred million people—and that doesn’t count a single soldier killed in war. So, don’t get too confident about people’s ability to figure out right from wrong without a Higher Authority.
A good general rule is that one should seek to be loved by one’s peers—one’s spouse and one’s friends are the best examples—but beyond that, one should first seek to be respected. Seeking to be loved is almost always destructive to non-peer relationships. Teachers, for example, should seek to be respected by their students, not loved. Likewise parents, when raising their children, should not seek to be loved; they need to do too much that may not elicit love in order to raise good and, ironically, loving children. In the liberal world in America, the roles of parents and teachers shifted from authority figures to peers. The results have not been good for children or for society. When one seeks to be loved by those over whom one must exercise authority, one compromises the values necessary to do a proper job.
It is America (or Israel) at war, not just any war, that disturbs the Left. That is why there have been few demonstrations, and none of any size, against the mass murder of Sudan’s blacks; the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, or Congo; China’s crushing of Tibet; or Saddam Hussein’s wars against Iran, Kuwait, and Iraq’s own Kurds. Though there are always admirable individual exceptions, the Left has not been nearly as vocal about these large scale atrocities as it is about America’s wars. One additional reason is that, in general, atrocities committed by non-whites rarely interest the Left—and therefore ‘world opinion,’ which is essentially the same thing as Leftist opinion.
The Left would like to believe that racism—not the breakdown of marriage and family, the absence of religious norms, a degraded popular culture, and other issues that all concern values—is the primary impediment to black progress in America. Therefore the Left declares racism the greatest impediment to black progress.
Since neither black animosity nor the Left’s falsehood of “racial tensions” is based on the actual behavior of the vast majority of white Americans, nothing white America can do will affect the perceptions of many black Americans or of the leftist libel.
It is not true that the world hates America. It is the world’s Left that hates America. However, because the Left dominates the world’s news media and because nearly everyone, understandably, relies on the news media for their understanding of what happens in the world, many people, including Americans, believe that ‘the world’ hates America. And, of course, the Left-dominated media help to create much of the hatred for America that does exist. If I relied exclusively on the New York Times or Le Monde or the Guardian or CNN International or virtually any of the world’s major television and radio news stations and newspapers for all I knew about America, I would probably hold it in contempt as well.
Given the amount the human suffering Communists have caused, why is Communist so much less a term of revulsion than Nazi? When people describe particularly evil individuals or regimes, why do they use the terms Nazi or fascist but almost never Communist? And, unlike Hitler, Communist mass murderers are rarely used as examples of evil incarnate. Sometimes, in fact, they are used in a heroic or even entertaining way. There are “Mao” restaurants in various cities in the Western world. It is unlikely that there are any “Hitler” restaurants in the West. So, too, while Che Guevara T-shirts and posters are ubiquitous, there is nothing similar celebrating a Nazi, or fascist, or perhaps any non-Communist killer.
The word corruption does not arouse the moral revulsion that it should. We think of it as more a nuisance than a great evil. But corruption kills societies every bit as much as murder kills an individual. Moreover there is no hope for any society in which corruption is endemic. One final thought: Here in Cameroon, as elsewhere in Africa, the knowledgeable guides who lead tours of the slave centers note that Africans were deeply involved in the slave trade, and that without them, the slave trade could not have existed. If only this fact were taught as readily in American universities as it is here in Africa — not in order to minimize white complicity, but because universities should teach truth. Flawed human nature has no color.
One of the most often asked questions posed after America was attacked on 9/11 was, ‘What has the United States done to arouse so much Muslim hatred?’ The question, however, is on the same moral level as asking what German and other European Jews did to cause the Holocaust, or what blacks did to arouse the hatred among the American whites who lynched them.
Muslim religious leaders — from Al-Azhar in Cairo to local imams throughout the world - need to say exactly what Pope Francis said to the Catholic members of the Mafia: ‘Any Muslim who commits an act of terror — that is, deliberately murders civilians of any nationality or religion — goes to hell.
As of the second decade in the twenty-first century, nearly all acts of terror around the world (as opposed to acts of terror confined to one country, as in the case of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka) have been committed by Muslims in the name of Islam. Of course the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists. But this frequently noted fact is meaningless.
As of the second decade in the twenty-first century, nearly all acts of terror around the world (as opposed to acts of terror confined to one country, as in the case of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka) have been committed by Muslims in the name of Islam. Of course the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists. But this frequently noted fact is meaningless. The vast majority of Germans were not members of the Gestapo, nor were the vast majority of Russians members of the Communist Party, let alone the KGB. Not only is international terror overwhelmingly Muslim, but there are virtually no terrorists committing terror in the name of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any other religion.