Prager on subjectivism in religion

Of course, commentator and radio talk show host Dennis Prager would never actually agree with the idea that religion as such is subjective and yet, every once in while, the blatant truth of this proposition has to shine through. In an excellent column today Prager joins those who have been advocating for some time that this war is misnamed and the enemy is very much religious in nature. However, in an interesting passage in this article Prager writes:

With a background in religious studies and having studied Arabic and Islam, many listeners have called my radio show asking me if I consider Islam to be inherently violent or even evil. From 9-11 to now, I have responded that I do not assess religions; I assess the practitioners of religions. Why? Because it is almost impossible to assess any religion since its own adherents so often differ as to what it is. For example, is Christianity the Christianity of most evangelicals or that of the National Council of Churches? On virtually every important moral issue, they differ. The same holds true for right- and left-wing groups within Judaism.[emphasis added]

This has been my criticism of those claiming that religion can provide the basis for morality. Religious people such as Prager claim that without God there can be no morality. Why? Because, Prager would argue, reason is incapable to deriving "ought" from "is" or morality from facts. As a result, supposedly we will just end up with a lot of different opinions of what's right and what's wrong but no absolute or objective standard. Judeo-Christian values, however, do provide absolute right and wrong, it is claimed, and thus people in favor of morality ought to support religion and Judeo-Christian values in particular.

But clearly, by Prager's own admission, if the problem is that people might disagree, religion provides no solution. Even putting aside the issue of the existence of multiple different religions, people within the same religion often disagree quite strongly as to the interpretation of their sacred texts. So frankly, as far as I'm concerned religious people are back to square one.

Needless to say, this ignores multiple other problems with basing morality on religion rather than reason and reality, such as the fact that religion is based on impossible fantasies, which must be taken on faith, the result of which can hardly be considered objective. It is really no surprise that disagreements on interpretations of these fantastic ideas persists.

Judeo-Christian Illusions

In Dennis Prager's latest column in his series defending "Judeo-Christian values," Prager argues that

The cultural civil war in which America is engaged is, in large measure, about American exceptionalism. Conservative America generally believes in the concept; liberal America generally finds it chauvinistic and dangerous.

I'm certainly sympathetic to the Conservative side of this debate, or perhaps more accurately, I'm vastly more opposed to the Liberals on this than to the Conservatives, even if I do find American moral judgment at times inadequately "chauvinistic". What prompted me to write about this column however is not its main topic but a throwaway line at the end of the column in which Prager notes that

Too bad more Europeans did not place a Judeo-Christian morality above secular law. There would not have been a Holocaust.

I have no problem with the fundamental principle involved here, namely that the moral and legal are separate domains and that there are clearly times when the legal code of a given locality is morally wrong and therefore, morally, ought to be opposed, sometimes even violently opposed. That is after all, the point of the Declaration of Independence which essentially argued that a legal authority can and ought to be changed if it violates the higher moral law.

My issue is with the claim that specifically a greater allegiance to "Judeo-Christian morality" would have provided the necessary resistance to the goals of the Nazis and thus prevented another Holocaust. If "Judeo-Christian morality" is to have an influence in the culture, it would have to be through its two main component religions, namely Judaism and Christianity, and of the two Christianity would be the more important since to the extent that Europe was religious on the eve of WWII, it was Catholic or Protestant. Judaism, only recently emancipated, did not, I dare say, play a significant role in shaping the ideas of most Europeans.

Let's assume the following assumptions of Prager are true: That Europe was largely secular on the eve of WWII and that a greater allegiance to "Judeo-Christian values" would have stopped the Nazis. Well, if the representatives of "Judeo-Christian values" in Europe were the Christian clergy, whether Catholic or Protestant, then we would expect them to be the centers of opposition to Nazism. We would expect them to have been the voices in the wilderness opposing the Nazis in the name of "Judeo-Christian values" that they support. What is the historical record?

Mixed, at best, as it turns out. Paul Johnson's History of Christianity is instructive in this respect. On the Catholic attitude toward Hitler he writes:

...Catholics felt no loyalty to Weimar; it was not 'nationalist' enough. And towards Hitler, who was, they were ambivalent. It is true that some bishops were initially hostile to the Nazis...In any case some of the Bishops refused to take a stand against the Nazis, and especially against Hitler, who was becoming increasingly popular...The fact is that most of the bishops were monarchists. They hated liberalism and democracy much more than they hated Hitler...Moreover once Hitler attained power, German Catholicism dropped its 'negative' attitude and assumed a posture of active support. This was carried through by the bishops as early as 28 March 1933, on a firm indication from Rome (advised by Pacelli) that there would be no Vatican support for a policy of opposition.

There's more that could be said and interested readers can read some of the details of Catholic response to Hitler in Johnson's book. Turning now to the Protestants, Johnson informs us that

...if the Catholic attitude toward Hitler was apprehensive and pusillanimous, many of the Protestant clergy were enthusiastic. The collapse of 1918 and the end of the Protestant monarchy had been a disaster for the Lutherans...most Lutherans were afraid their church would collapse once state support was completely removed. So they hated Weimar...Some of them, therefore, looked on Hitler and his movement as saviours.

Johnson also details various attempts by Lutherans to remove "the Jewish background to Christianity." The Lutherans, apparently, would resist any description of their values as "Judeo-Christian."

Nevertheless, even if we grant that much of what passes for Christianity at that time was hypocritical, it remains true that for a large number (the majority?) of devout Christians, Nazism presented little or no moral difficulty. Perhaps Prager should keep that in mind the next time he argues that that an increase in religious values can protect us from the evils of this world.

Now on to the meat of the matter. Prager spent the last hour of his program today attempting to clarify his views on the consequences of the decline of Judeo-Christian values and the rise of secular ideas. Specifically, Prager maintained that it is only the belief that man is created in God's image that could be a valid basis for believing in human moral superiority to animals. He further blamed the decline of marriage and reduced desire to have children on secularism. His third example consisted of foreign policy where the morality of the war in Iraq is to be decided by a UN consensus rather than the fixed viewpoints of religion. And finally he pointed to the absence of wisdom at the university, a largely secular institution, which has the distinction of discussing and advocating some of the most foolish ideas in society.

Interestingly Prager insisted he was not trying to convert any atheists or encourage anyone to believe in God. He was simply trying to make clear the consequences of what he termed secularism. He was arguing in effect that no matter what side of the issue one is on, one has to acknowledge that without religious Judeo-Christian values the consequences he enumerated are inevitable. Prager as usual is merely insisting on "clarity."

I will begin by commenting that not all the consequences mentioned by Prager are bad in my view. For example, the issue of whether or not one has children, everything else being equal, is not a moral issue in my view. Context can make it a moral issue in both directions: There are people to whom children would be a great value and there are people who should never have had their children. But human beings as such do not have a moral obligation to have children, notwithstanding the biblical view.

Prager is quite correct on the university as the source and instigator of numerous foolish (and in fact worse than foolish) ideas. They are in fact the source of his two other examples: The consensus view of morality and the moral equivalency of human and animal suffering. The consensus view dates back to the pragmatists such as John Dewey and Charles Peirce, who ultimately derive their ideas from Immanuel Kant. The moral equivalency of humans and animals is a view pushed by Princeton's Peter Singer, among others. Singer's utilitarianism traces its roots to the original utilititarians Mill and Bentham who themselves in effect combine the views of Epicurus and Kant. Ultimately the reason for the presence of these ideas is not secularism as such but a long philosophical development of increasing irrationality that started all the way back in times when most people (and universities as well) were still quite religious. It was the errors and absurdities of the various early religious philosophers which then culminated in the errors and absurdities in the later secular ones. There were parallel trends: The increasing secularism and the increasing tower of irrational errors. Initially, various religious ideas were quite properly rejected in the name of reason. Later on as philosophers made crucial mistakes in understanding how reason works and concluded that reason is impotent, they started to reject almost all abstract principles and concepts due to their initial mistakes. Religion was rejected at the same time as reason. This unfortunately doomed proper secular morality until the arrival of novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand's Objectivism in the 20th century.

Today Prager interviewed a representative of PETA. This interview occured because PETA has a campaign comparing the treatment of chickens in industrial farms with the treatment of Nazi concentration camp inmates using images of both with the slogan "the holocaust on your plate." The representative interviewed was the creator of the campaign. Prager followed the interview with a cultural analysis of the United States from the perspective of the increasing influence of secular ideas and declining belief in religious ideas. In terms of the issue raised by PETA, Prager presented his view that the idea of human beings being more valuable than animals derives from a belief that man is created in God's image. He then proceeded to give several examples of what he considers to be the perverse consequences of the decline of Judeo-Christian values and rise of what he termed "secularism" and thus secular values. Among the examples were the decline of marriage and increasing number of people choosing not to have children, the large number of people looking to the United Nations as a moral authority, and the absence of wisdom in general and specifically at the University, the premier secular institution.