The Big Lie
PRAGER, DENNIS
The Big Lie Many people blame religion, but ifs secular ideology that has led to the slaughter of 100 million people this century. For a hundred years, jews have been disproportionately involved...
...Then he makes this incredible statement: "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil...
...Moreover, tor many Jews the university serves as a substitute temple...
...To blame religion For the evil done by idealistic people when virtually all the idealistic evil of this century was done in the name of secular ideologies is nothing less than a Big Lie...
...They include non-Jewish Jews on the Left—such as Karl Marx, the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis (he wrote "religion is the opiate of the masses"), the Socialist Rosa Luxembourg, and the Communist Leon Trotsky—and the millions of Jews who led and supported leftist antireligious movements...
...For example, in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote, "I think that on balance the moral influence of religion has been awful...
...Even strongly identifying Jews such as some of the socialist founders of Israel were staunchly antireligious Jews...
...but for good people to do evil— that takes religion...
...That it isn't true is irrelevant to those who fear and loathe religion...
...And while few Christians are still raised with the former belief, most Jews are still raised with the latter...
...For someone as bright as Steven Weinberg to make such a foolish statement indicates his rational faculties have been overwhelmed by anger and hatred against religion...
...Animosity toward religion is often so intense that it causes otherwise rational people to make profoundly irrational and foolish statements...
...Many Jews hold an antipathy to religion that is as strongly held and as impervious to change as the beliefs held by religious people...
...It is difficult to find peace and happiness in life without God and religion, and it is difficult not to be angry if you believe that most of the world around you (that is, religious people) are likely to commit evil against you...
...Jews committing their lives to secular substitutes for religion have, on the whole, produced a lot more bad than good...
...His daily radio show is nationally syndicated...
...Finally, among many Jews hostility to religion is itself a form of religion...
...Secondly, most Jews walk around with an anger against religion—specifically over the nearly 20 centuries of Christian anti-Semitism which they believe was the cause of the Crusades, the Inquisition, pogroms, and the Holocaust...
...Most Jews go from kindergarten through graduate school undergoing what can legitimately be described as a secular brainwash...
...But to the New York Review of Books, a distinguished physicist is worthy of being published on almost any subject...
...More people have been killed in the name of God...
...The disproportionate numbers of Jews who commit much of their lives to various secular "isms" (Marxism, socialism, feminism, liberalism, humanism) is testimony to the need so many Jews feel for substitute secular faiths and sources of meaning...
...And the world suffers, too...
...For a hundred years, jews have been disproportionately involved in antireligious and radically secularizing movements...
...Why are so many Jews convinced that religion is an intellectual fraud and the world's major source of evil...
...Why, then, are so many Jews antireligious...
...They are oblivious to the fact that World Wars I and II, the gulag, the Cambodian killing fields, the Holocaust, and the Chinese cultural revolution—all these unprecedented destroyers of human life—were secular in nature...
...In the 20th century, about 100 million people were slaughtered and over a billion enslaved, nearly every one by the secular ideologies of Nazism and Communism— not by religion (though radical Islam may become an exception in the new century...
...One consequence of this is that there are many unhappy and even angry Jews...
...The disproportionate number of Jews in secularizing groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, and among the many radically secular professors at our universities, are also part of this phenomenon...
...Dennis Prager's latest book is Happiness is a Serious Problem (HarperCollins), and he writes biweekly The Prager Perspective...
...Indeed, the truth is the inversion of Professor Weinberg's thesis: In the 20th century, for good people to do evil has, more often than not, necessitated a secular substitute for religion...
...For every Christian raised with the belief that Jews are Christ-killers, there is a Jew raised with the belief that Christians are potential Jew-killers...
...is the mantra of those angry at religion...
...Yet it is a Big Lie that is passed on to millions of Jews and non-Jews along with their mother's milk...
...His Web site is www.dennis-prager.com...
...For someone to write at the end of the 20th century that without religion good people would not do evil is a statement of such willful ignorance that it boggles the mind...
...One reason is that Jews are proportionally the most highly educated group and there is a direct correlation between higher education and antipathy to religion...
...Alas, a Nobel Prize winner in physics is no more intrinsically capable of intelligent thought about religion than the chief rabbi of Israel is about physics...
Vol. 25 • February 2000 • No. 1
