In this post, Dennis Prager argues that the worst sin is when people who claim to have allegiance for God perform evil acts, thus bringing God’s reputation into disrepute.
I found a Prager University video on the same topic:
Excerpt:
The worst sin is committing evil in God’s name.
How do we know?
From the third of the Ten Commandments. This is the only one of the ten that states that God will not forgive a person who violates the commandment.
What does this commandment say?
It is most commonly translated as, “Do not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. For the Lord will not hold guiltless” — meaning “will not forgive” — whoever takes His name in vain.”
Because of this translation, most people understandably think that the commandment forbids saying God’s name for no good reason. So, something like, “God, did I have a rough day at work today!” violates the third commandment.
But that interpretation presents a real problem. It would mean that whereas God could forgive the violation of any of the other commandments — dishonoring one’s parents, stealing, adultery or even committing murder — He would never forgive someone who said, “God, did I have a rough day at work today!”
Let’s be honest: That would render God and the Ten Commandments morally incomprehensible.
As it happens, however, the commandment is not the problem. The problem is the translation. The Hebrew original doesn’t say “Do not take;” it says “Do not carry.” The Hebrew literally reads, “Do not carry the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”
This is reflected in one of the most widely used new translations of the Bible, the New International Version, or NIV, which uses the word “misuse” rather than the word “take:”
“You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God.”
This is much closer to the original’s intent.
What does it mean to “carry” or to “misuse” God’s name? It means committing evil in God’s name.
And that God will not forgive.
Why not?
When an irreligious person commits evil, it doesn’t bring God and religion into disrepute. But when a religious person commits evil in God’s name he destroys the greatest hope for goodness on earth — belief in a God who demands goodness, and who morally judges people.
The Nazis and Communists were horrifically cruel mass murderers. But their evils only sullied their own names, not the name of God. But when religious people commit evil, especially in God’s name, they are not only committing evil, they are doing terrible damage to the name of God.
Sean McDowell has a post about Dennis Prager’s view, and he says:
Given this context, an obvious example is Muslim radicals killing innocent people in the name of God. But the most recent example, which is rightly a prominent story in the news, is the rampant sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests. The story runs deeper than most people could have ever imagined, involving the systematic cover-up of over 1,000 cases against children by 300 priests in Pennsylvania alone over the past seventy years. The individual stories are harrowing, heart-breaking and infuriating.
Sadly, these horrific actions don’t merely reflect on the individual priests, but on the Catholic Church, the entire Christian faith, and religion in general. And rightly so. Can we really blame people who abandon God when his “representatives” commit such abominable crimes?
As Prager has sadly, but correctly, observed: “No atheist activist is nearly as effective in alienating people from God and religion as are evil ‘religious’ people.”
Now, I don’t agree with Dennis on his ranking this sin as the worst. I would put carrying the Lord’s name in vain lower, and say that rebellion against God is the worst sin. That’s what I would say intellectually speaking. Emotionally speaking, I think that attacking people for their allegiance to God is the worst sin, like when gay activists go after Christian business owners for trying to take the Bible seriously about marriage, for example. Just don’t get in the way of a Christian and their relationship with God, you atheists. You’re doing something absolutely horrible when you make it harder for a Christian to follow Jesus. You might disagree with Christianity, but it would be wise not to persecute Christians, just in case we’re right about what is true.
Dennis is Jewish, so he believes that religions should be judged based on whether they produce good or not, rather than whether they are true or not. I try to listen to Dennis’ radio show as often as I can, and although he does like to discuss what we can know about God from science and history, he doesn’t think that getting the right answers to theological questions is as important as doing the right actions. I think that might be why he chose this one as the worst, because actions are more important to him. I agree with him that it is certainly very bad to invoke God in a way that makes God look bad.
Marriage stability vs sexual partners,(Teachman et al. JAMF, August 2010)
For fun, I’ve decided to publish the 2000-word first draft that I normally send to my 6 female editors, because sometimes it’s fun to let people know what I *really* think about things before my editors force me to make it sound much better and more persuasive.
We got a comment yesterday that I thought was worth a response.
Let’s start with the comment:
My husband was a Narcissist. He slept all over the county and never worked a day in this marriage. Plus, He couldn’t decide if he was straight or gay. After my son finally left home I filed for divorce. I wish I did it sooner. Now he claims to be born again and wants to stay together. When is enough, enough?
We don’t know if this woman was a Christian, was chaste, and whether the man she chose was Christian or was chaste. All we know is that the man she chose was attractive enough to easily find other women who would have sex with him despite the fact that he was married. Whatever he has, it’s something that causes women who are not married to him to have sex with him. That’s who the divorced woman chose to marry. His “charm” wasn’t from his moral character or his deep knowledge of Christian theology and apologetics.
My first response to this was to put the responsibility on the person who had chosen the bad husband. After all, I reasoned, everyone who takes a massive step like marriage is obligated to investigate who it is they are marrying.
But when I said that, I got some responses from women that said that she wasn’t responsible for her poor choice of man, and that she was an innocent victim of his magical charming powers.
Here’s Lee:
A lot of time people don’t show their worst qualities until the relationship is firmly in place, and it starts coming out slowly. It’s not always as clear cut as a woman stupidly choosing an unsuitable husband who acted unsuitable from the get-go. I mean yeah, sometimes it’s obvious early on and the woman is just stupid/ blind/broken/other. But we should be careful to not assume, and careful to not make harsh judgments from our ignorance.
If dangers like infidelity are not “obvious” then it’s not the woman’s fault that she didn’t detect it. Apparently there is no way for the woman to detect it if it’s not obvious, so she’s not responsible.
And Mary:
Narcissists are skilled at charming and persuading people that they’re really great. And they’re skilled at convincing others that their misgivings are irrational fears. Unfortunately,there are a lot of people like that. Not saying that people (men AND women, btw!) don’t just sometimes choose stupidly, for bad reasons like “hotness” and excitement. But narcissists are a whole other kettle of fish. They can come out with a completely different personality once they’ve snagged their prey.
If a bad person is “skilled at charming”, then their victim has no way of evaluating them accurately. Basically, deciding who to marry is just an activity where you talk, and decide how you feel about that person’s talk. If the person is charming, then they make you feel good, and it’s rational to marry them. A lot of women express this as “I want a man who is confident”. It’s never been explained to me how “confidence” is any evidence that the man has an ability and a past pattern of self-control and fidelity.
And Sara:
Probably because narcissists can be very charming at first and easily win people over.
[…] What I was trying to say and the article pointed out is the power of narcissists is they can put people, especially women, under a spell of sorts. They are just so slick and charming that common sense goes right out the window. They don’t think to verify all these things that seem obvious because they are so captivated.
All that’s necessary to detect a charming narcissist is “common sense”. His suitability to do husband and father roles should be “obvious” from what he says and how he makes her feel.
So, let’s take a look at some tips for avoiding these charming narcissists who can convince you to marry them just with their words and the feelings they cause.
How to avoid marrying a charming narcissist who cheats on you
Here is some advice on how to avoid marrying a charming narcissist.
1. Evaluate a person based on objective evidence instead of how they make you feel with their words
There are a lot of lies coming out of the artists, actors, celebrities, etc. in this secular leftist culture that basically say that marriage is all about you and your feelings. If you prepared for marriage by watching movies made by pedophiles in Hollywood, and listening to music made by promiscuous musicians, and reading self-help fiction written by divorced spinsters, then you are not ready to detect a charming narcissist. Marriage is a practical enterprise, with distinct roles for husbands and wives that must be performed regardless of how either spouse feels. You need to understand and evaluate what behaviors are expected of husbands and wives in a marriage, and then look for evidence that the person you want to marry can perform those behaviors.
For example, if the behavior is fidelity, then the person should be able to demonstrate chastity and self-control during the courtship, and produce references from past girlfriends / boyfriends, and have written about chastity and self-control using research sources to explain the connection between premarital sex and marital instability. If you’re choosing with your feelings, and you haven’t done an analysis of marriage roles, and partner abilities, you’re headed for a disaster.
Just so you know, when I said this to some of the pro-irresponsibility, non-judgemental women I know, their response was to laugh in my face at the idea of asking someone’s previous partners about whether they were chaste and self-controlled. And this is why people are taken by surprise by the charming talk of narcissists. Feelings-oriented people today laugh at the idea of doing any evaluation, preferring to rely on their feelings. A lot of the failure to choose wisely is just down to people not understanding how the world works, then trying to manufacture a psycho-babble rationalization of why they screwed up.
When you’re hiring someone, you do a job interview, you test their skills, you contact their references, you do a drug test, a credit check, a criminal record check. And you have other skilled people sit in on the interviews and tests, in order to make sure that the person can really do the job they are being interviewed for. The marriage evaluation should include everything that the job interview includes as a minimum. Marriage is at least as complicated as choosing to hire someone for a job. If you aren’t doing the bare minimum of evaluating their education, career and finances, then you are setting yourself up for failure.
2. Learn what it takes to make morality rational, and then determine if your candidate is capable of being moral
Because marriage deals so much with moral obligations, it’s incumbent on you to read extensively on moral issues. You yourself should have developed worldview (through study and debate) that rationally grounds the minimum requirements for moral values and duties: 1) free will, 2) consciousness, 3) objective moral values, 4) objective moral duties, 5) a divine judge, 6) life after death. Why? Because doing the right thing isn’t something that you always feel like doing. When doing the right thing goes against your feelings, you will need to have a reason to act against your own self-interest. And that reason is going to be because the world is the sort of place where morality is real, and independent of your feelings, where you are a free moral agent, and where is a divine judge and an afterlife.
At the center of the ability to rationally ground morality is the ability to know God is real rationally, and to defend his existence using objective evidence and logical arguments. If you don’t know whether God exists based on logic and evidence, how will you evaluate whether someone else knows it? If you can’t rationally ground doing the right thing when it goes against your interest, then you won’t be able to know how to ask questions and investigate in order to decide whether someone else is moral or not. Marrying someone who doesn’t believe in a moral lawgiver and a moral judge after death is as prudent to going into a city dump eating all your meals from what you find there.
In the specific case of fidelity, it’s important to remember that some people have goals and an understanding about how poor choices right now will make those goals more difficult to obtain. It’s easy to say that you want your spouse to be faithful. But what’s really needed is to measure what they are really trying to achieve in life, and whether they understand how infidelity would affect those plans. If you can’t see from their past decisions that they KNOW that 1) marriage and family are important enough to sacrifice for and 2) that they understand and apply the research that shows what decisions helps to make a marriage last (e.g. – no premarital sex), then, they don’t really have the goals and the information that you want in a marriage partner.
Conclusion
I have to end this post with the reaction from my friend Lindsay, who is one of my reliable advisors. She responded to Lee and Mary above with this:
There are ways to avoid marrying a narcissist, addict, abuser, or other bad man. However, most women don’t know how to evaluate men because no one ever told them what to watch for or that they need to focus on long term character traits and not ignore red flags. They have been actively encouraged to follow their hearts and indoctrinated in this view since they were small children. That doesn’t mean they are without blame, but they have also been let down by their families, friends, and society as a whole. Women need the eyes of family and friends on the men they date to help them see problems they might not recognize and warn them. But too often, family and friends are too uncomfortable saying something and think they are supposed to stay out of it. Our society has broken down and women do not have the protections they need.
Lindsay probably has the best and most successful marriage of anyone I know. She did everything right that I tell young women to do. Multiple STEM degrees, debt-free, years of private sector experience, married a virgin as a virgin herself right in the middle of her 23-27 year window, and is now a homeschooling mother of 3. Perfect, and did a thorough evaluation of her perfect husband Doug. Doug had done enormous amounts of work demonstrating through actions and achievements that he had the character and skills to be an excellent husband and father. Anyone who evaluated him beyond the surface level of talk and feelings and “confidence” would have found a gold mine of husband and father capability. Capabilities which are now on display in their marriage.
Note: in all truth, this is something that men do even more than women. Men choose entirely on appearance, they dirty themselves up with unchastity as if that has no effect on their ability to evaluate a woman properly, they read next to nothing about feminism and divorce, and then they cry and whine when the bad woman they married cleans them out in divorce courts. My recommendation to men is that they spend more time on education, career, finances, morality and Christianity, and less time getting drunk, watching sports, and having premarital sex. Get yourself some good advisors and get started early on evaluating young women for the roles of wife and mother. If they haven’t prepared for marriage like Lindsay did, dump them immediately, and move on to the next candidate.
Justin hosts a discussion between Mara Clarke of the Abortion Support Network and Scott Klusendorf of the Life Training Instititute. Mara believes women should decide whether to terminate a pregnancy, but Scott says that all depends on whether we are dealing with a human life in the womb.
Klusendorf: no justification for abortion is necessary if the unborn are not human
Klusendorf: we need to address the issue “what is the unborn?” Are the unborn human?
Klusendorf: SLED: size, level of development, environment, degree of dependency
Klusendorf: None of these things affect the value of a human being
Klusendorf: Even if we don’t KNOW whether the unborn is human
Mara: I’m not going to debate when life begins
Mara: Women know when life begins by feelings
Mara: The moral decision is “whether I can take care of this child?”
Brierley: When is an unborn being human?
Mara: I refuse to debate that – the real question is whether women want their babies or not
Mara: Forced pregnancy is not OK
Brierley: Could your justification for abortion (not wanting to care for a child) work through all 9 months?
Mara: Late term abortions are rare, so I don’t have to answer that question
Mara: Abortion should be OK through all 9 months of pregnancy because women cannot be restricted
Mara: Some women are poor, they need to be able to kill expensive babies at any time
Klusendorf: although she says she won’t debate the unborn, she does take a position
Klusendorf: she assumes the unborn is not human, because she says that insufficient funds is justification for abortion
Klusendorf: no one argues that you can kill a two year old because they cost money, because she thinks they are human
Klusendorf: she is begging the question by assuming the unborn are not human, but that is the issue we must resolve
Klusendorf: I am pro-choice on many other things, e.g. women choosing their own husbands, religion, etc.
Klusendorf: Some choices are wrong – Mara might be right, but she needs to make the case for the unborn not being human
Brierley: What is your reason for thinking that an unborn child is different from a 2-year old?
Mara: An unborn child is not the same as a 2-year old, in my personal opinion
Mara: I am not a debater, so I don’t have to provide reasoning for my assertion, I just feel it
Mara: Not everybody agrees with Scott, they don’t have to have a rational argument, they just need to feel differently
Mara: From my experience, when a woman doesn’t want to be pregnant, then she should be able to not be pregnant
Mara: Women shouldn’t be punished with a baby that she doesn’t want, even if she chooses to have recreational sex
Brierley: What do you think of women who think the unborn is human and do it anyway?
Klusendorf: It’s interesting that they never kill their toddlers for those reasons
Klusendorf: I layed out scientific and philosophical reasons for the humanity of the unborn
Klusendorf: Her response was “but some people disagree with you”
Klusendorf: People disagreed about whether slavery was wrong, or whether women should be able to vote
Klusendorf: that doesn’t mean there is no right answer – the right answer depends on the arguments
Klusendorf: if absence of agreement makes a view false, then it makes HER pro-choice view false as well
Klusendorf: she did make an argument for the unborn child having no rights because of the location
Klusendorf: she needs to explain to us why location matters – what about location confers value
Mara: I’m not going to let Scott frame my debate for me!!!
Mara: women get pregnant and they don’t want their babies! should we put them in jail!!!!
Klusendorf: I didn’t just give my opinion, I had science and philosophy, the issue is “what is the unborn?”
Mara: philosophical and scientific debates are unimportant, I am an expert in real women’s lives
Klusendorf: Which women? Women in the womb or only those outside the womb?
Mara: Only those outside the womb
Klusendorf: Only those outside the womb?
Mara: Women living outside the womb have a right to kill women inside the womb – women have bodily autonomy
Klusendorf: then does a pregnant woman with nausea have a right to take a drug for it that will harm her unborn child?
Mara: Unborn children are only valuable if they are wanted, unborn children only deserve protection if they are wanted
Mara: There are restrictions on abortion – you can’t get an abortion through all nine months in the US
Mara: There is a 24-week limit in the UK as well
Klusendorf: There are no restrictions on abortion that conflict with “a woman’s health” because Supreme Court said
Mara: where are these late term abortion clinics?
Klusendorf: (he names two)
Mara: that’s not enough!!! we need more! where is there one in Pennsylvania?
Klusendorf: well, there used to be Gosnell’s clinic in Pennsylvania, and you could even get an infanticide there….
Brierley: What about Dawkins’ view that it is moral to abort Down’s Syndrome babies?
Klusendorf: he is ignoring the scientific case and philosophical case for the pro-life
Klusendorf: the pro-life view is a true basis for human equality
What I wanted Scott to ask was whether sex-selection abortions were OK with her. Since her reasoning is “if it’s unwanted, it has no rights”, then that would mean sex-selection abortions are just fine. That’s what a UK abortion expert recently argued. And I also posted recently about how sex-selection abortions are not prosecuted in the UK. If you’re looking for a war on women, there it is.
