The Bible vs. the Heart

[Geee]

National Review:

I offer the single most politically incorrect statement a modern American — indeed a modern Westerner, period — can make: I look first to the Bible for moral guidance and for wisdom.

I say this even though I am not a Christian (I am a Jew, and a non-Orthodox one at that). And I say this even though I attended an Ivy League graduate school (Columbia), where I learned nothing about the Bible except that it was irrelevant, outdated, and frequently immoral.

I say this because there is nothing — not any other work, religious or secular, or body of work — that comes close to having played a role like the Bible’s in forming the moral basis of Western civilization and therefore the basis of nearly all moral progress in the world.

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It was this book that guided every one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, including those described as “deists.” It is the book that formed the foundational values of every major American university. It is the book from which every morally great American from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to the Reverend (yes, “the Reverend,” almost always omitted today in favor of his secular credential, “Dr.”) Martin Luther King Jr. got his values.