What Are Judeo-Christian Values?

Jews and Christians are the only two religions that share a sacred text and a fundamental set of values. These values created and sustained Western Civilization. But now many want to discard them. If we do, at what cost?

Script:

Have you ever heard the term, “Judeo-Christian values?”

I suspect you have.

Can you name any of those values?

I suspect you can’t.

But you should because Judeo-Christian values are the moral foundation of Western civilization.

As the great British prime minister Margaret Thatcher put it:

“The truths of the Judeo-Christian tradition are infinitely precious, not only…because they are true, but also because they provide the moral impulse which alone can lead to that peace…for which we all long.”

Mrs. Thatcher was a believing Christian. I am a believing Jew. While we have different theologies, we have the same core values. And as far as society is concerned, moral values are far more important than theologies.

That is why traditionally religious Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Jews are aligned on almost every important moral issue.

Here, then, are ten of those values.

Number 1: There is one God. That God is the God introduced to the world by the Hebrew Bible, or as Christians came to refer to it, the Old Testament.

Number 2: The Hebrew Bible introduced the most revolutionary moral idea in history: that there are objective moral truths just as there are objective mathematical and scientific truths. Without God, there is no moral truth; only moral opinions.

Number 3: Because there are moral truths, good and evil are the same for all people.

Number 4: God—not man, not government, not popular opinion, not a democratic vote—is the source of our rights. The American Declaration of Independence declares that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."

Number 5: The human being is “created in the image of God.” Therefore, Every human life is precious and therefore race is of no significance because God has no race.

Number 6: The world is based on divine order, and order is made by distinctions. Among these divine distinctions are God and man, God and nature, man and woman, human and animal, good and evil.

Number 7: Man is not basically good. Christians speak of “original sin” in referring to man's nature; Jews cite what God said in Genesis: “The will of man's heart is evil from his youth.” Both beliefs are diametrically opposed to the naive modern belief that man is basically good. And they lead to the same conclusion: we need God-based rules to keep us from our natural inclinations.

For the full script, visit: https://l.prageru.com/42TNare