I am quoting from Melanie Philips’s post below: I consider Melanie Philips the modern day equivalent of Maimonides with her brilliant insights into what is going on in the ideological environment that we all swim in. She writes in the post below: (the bold emphases are mine)
Darwinism, Judaism and the clash between science and religion
- “…It is Judaism’s Mosaic code that gave the West its conscience and the roots of its civilization by putting chains on people’s selfish appetites. And strikingly, every contemporary ideology that aims to undermine or transform the West is based on opposition to Jewish religious beliefs, Jewish moral codes or the Jewish homeland in Israel…
- Much of this secular onslaught goes back to the central Enlightenment idea of a world based on reason, which French Enlightenment thinkers in particular perceived to be in opposition to religion.
- But the West’s concept of reason actually comes from the Hebrew Bible. Ideas such as an orderly and rational universe structured on a linear concept of time were revolutionary concepts introduced in the book of Genesis.
- These ideas were essential to the development of Western science…
- The opposition between religion and science that is assumed to be fundamental by secular liberals is in fact foreign to Judaism…
- The 12th-century Jewish sage Maimonides was the great exemplar of the belief that science and religion were complementary. He wrote that conflict between science and the Bible arose from either a lack of scientific knowledge or a defective understanding of the Bible.
And just as if to prove this premise I came across the following short video of this week’s Torah portion, Deuteronomy 21:10–25:19.– (Ki Tetze in Hebrew)- which clearly corroborates and expands on this theme of human rights as originating in the Hebrew Bible. These verses include laws of war, agriculture, concern for the welfare of employees, slaves, and animals, and basic concern for the welfare of the other.
And now going back to Melanie Phillips in the above article she writes:
- Without the Hebrew Bible, there would have been no Western rationality or principles such as justice or compassion. But secularism holds that the rule of reason divorced from biblical religion would banish bad things like prejudice or war from the world and the human heart.
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| Of course, the Nazis put the biggest lie to this premise – the premise that human reason is superior to the fear of G-d for creating a just world – with their cruelty towards man woman and child, and their ideology that Germany is the “master race” and deserves to be the ruler of the known human world, other supposedly “rational” even “scientific” ideas such as – “the Jews” are the reason for Germany’s defeat in World War One: and if only they could eliminate all Jews – men women and children – the world would be a “better” place.
Hitler was so convinced that eliminating Jews was a worthwhile goal that in his last will which he wrote in his bunker, just before committing suicide as the American forces were surrounding him, he admonished the German people to continue with this goal even if they were to lose the war.
And then Melanie Phillips continues in the same article: |
- Impossible utopianism invariably results in oppression. So it proved with medieval apocalyptic Christianity, the French Revolution, communism, and fascism; and so it is proving today with the cultural totalitarianism of the left.
- Like all utopians, the left believe their ideas are unchangeable because they supposedly stand for virtue itself. All who oppose them are therefore not just wrong but evil. So any heretics, who dare to disagree with the scientific, supposedly “rational” theology of Darwinism, (such as the scholar Gelernter mentioned in her article) must be literally stamped out, because no quarter can ever be given to any challenge to secularism.
In this way “science” becomes the idolatrous God of western “rational” civilization.