My Heart Bleeds

Here's something from Dennis Prager because I like his writing and this especially so.

It's the heart vs. the Bible

The eyes and the heart form an extraordinarily powerful force. They can only be overcome when formulating policies by a mind and a value system that are stronger than the heart-eye duo.

With the decline of Judeo-Christian religions, the heart, shaped by what the eye sees (hence the power of television), has become the source of people's moral decisions.

This is a potentially fatal problem for our civilization. As beautiful as the heart might be, it is neither intellectually nor morally profound.

It is therefore frightening that hundreds of millions of people find no problem in acknowledging that their heart is the source of their values. Their heart knows better than thousands of years of accumulated wisdom; better than religions shaped by most of the finest thinkers of our civilization (and, to the believer, by God); and better than the book that has guided our society – from the Founders of our uniquely successful society to the foes of slavery to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and most of the leaders of the struggle for racial equality.

This elevation of one's heart is well beyond self-confidence – it is self-deification.

One of the first things you learn in Judaism and Christianity is that the eyes and heart are usually terrible guides to the good and the holy. "... [D]o not follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to whore after" (Numbers 15:39); "the heart is deceitful above all things ..." (Jeremiah 17:9).

There is a way that seems right to a man, But its end is the way of death. - Proverbs 14:29

It is undeniable that many people have used their minds and many have used the Bible in ways that have led to evil. And some of these people have been truly heartless. But not one of the great cruelties of the 20th century – the Gulag, Auschwitz, Cambodia, North Korea, Mao's Cultural Revolution – came from those who took their values from the Bible. And the great evil of the 21st century, though religion-based, doesn't come from the Bible either.

Meanwhile, the combination of mind, Judeo-Christian values and heart has produced over centuries the unique success known as America. Reliance on the heart will destroy this painstaking achievement in a generation.