Tuesday, August 29, 2023

Schools Are Not The Place To Learn About Evil

Dennis Prager wonders Why Young Americans Are Not Taught About Evil at townhall.com today. He posits a number of reasons that mostly revolve around the fact that the idea that most of the genocides of the 20th century were communists, and most of the teachers are communist sympathizers.
The first reason is that nearly all the genocides of the 20th century were committed by communists, and the Left, which runs virtually all educational institutions, has always had a soft spot for communism. If people were to recognize that communism has been the greatest source of evil in the modern age in terms of numbers murdered, number of lives destroyed, liberty stolen, and the sheer amount of human suffering inflicted (greater by those metrics than those of the Nazis before they were forcibly stopped), the Left would lose much of its appeal.
Another reason is the foolish notion that people are basically good. This has been a left-wing belief since the French Enlightenment leader Jean-Jacques Rousseau came up with the idea. As he wrote in his book, "On Philosophy, Morality, and Religion," "Man is a naturally good being, loving justice and order; there is no natural perversity in the human heart... All the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it."

It is true that atheists believe that people can be "good" without God. However, without God to lay down what is right from wrong, what people believe to be right and wrong is just various peoples' opinions. Without the 6th commandment, is it really wrong to murder another human being? What about people with disabilities? Can one justify killing them on the grounds that they will have a lesser quality of life? What about the very old, those with dementia, Downs syndrome? I have heard all these things and more "justified" by people. God, on the other hand, is absolute that "Thou shall not murder." Fyodor Dostoevsky in his book The Brothers Karamazov said that 'If God does not exist, everything is permitted." He was right.

Many leftists, though not all, are atheists and believe that people are basically good. But I have also heard many Christians who believe that people are basically good too. I have no idea where this idea comes from, though. If one reads the Bible, it is one long series of stories of men sinning against God and man. Our God does not recognize small sins and major ones. There is no such thing as a little white lie. That little white lie earns the one who commits it the same punishment as a mass murderer. In either case, God cannot stand to look at us and must turn away. Thus, hell is spending eternity apart from God.

If you want to understand just how evil men are, think of a predator taking down and killing its prey. It is usually as quick as possible given the predators weapons. Now, look at how Christ was executed. He was crueling and brutally beaten, then nailed on a cross through the most sensitive nerves in order to maximize the torture of the victim. If they hadn't gone overboard with the flogging, he might have lasted longer on the cross, thus extending his misery. As it was, the crucifixion was an agonizing affair to which we wouldn't subject any other creature, man's inhumanity to man.

Finally, good and evil should be enforced in schools, but students should learn these things at home and at church under their parent's guidance. It is not the schools place. Indeed, we place too much on the schools. Schools are there to teach a few descrete subject matters including reading, writing, mathematics, history, science, and civics. What is not in the schools wheelhouse are sex, CRT, activism, politics, and religion. Note that while any religion should not be either emphasized or denigrated, clubs should be allowed. On the other hand a brief peek at history should show that men are evil.

Where I agree with Prager is that knowledge of evil should cause people to reject the Left, and seek Christianity, for Christ promises to take this sinful person and make him acceptable to God.

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