Free Republic

Nothing keeps me religious more than the left, not even religion itself. I am not even particularly "spiritual." My religiosity is overwhelmingly rational (the title of my Bible commentary is "The Rational Bible"). I believe in God because creation rationally suggests a Creator. The force that has most propelled me to religion is the great (secular) religion of the last hundred years: the left. If most people of the left (the left, not liberalism) -- people who have not only rejected but scorned God, Judaism, Christianity and the Bible -- were decent individuals, were committed to intellectual honesty and had...

From the beginning, I repeatedly said the charge that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election was a lie. The president's description of it as a "witch hunt" was accurate. I regularly acknowledged that I was putting my credibility on the line by stating that it was all a hoax. But how did I know that? After all, I wasn't privy to any confidential intelligence. One answer is I used common sense. The Trump-Russia collusion charge and the Donald-Trump-is-an-agent-of-the-Kremlin charge struck me -- and tens of millions of other Americans...

Video Link If you aren't sure you want to spend time on this video, here is a great video snippet that will help you reach an answer...Dennis Prager on the greatest possible sin. This alone is worth hours spent on such a video. Dennis goes on to explain that in Hebrew, the sin of taking God's name in vain isn't what people think it is. In Hebrew, explains Prager, it is actually do not "carry" God's name in vain (i.e. don't murder, steal, kill, etc. in God's name).Here's is a bit of text of Ravi's first response in the video......

I rarely make predictions -- whether of election results or anything else. My policy has always been to say what I believe should be done, not what will be done. I am making an exception with regard to America in 2019. 2019 will be a dark year in America. Thanks to the left's control of the House of Representatives and the news media, Americans will be kept in a fevered state throughout 2019 -- with innumerable hearings, exposes, criminal investigations and possible indictments of those around the president and the president himself. Truth will not be the point. Defamation will....

I rarely make predictions -- whether of election results or anything else. My policy has always been to say what I believe should be done, not what will be done. I am making an exception with regard to America in 2019. 2019 will be a dark year in America. Thanks to the left's control of the House of Representatives and the news media, Americans will be kept in a fevered state throughout 2019 -- with innumerable hearings, exposes, criminal investigations and possible indictments of those around the president and the president himself. Truth will not be the point. Defamation will....

Is "Merry Christmas" a thing of the past, a greeting from a bygone era, a remnant of a past with which we no longer want to be associated? We might not be there yet, but if current trends continue, we're not far off. If so, it's a shame, a further coarsening of the culture -- and worse. It is yet another an example of the removal of religion, specifically Christianity, from a country that has long been the most religious major industrialized democracy in the world. Proponents of "happy holidays" argue that this is no big deal. They say the...

Every Wednesday, the second hour of my national radio show is the "Male/Female Hour." A few weeks ago, a woman named Jennifer called in. For reasons of space, I have somewhat shortened her comments. Every young woman should read them. This is precisely what she said: "Dennis, I want to get right to it. I'm 50 years old with four college degrees. I was raised by a feminist mother with no father in the home. My mother told me get an education to the maximum level so that you can get out in the world, make a lot of money....

All my life I have reminded fellow Jews in America that we are the luckiest Jews to have ever lived in a non-Jewish country. I know what I'm talking about. I wrote a book on anti-Semitism, taught Jewish history at Brooklyn College and fought anti-Semitism since I was 21, when Israel sent me into the Soviet Union to smuggle in Jewish religious items and smuggle out Jewish names. Even after the massacre of 11 Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue, this assessment remains true. But the greatest massacre of Jews in American history is a unique American tragedy. It is a...

As a Jew who attends synagogue every Shabbat, and as an advocate for the carrying of concealed weapons, I fervently pray we will not need armed guards at American synagogues. America's uniqueness has been exemplified by the fact that Jews do not need armed guards in their synagogues. May it always be so. Even if you don't love Jews -- if you only love America -- you need to fight anti-Semites. As the Jews go, so goes the fate of the nation in which they live.

I moved to California from New York City in 1976. The founder of what was then America's largest Jewish retreat center, the Brandeis Institute (not affiliated with the university), Dr. Shlomo Bardin, asked me to work as his assistant. He was 75 years-old; I was 25. One weekend the next year, he announced to the membership he wanted me to succeed him. To everyone's shock, he died that very week. It was then renamed the Brandeis-Bardin Institute. The institute was located in Simi Valley, California, then more a small town than even a small city. It had all of...

Far be it for me, someone who spent the better part of his life as your typical secular agnostic, to talk about God. But that was what I have been thinking about in the hours since I spent my day, as many of us did, watching the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing. I guess it first hit me when Judge Kavanaugh, in the midst of his powerful and heartfelt opening statement, one few expected him to make, choked up, fighting back tears as he spoke of his ten-year old daughter's desire to pray for Dr. Ford. I had trouble choking back my...

It is almost impossible to overstate the damage done to America's moral compass by taking the charges leveled against Judge Brett Kavanaugh seriously. It undermines foundational moral principles of any decent society. Those who claim the charges against Judge Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford are important and worth investigating, and that they ultimately, if believed, invalidate his candidacy for the U.S. Supreme Court are stating that: a) What a middle-aged adult did in high school is all we need to know to evaluate an individual's character -- even when his entire adult life has been impeccable. b) No matter how...

An hour & 13 minute video with Dennis Prager & Ravi Zacharias, hosted by Jeff Foxworthy. A very lovely evening talking about religion.

Facebook on Friday issued an apology to PragerU for “mistakenly” removing several videos and limiting the reach of others. PragerU Aug 17, 2018 BREAKING: We're being heavily censored on @Facebook. Our last 9 posts are reaching 0 of our 3 million followers. At least two videos were deleted last night for “hate speech” including our recent video with @conservmillen. Facebook We mistakenly removed these videos and have restored them because they don't break our standards. This will reverse any reduction in content distribution you’ve experienced. We’re very sorry and are continuing to look into what happened with your Page. Aug...

Conservative non-profit group PragerU appears to be facing Facebook censorship, as many recent posts from group are suffering from a 99.9999 percent drop in engagement based on Facebook’s own dashboard. The Social Media Masters of the Universe also pulled down two PragerU videos, which it labeled “hate speech.” Echoing the apparent page limitation of conservative commentating duo Diamond and Silk, the conservative non-profit group PragerU — which produces educational videos on conservative issues — appears to have found its Facebook page’s reach drastically limited. The group’s Facebook page boasts three million followers, but its most recent posts have been seen...

Last week, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had changed the Catholic catechism. After 2,000 years of teaching that a moral use of capital punishment for murder is consistent with Catholic teaching, the pope announced that the catechism, the church fathers and St. Thomas Aquinas, among the other great Catholic theologians, were all wrong. And God and the Bible? They're wrong, too. Pope Francis, the product of Latin American liberation theology -- along with many other Catholic religious and lay leaders -- is remaking Catholicism in the image of leftism, just as mainstream Protestant leaders have been rendering much of...

For this week's Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten podcast, I had nationally syndicated radio host, columnist, author of numerous books, teacher, film producer and co-founder of PragerU, Dennis Prager, on the podcast to discuss among other things: How Dennis Prager ended up a conservative as an Ivy League-educated Jewish intellectual from Brooklyn, New York -- contrary to so many of his peers How perceptions of human nature divide Left and Right Whether government has filled the void of religion for the increasingly secular and progressive American coasts How the good intentions that underlie Leftist policy prescriptions lead to horrendous outcomes...

You and I are living through the greatest mass hysteria in American history. For many Americans, the McCarthy era held that dubious distinction, but what is happening now is incomparably worse.For one thing, any hysteria that existed then was directed against the greatest evil in the world at the time: communism. Then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee notwithstanding, there really were Americans in important positions who supported communist regimes enslaving their populations and committing mass murder. McCarthy was on to something.In contrast, the country is choking on hysteria over the extremely unlikely possibility -- for which there...

As I watch a great number of my fellow Americans and virtually all of the mainstream media descend further and further into irrational and immoral hysteria — regularly calling the president of the United States and all of his supporters Nazis, white supremacists and the like; harassing Republicans where they eat, shop and live; ending family ties and lifelong friendships with people who support the president; declaring their opposition to Trump and the Republican Party the “Resistance,” as if they were American reincarnations of the French who fought real Nazis in World War II; and so on — I ask...

Last week, on the MSNBC TV show "Morning Joe," MSNBC contributor Donny Deutsch said that every American who votes for President Donald Trump is a Nazi. His exact words: "If you vote for Trump, then you, the voter -- you, not Donald Trump -- are standing at the border like Nazis going, 'You here. You here.'" Now, as virtually every Jew of Deutsch's generation knows, a Nazi saying, "You here. You here," refers to guards at Nazi extermination camps sending Jews to gas chambers or to work the barracks. Also last week, Gen. Michael Hayden, a former director of the...