The Free Press: Right and Wrong Are Not a Matter of Personal Opinion, by Dennis Prager (Author, If There Is No God: The Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil (2026)):
The great moral tragedy of our time is that feelings have replaced values. And they shouldn’t. Feelings are beautiful. Feelings are wonderful. It’s good to cry, it’s good to laugh, it’s good to love, it’s good to care, it’s good to have compassion. Feelings are what make us human. But values must always come first.
Hitler felt that Jews should be destroyed. Whites in South Africa felt that apartheid was right, that blacks shouldn’t be allowed to use white bathrooms or white restaurants or go to white businesses or live in white neighborhoods. Feelings cannot determine what is right.
In fact, the Bible repeatedly warns people not to rely on their hearts. If you want to know why so many people reject Bible-based religions, there it is: Most people want to be governed by their feelings and not have anyone—be it God or a book—tell them otherwise.
The battle in America and the rest of the Western world today is between the Bible and the heart.
Millions of people today are atheist or agnostic. If you are one of them, my goal is not to convince you that God exists. But I am asking you to live as if you believe God exists, and by extension, as if you believe objective good and evil exist.
Why? Because for a good society to maintain itself, we need objective morality. What would happen to math if it were reduced to feeling? There would be no math. Likewise, if we reduce morality to feeling, there would be no morality. In other words, if values and feelings are identical, there would be no such thing as a value.
Imagine a child in kindergarten who sees a box of cookies meant for the whole class and takes them all for himself. Most people would acknowledge that the child has to be taught that this is wrong. But if values were derived from feelings, this child would keep all the cookies on the basis of his personal value that whoever gets to the cookies first gets to keep them. It’s not as though this philosophy is without precedent. It has been the way many of the world’s societies have looked at life: “Might makes right.”
That’s precisely why the Ten Commandments outlaw stealing. Because stealing is normal. The whole purpose of moral and legal codes is to forbid people from acting on their natural feelings.
Consider another example, this one far more serious. In virtually every past society, a vast number of women and girls have been raped. In wartime, when victorious armies could essentially do what they wanted, rape was the norm, with few exceptions, such as the American, British, and Israeli armies. Only men whose behavior is guided by values rather than feelings do not rape in such circumstances.
Both of these vastly different examples prove the same thing: To lead good lives, people must first learn Bible-based values, mandated when they are children. Over time, that instruction generates moral values, which then produce moral feelings. But we cannot rely on feelings first to determine how we act. When we do, the world descends into chaos, and people tear each other apart. Values measure your actions against an ultimate authority. Feelings measure your actions against nothing at all.
And so the answer to these questions—why are there so many problems? Why are people behaving so badly?—is clear. Fewer and fewer people are telling their children two of the most powerful words in our language: “That’s wrong.” …
People in the West have been trying to teach values without reference to God and the Bible since the late 18th century, and in America since World War II. This has been a moral and intellectual failure. The most secular institutions, the universities, have produced the worst ideas: multiculturalism, moral relativism, opposition to capitalism, virulent anti-Americanism . . . the list goes on.
Ethics cut off from their biblical roots are like flowers cut off from their roots in the soil. Someone could look at the flowers and say, “These flowers look great. Apparently, they can survive when cut from their soil.” That is how people look at Bible-based or Judeo-Christian ethics cut from their religious soil. They appear to survive for a few generations. But like flowers, they will eventually wither and die.
So, yes, you can teach people good values without faith. And I wish we would—that is certainly better than teaching bad values or no values. But without God and the Bible, they won’t last. Goodness without God isn’t as strong as goodness with God.
Again, you don’t need to believe in God. But deciding between right and wrong is essentially impossible without a value system revealed by God. If there isn’t a God who says pushing little kids down—or raping women—is wrong, then all we have to go by are feelings, and then doing whatever you feel like doing isn’t wrong at all.
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