Judeo-Christian values lie at the heart and soul of Western civilization itself.

And they lie at the heart and soul of a lot of the Enlightenment values that we ourselves tend to value as even secular people. The very basis of the notion that human beings have intrinsic worth and intrinsic quality, that is a notion that cannot be discovered from science. It's not something that you can pick up just by looking at a science textbook. After all, we're just an agglomeration of cells and an agglomeration of various firing synapses. The idea that human beings have inherent value, that's something that springs from the Judeo-Christian tradition. The idea that we're all equal before God, that we have all equal rights before God. That again, it comes from the ideas in Genesis, the idea that as human beings, we are created as individuals made in the likeness of God, and therefore we have to value the

rights of other human beings, the moral strictures of the Ten Commandments. These are all the things

that provide the grounding for a social fabric that allows for freedom to flourish. Now, there are

a lot of people who attack Judeo-Christian values because they believe that Judeo-Christian values

is too exclusive, that Judeo-Christian values is rooted in faith as opposed to in logic.

But the reality of the situation is that everybody's moral framework is rooted in certain

assumption. The question of how we are to live a moral life is rife with questions about how we

ought to view human beings in their place in the world. If you believe in the sort of scientific

materialist worldview that says that human beings are basically just material wandering through space with the illusion of free will, it's very difficult to make a moral case for why you should act in a certain way, why you should act as though you have free will, why you should act in the interests of others as opposed to in your own interest. If, however, you believe that there's a moral standard that stands above and beyond you, that you were created with a soul, something that exists beyond death. If you believe in Judeo-Christian values, in other words, that provides the logical framework that allows for the flourishing of human freedom. Now, that doesn't mean that every religion-based society is going to end in human freedom. Very often,, just like any other force in human history, can be used for tyranny.

And you've seen that, too, people who want to cram down particular doctrines,

people who believe in a theocracy where religious authorities get to declare what you can and cannot do.

But the true purpose of Judeo-Christian values is to determine your place in a universe that is governed by

rules, that is discernible by human reason, human intellect.

This is rife in Judeo-Christian theology, ranging from Maimonides in Judaism to Aquinas

in Catholicism to the great Protestant theologians as well.

The fact of the matter remains that if you want to have a free country, you have to have a social fabric that is supported by these moral ideas. This is why the French Revolution was a failure, because the French Revolution tried to create a secular morality without the framework of Judeo-Christian morals. And it turns out that it is very easy to discard the individual in that math. It's incredibly easy to say the individual doesn't matter as much as the collective. This was the logic that was used by Robes-Pierre and by the way by Karl Marx. It is easy to say that an alternative moral system in which individuals don't matter as much as the sort of collective will, that individuals ought to be grounds dust. And you saw this under communism, you saw this under fascism, the values that you believe in, the values of free markets, the values of free exchange and free speech and free

thought, the value being treated as an individual, again, that is rooted in the belief that

you were made as an individual by God in God's image. And those values have to be promulgated.

And responsibility has to be added to those values because individualism without any

sort of teaching in your moral debt owed to others ends with hedonism and it ends with narcissism,

and it ends with societal collapse in anarchy. So if you want that balance between responsibility

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