The Rational Bible Quotes

“psychiatrist Dr. Abraham Twerski puts it, “Human beings need four things: air, food, drink, and someone to blame.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“The Torah and Judaism are behaviorist in their approach to life. How we behave is ultimately more important than how we think or feel. This is one of the greatest differences between the Torah and the contemporary mind, which attaches far more importance to how people feel.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“By giving His Chosen People the name “Struggle with God,” (in Genesis 35:10, it is God Himself, not just the “divine being” of this chapter) God was not only giving people permission to struggle with Him; He was actually asking us to. Doing so makes our faith authentic. And it is that authenticity which keeps us from turning into religious automatons.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“If people with anger issues were offered a million dollars to significantly reduce the number of times they expressed excessive anger over a six-month period, most would become adept at controlling their temper. But in the absence of million-dollar incentives, people destroy marriages, family relationships, and friendships—things worth far more than a million dollars.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“Telushkin makes a compelling argument that people with bad tempers who tell themselves they cannot control their anger are usually deceiving themselves: Mugging victims, for example, feel intense anger at their mugger, but virtually all of them—even those with bad tempers—politely hand over their money rather than curse or fight the attacker. They control their behavior, proving they can do so—when they want to. Telushkin offers a second example: If people with anger issues were offered a million dollars to significantly reduce the number of times they expressed excessive anger over a six-month period, most would become adept at controlling their temper. But in the absence of million-dollar incentives, people destroy marriages, family relationships, and friendships—things worth far more than a million dollars.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“Anger is directly related to both good and evil. The difference is the answer to five questions: What am I angry about? Is the anger justified? Is the anger proportionate to the offense? What behavior will my anger lead me to do? Do I control my anger, or does my anger control me? Jacob condemned Simeon and Levi because they allowed justified anger to lead them to unjustifiable behavior—mass killing. Whether people get angry is not what reveals their character; it is what they get angry about and how they express it.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“There are those who mock Jews and Christians who believe God promised the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. But, as noted, even an atheist would have to acknowledge no other people ever established a state there—as Jews have three times—or have claimed it as their own dating back three thousand years.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“the yetzer hatov also must be reined in. Much of the evil of the twentieth century was caused by ideologies that appealed to the yetzer hatov. Communism—in its insistence on “equality” and that the state should own all the means of production and use that ownership to eliminate poverty—is the best example. It resulted in about 100 million dead innocents (non-combatants) and more than a billion people deprived of elementary human rights. (The other great twentieth-century evil, Nazism, was rooted in racism, and therefore primarily appealed to the yetzer harah.)”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“monotheism was not a specifically Jewish revolution because it predated Abraham by several generations. The Jewish revolution was ethical monotheism”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“according to Jewish teaching, the ban on blood consumption specifically banned tearing off the limb of a live animal. This practice was used in the ancient world to avoid killing an animal and losing some of its meat to decay. This practice kept the animal alive—and its meat fresh—for a few more days, but it resulted in terrible suffering to the animal. As this ban is written before Jews existed, it is considered a universal ban—one of the “Seven Noahide Laws” incumbent upon all of humanity.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“To be an atheist is to believe the universe came about by itself, life came from non-life by itself, and consciousness came about by itself.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“If there is no God, we know there is no ultimate meaning or purpose to life: that all existence—including, of course, our own—is the result of random chance.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“The sentence God repeats more than any other is: ‘Fear not.’ ”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“In permitting Adam to eat from the Tree of Life but prohibiting him from eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, God gives man a choice between two mutually exclusive ways of living. Either he can eat from the Tree of Life and live forever without knowing good and evil or he can eat from the Tree of Knowledge, know the difference between right and wrong—and be mortal. As we will see, the point of the Adam and Eve story is that, if given the choice, we humans want a life of knowledge and choice more than a life of innocence.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“On the Sabbath, we are prohibited from milacha, to affirm there is more to our life than work: human beings have value even when not producing.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“Whether or not one accepts this last explanation—which I first heard from an Orthodox rabbi—the human being could indeed be regarded as part animal and part divine because human life is a constant battle between the animal and the divine.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“To paraphrase the American rabbi and theologian Milton Steinberg (1903-1950), the believer has to account for the existence of unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for the existence of everything else—for the world, life, consciousness, beauty, love, art, music. It would seem the believer has the upper hand.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“The most compelling rational argument is, as noted, the question “Why is there anything?” Science and atheism have no answer to this question. Nor will either ever have an answer. It is outside the purview of science. Science explains what is. But it cannot explain why what is came about—why something, rather than nothing, exists. Only a Creator of that something can explain why there is something rather than nothing.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“The logical argument is this: How does the atheist explain existence? Why is there anything? To that, the atheist has no answer.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“So, unlike those who know they make up meaning, neither we who believe in God nor atheists know we made up God. On the contrary, there are very strong arguments for a Designer of the world, but there are no arguments for an ultimate purpose to life if there is no God.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“I thought about how my father had done this with me, how his father had done this with him—going all the way back to Abraham, almost four thousand years ago. I thought about all the Jews who, at the risk of their lives, brought their sons into the covenant during the many antisemitic periods in Jewish history.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“Many ancient cultures had rites of circumcision. What rendered the Torah’s rite completely different was it did not constitute a rite of passage—the nature of circumcision in all other cultures—but a physical expression of a covenant between God and His people.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“In addition to realizing how pointless, fleeting, and self-destructive the pursuit of fame is, the most effective antidote is to take religious faith seriously.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“HOW TORAH MONOTHEISM CHANGED THE WORLD This is the first time that the Torah draws a contrast between the God of Israel and other gods. Biblical monotheism and the Torah’s denial of all other gods served as the single most important moral and intellectual advance in history. See the commentary on Exodus 8:6, in which I offer fifteen world-transforming consequences of biblical monotheism. For the reader’s convenience, I will briefly list them here. The God introduced by the Torah: 1.   Is the first god in history to have been entirely above and beyond nature. 2. Brought universal morality into the world. 3.   Means “good” and “evil” are not individual or societal opinions but objectively real. 4. Morally judges every human being. 5. Gives humanity hope. 6.   Introduced holiness—the elevation of humans from animal-like to beings created in God’s image. 7. Gives every individual unprecedented self-worth. 8. Is necessary for human brotherhood. 9.   Began the long journey to belief in human equality. 10. Is incorporeal (no body; not physical). 11. Teaches us the physical realm is not the only reality. 12. Means there is ultimate meaning to existence and to each of our lives. 13. Gives human beings free will. 14. Teaches might is not right. 15. Made human moral progress possible.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“With regard to people who denigrate their accomplishments, the twentieth-century rabbi Chazon Ish—a man renowned for his scholarship and moral character—said: “People are mistaken in thinking that humility means to think of yourself as an ignorant boor even when such is surely not the case. Humility means that a person realizes his true worth.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“Gratitude must be constantly fed (unlike resentment, which lives on naturally), and physical reminders are essential.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“Consequently, I have had to look for rational explanations for seemingly irrational laws and passages and for moral explanations for seemingly immoral laws and passages. And I have almost always found them. In this case, for example, I came to understand this law was one of the great moral leaps forward in the history of mankind. In this law, the Torah brilliantly preserved parental authority while permanently depriving parents of the right to kill their child, a commonplace occurrence in the ancient world and even today (such as “honor killings” in parts of the Muslim world). The law permits only a duly established court (“the elders”)—not parents—to take the life of their child. And we have no record of a Jewish court executing a “wayward” son.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“The forces that may easily drive people to break the law, a desire for food, sex, wealth, and self-preservation, seem to be instinctive, not learned, while those that restrain our appetites, self-control, sympathy, and a sense of fairness, seem to be learned and not instinctive.”4 Those who blame evil on outside forces—i.e., “society”—rather than on the individual will encourage people to battle society rather than battle their nature. Indeed, the need to change society rather than have people control their nature has become the dominant outlook in the Western world.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis

“The Torah’s view is we are supposed to be preoccupied with making this world as heavenly as possible. Those who live by its moral laws and values are best able to achieve that goal.”
― Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis