The Bible vs. Heart

I offer the single most politically incorrect statement a modern American — indeed a modern Westerner, period — can make: I first look to the Bible for moral guidance and for wisdom.

I say this even though I am not a Christian (I am a Jew, and a non-Orthodox one at that). And I say this even though I attended an Ivy League graduate school (Columbia), where I learned nothing about the Bible there except that it was irrelevant, outdated and frequently immoral.

I say this because there is nothing — not any religious or secular body of work — that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world.