MARK: The Rush Limbaugh Show on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network. You know, during this last year, as you know, if you read his editorials in The Limbaugh Letter, Rush, in a certain sense, grew more profound about the things he talked about, or that’s not strictly true. He grew more openly profound. Rush was a man of faith, but he wore his faith lightly. He wasn’t a public God botherer as they say in the Anglican communion where I happen to be situated, mainly tribally. But Rush wore his faith lightly. However, once in a while he did explicitly address the question of God and truth in a very profound way.
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RUSH: Micah in Milwaukee. Thank you for calling, Micah. How are you?
CALLER: I’m doing well, Rush, and as a young conservative, I am deeply concerned with the heart and soul of America and Americans. As I see all that’s going on and the issues being brought up, I’m concerned that truth needs to be known and be told. That’s the only way this generation, the next generation, is going to survive, is by knowing the truth. I mean, we’ve outlawed God. We’ve taken all these things out of our culture and made unimportant things important. And truth needs to be known. We need to see this next generation know the truth. As a bus driver also, I interact with these young people, and I’m concerned. There are obviously bright ones out there, but I see that they aren’t being taught like they should. And they aren’t being taught about God. And that concerns me.
RUSH: It’s not just they’re not being taught about it. God is being systematically eliminated. Now, to people who might… Not everybody believes in the same god. There are a lot of religions that believe in “a” god. The left actually does not believe in a god much like you and I would. Their god can be the environment or it can be a concept like Gaia or whatever. But the reason for no God on the left is with no God there’s no morality, and there’s no right or wrong that anybody else gets to proclaim.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: And that’s the great source, for me, of societal dysfunction.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: It may sound silly, but one of the primary fuels for religion is eternal life. There’s more to this than just this. There’s more to all of this. There’s more to this than earth, and nobody will ever have any proof for it. It’s faith, trust in God, everybody comes up with their own ways, plus their religious teachings to try to believe it and have faith in it. But then you’re faced with people that think it’s all bunk and they just want to disregard all of it — and they want to laugh at, make fun of, and impugn people who have such beliefs.
And with it, they take away morality. They take away the concepts of universal right and wrong. You talked about truth. They even obliterate that, and they get to replace it with whatever they want, whatever advances whatever they care about, and at the same time ridiculing and laughing at people who don’t believe it. In the process, the entire foundation of culture and society is whittled away. I have the same fear you do, and I’ve had it for much longer than you ’cause I’m a little older than you are.
CALLER: (chuckles) Sure.
RUSH: It gets risky when you talk about truth because who gets to define “truth”?
CALLER: Well, I know our founders, they all believed in God and the Bible, and maybe —
RUSH: No, let me tell you. You can find the right leftist, and he’ll tell you, “No, that’s a myth. The Founding Fathers were a bunch of atheists and they didn’t believe in God and they didn’t care about God,” and so this is taught. You know, your version of truth is gonna be countered by somebody else’s version of truth, and then the definition of “truth” becomes something over which people argue, just like facts have become.
What’s needed is massive educational exposure to things, where people have much more information and input to be able to make up their own minds. But that’s what the left fears, is people making up their own minds. People, left to their own devices, are not gonna choose what liberalism forces on people.
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MARK: Rush is absolutely right about that. Every society needs a transcendent meaning to life. Otherwise you’re just circling around in a hyper-present tense that is, by definition, shallow. Why do men plant trees that they will not live to see grow to their glory? Why in medieval Europe did people start to build the most beautiful buildings, the most beautiful cathedrals to the glory of God, knowing that they would never live to see those buildings completed and to worship in those buildings?
And Rush is absolutely right there, that if you cease to have faith, there’s not a lot left except government and the state. And it was interesting to me through this last terrible year to hear Rush reflect profoundly and honestly on his faith.