When I first started reading Ten Universal Principles: A Brief Philosophy of the Life Issues, by Robert J. Spitzer, I was pretty sure my brain was breaking.

I kept going, though. It was too good not to. (I just couldn’t read it, at first, at night–it was too easy to give up.)

I have no background with a classical education in the liberal arts. Until recently, I didn’t see the need for it.

Though I love to read, I didn’t get the reason for immersing myself in the classics and going back to read and study ancient texts. Don’t we all just need a trade and a skill set? Isn’t that what education is for?

I’m beginning to see that the root for the common wisdom that “if we don’t know and understand history, we will have to repeat it” comes from a firm grounding in understanding things like philosophy. In order to know and understand history, I need to study things that are very old and that require a different mindset.

Spitzer’s book is not easy reading, but it is, I believe, very necessary, especially if you want to understand the logic and the true horror of our non-logic in the culture of death that we’re living in right now.

The subtitle of this book might make you think that it’s focused only on abortion. (That’s what I thought, anyway.) Wrong! Instead, what Spitzer does in this book is give a tutorial of sorts on ten principles that he calls universal.

They are universal because they are at the foundation of ethics and form the basis of our country. When our founding fathers wrote the documents that are at the core of who we believe we are, they took these principles for granted. So did their contemporaries, as a matter of fact. The fact that many of us haven’t heard of them before points to a failure in education, I think.

Thanks to Ten Universal Principles, I no longer have any doubt about the lack of logic that reigns in conversation today. Spitzer put words to things I had felt uncomfortable with intuitively. He explains beautifully and clearly what I have longed to understand better.

You don’t need a degree to read and understand this book. You might have to take it slowly, but we would all do well to take on a reading challenge, especially one as critical as understanding why life trumps all else.

I have not read any Supreme Court cases, though I might just tackle a few: Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade for starters. I have somehow never heard about the parallels of how false logic was used in both to hurt people.

At the heart of it, Ten Universal Principles is a book that defends sane thought by, first and foremost, explaining and showing the reader what “sanity” truly is. We live in a time when words are being redefined and truth is being confused. I highly recommend Ten Universal Principles to everyone.