poligion: Gun Control or Violence Control

where religion and politics meet

Everybody has a worldview. A worldview is what you believe about life: what is true, what is false, what is right, what is wrong, what are the rules, are there any rules, what is the meaning of life, what is important, what is not.

If a worldview includes a god/God, it is called a religion. If a bunch of people have the same religion, they give it a name.

Nations have worldviews too, a prevailing way of looking at life that directs government policies and laws and that contributes significantly to the culture. Politics is the outworking of that worldview in public life.

We are being told today that the United States is and has always been a secular nation, which is practical atheism.

But our country could not have been founded as a secular nation, because a secular country could not guarantee freedom of religion. Secular values would be higher than religious ones, and they would supersede them when there was a conflict. Secularism sees religion only as your personal preferences, like your taste in food, music, or movies. It does not see religion, any religion, as being true.

But even more basic, our country was founded on the belief that God gave unalienable rights to human beings. But what God, and how did the Founders know that He had? Islam, for example, does not believe in unalienable rights. It was the God of the Bible that gave unalienable rights, and it was the Bible that informed the Founders of that. The courts would call that a religious opinion; the Founders would call that a fact.

Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’ have the United States of America.

A secular nation cannot give or even recognize unalienable rights, because there is no higher power in a secular nation than the government.

Unalienable rights are the basis for the American concept of freedom and liberty. Freedom and liberty require a high moral code that restrains bad behavior among its people; otherwise the government will need to make countless laws and spend increasingly larger amounts of money on law enforcement.

God, prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments were always important parts of our public life, including our public schools, until 1963, when the court called supreme ruled them unconstitutional, almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.

As a secular nation, the government now becomes responsible to take care of its people. It no longer talks about unalienable rights, because then they would have to talk about God, so it creates its own rights. Government-given rights are things that the government is required to provide for its people, which creates an enormous expense which is why our federal government is now $22 trillion in debt.

Our country also did not envision a multitude of different religions co-existing in one place, because the people, and the government, would then be divided on the basic questions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our Constitution, which we fought a war to be able to enact, states, among other things, that our government exists for us to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It could not do this unless it had a clear vision of what it considers to be true, a vision shared with the vast majority of the people in this country.

I want to engage the government, the culture, and the people who live here to see life again from a Christian perspective and to show how secularism is both inadequate and just plain wrong.

Because religion deals with things like God, much of its contents is not subject to the scientific method, though the reasons why one chooses to believe in God or a particular religion certainly demand serious investigation, critical thinking, and a hunger for what is true.

Science and education used to be valuable tools in the search for truth, but science has chosen to answer the foundational questions of life without accepting the possibility of any supernatural causes, and education generally no longer considers the search to be necessary, possible, or worthwhile.

poligion: 1) the proper synthesis of religion and politics 2) the realization, belief, or position that politics and religion cannot be separated or compartmentalized, that a person’s religion invariably affects one’s political decisions and that political decisions invariably stem from one’s worldview, which is what a religion is.

If you are new to this site, I would encourage you to browse through the older articles. They deal with a lot of the more basic issues. Many of the newer articles are shorter responses to particular problems.

Visit my other websites theimportanceofhealing blogspot.com where I talk about healing and my book of the same name and LarrysBibleStudies.blogspot.com where I am posting all my other Bible studies. Follow this link to my videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb-RztuRKdCEQzgbhp52dCw

If you want to contact me, email is best: lacraig1@sbcglobal.net

Thank you.

Larry Craig

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Gun Control or Violence Control

Gun Control or Violence Control

It’s hard to see clearly when you are crying. And you don’t want to operate heavy machinery, drive, or vote on major legislation until you can.

We mourn the tragic loss of life that occurred at an elementary school in Connecticut. What captured our attention most was the fact that most of the victims were young children.

But I have to ask: are my sons less precious or less important, because they are adults and no longer cute? One son is a teacher. Would his death be less tragic if he were killed outside of school? If these 20 children and 7 adults were killed separately and individually all across the country, would we have less of a crisis?

The fact is that they are. In Chicago alone, where guns are illegal, about 27 people, men, women, and children, are killed every two weeks. Every two weeks.

So, yes, we have a problem. And there are two basic approaches to solving it.

One approach is to try to eliminate or minimize the possible weapons that people use to kill each other. The fact is that people have been killing each other since the Garden of Eden. As technology has improved, so has our ability to make weapons that can kill more efficiently and at a quicker pace.

So people are trying to limit access to the more efficient weapons in order to limit the number of people who can be killed at one time by one person. An improvement? Yes. But at what cost?

It’s a bit like requiring every car to make a complete stop at all intersections and no car to drive over 30 miles per hour in an effort to limit automobile fatalities. It can help, but trying to eliminate all the risks and dangers in life will only engender a docile and fearful populace more concerned about not failing rather than achieving successes.

So why do people need these more advanced weapons anyway? First we need to ask why we need weapons at all. Self-defense and protection of property. But we have police. But sometimes we need to act before the police can arrive.

But why do we need ‘assault weapons?’ Because we can’t assume that it will only be individuals who may threaten us or that their weaponry will be as primitive as that which lawmakers would like to leave us.

When the Second Amendment was written, our nation had just recently freed itself from a tyrannical government, and it acknowledged in its Declaration of Independence that the people have a right to change their government if it abuses its power. Having an armed populace is one of the checks on a growing government encroaching on the rights and freedoms of its people.

But I mentioned a second approach to solving the problem of people killing people. This approach involves inculcating in people respect and even love for each other.

This approach requires the help and support of both the government at all levels and our public schools.

We used to teach in our schools a code of ethics based on the Bible and the Ten Commandments. We acknowledged that there was a God, that there were rules in life, and by implication we would be held accountable for those rules.

Now we teach that life is a chance event of nature and that human beings are simply more intelligent apes. Essentially life has no meaning but what you make it, but you can’t assume that anyone else will have the same values as you.

The survival of the fittest is the basic law of life. What we used to call ‘dog eat dog.’ It’s no wonder that life has become cheap. We abort a million babies a year. We don’t regard life as sacred any more.

We have been lied to about this idea of separation of church and state, such that we have removed God as much as we can out of public life. So as a nation we feel compelled to live and act as if there were no God at all. All our decisions and actions must be predicated on the axiom that there is no God to inform our plans, direct our lives, or judge our deeds.

We are told that schools cannot teach or even mention anything about God, because that would be the government establishing religion. Yet that is precisely what our public schools did for the first 175 years or so that we existed as a nation and which, of course, we had done all the years prior to becoming a nation.

Our Founders knew that a government of the people could not and would not endure without a moral and religious people. Their objection was with a state Church as existed throughout much of Europe. All of the state churches were Christian. They just didn’t want the Federal government running any of them. But prayer and Bible use in schools were common and expected.

We believed in truth, and a truth that we all agreed upon.

In a nation that does not acknowledge God, we should not be surprised when people do things that exhibit no sense of conscience or morals. When we learn to value and love each other out of respect for God, then violence and crime altogether will diminish.