poligion: One Man – One Woman

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

Thursday, February 6, 2014

One Man – One Woman

The Bible says that Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. While I am sure some men would envy him, I think most people would just wonder what he was thinking. I suppose psychologists would call compulsive behavior; I call it a collector’s mentality. I collect coins. My wife has asked me at times just how many coins do I need. If I have a Morgan silver dollar, why would I want another one?

To a collector, there is no such thing as enough, unless maybe if you have the entire set of something. I used to collect coins as a kid, but my collection was stolen. I started collecting again at a very low period in my life. Besides being depressed, I was also poor. Probably not a good choice under the circumstances.

I found collecting coins therapeutic. Not only was I recapturing some of the joys of my past, I felt a certain satisfaction in completing or working toward completing a collection. But this is certainly not an isolated incident in my life. I have seen much the same dynamic at work in other things as well. I have collected sports cards, books, and movies. In some way, the addition to the collection has an enriching effect. A person feels more complete. But enough about me.

Solomon was a man in pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. He was always trying new things, looking for new experiences. Every woman is unique and beautiful in her own way. Having more than one wife or having concubines was common in his time. He certainly was more financially able than the next person to provide for so many. But as he pursued knowledge, he would add wives like someone trying to complete a collection.

Each woman would have something that the others would not. Each one enriched his life, yet this kind of thinking rarely leads to satisfaction. The collector always has an eye for the piece he doesn’t have yet. He finds as much or even more joy in the acquisition as in the possession.

We should also note that, while we cannot prove it, Solomon’s desire for more and more wives probably stemmed from a desire to have sex with as many women as possible. If men did not have sex with women, I am guessing that Solomon probably would not have married all these women for the conversation.

We noted that having more than one wife was common in those times. What the other nations did should not concern us too much, but Solomon was the king in Israel. Israel was the people of God. God brought the people out of slavery in Egypt to a land which He had promised them. He made a covenant with them and then gave to them His laws.

The question is: if having more than one wife was common in those days, and this was as wrong as we are commonly told, then why didn't God say something about it? Four entire books of the Bible are devoted almost entirely to God either directly or speaking through Moses to His people, giving them all the important rules for how to live. When it came to marriage, He was clear about adultery. He was also clear that if a man had sex with a woman prior to marriage, he was to marry her. Then He gave instructions about certain issues that could arise if a man had several wives. But He never said that it was wrong.

The fact is that throughout history in probably every culture, there has always been a shortage of available and suitable men. Why? Wars, more risky behavior patterns, higher incarceration rates, shorter life expectancy.