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 25, 2014

The Children of Gay Couples

The Children of Gay Couples:
The Underlying Issues
Religion is increasingly being discarded today in Western Civilization, because it is considered anti-science.  I will leave it to you to provide examples if you want them, because I would be raising questions I would feel compelled to answer here.
The latest case in point has to do with the idea of family.  No, I have not studied every culture in the world, but that would not be necessary anyway.  The presence of variations would not prove or disprove a norm. 
A norm has to be assumed, unless you have an authority that can tell you how things are supposed to be.  This is what religions do.  They tell us what life is all about.  However, they disagree with each other, so people have the responsibility to evaluate them to decide which religion is the most truthful.  Which also makes the assumption that there is a God behind everything as well.  Which is also being disputed.
So let’s take a step back for a second and try to see the bigger picture. 
We are born into a world.  Probably the first thing we notice is this uncomfortable feeling in our stomachs which goes away when we suck on this thing put into our mouths.  We grow up, and we have other uncomfortable feelings or urges that we try to alleviate or fulfill, just to make ourselves feel better.
But we are taught early on that there is more to life than just meeting these biological impulses, and this is what growing up is really all about.  There are things that we ‘ought’ to do.  A cynical child might ask ‘Why?’  The usual response might be, “Because I’m the mom.”
At a very young age, we are confronted with authority, something that tells us what to do with or without any explanation why we are to do it.
As we go through life, we could conceivably question everything we do or see, but generally we accept what society in general agrees upon, otherwise every generation is reinventing the wheel, and we never progress beyond the most primitive culture. 
But from time to time, society is questioned; and if no good reason can be given why something has always been done in a certain way, a new way is offered and accepted.  Though there are always quite a few who resist and insist that the old way is better.
I mentioned family as the latest case in point, and even here we are being asked to define what we mean.  Everybody used to know what a family was, but now society is asking the question all over again.
But how do you answer the question?  Do we take a poll and whatever the majority of people think it is, that is what it is?  Meaning, in another 20 years, we can take another poll and get a very different answer, and so, what, we change the definition again? 
But there is something new going on here, new ground that we are breaking as a society which should cause us to stop and really think about what we are doing.
Each of us has one life.  If you want to go through your life and reinvent the wheel according to your own satisfaction and try to establish your own justification for everything you do, you may spend your whole questioning everything, and when you get to the end of your life, you still won’t have all the answers, but you will have a lot of things you wish you had done differently, and you hope your children will learn from your mistakes, and we are back to the idea of people accepting an outside authority on how to live their lives.
But it’s your life.  But that is no longer the case.  Now we are taking that individual right to question everything and make our own decisions, and we are having other people live with the consequences.  It’s like you’re the one eating the junk food and somebody else is getting fat and dies from the heart attack.
All through human history, men and women have joined together to create and raise the next generation.  Whether you believed in evolution or God, it was understood that family was this union of a man, a woman, and their children.  There was something about having children that changed people.  They discovered a love that they never would have imagined, where they would give up everything in an instant for the sake of that child.
What has forever been assumed, either from religion or tradition, which is the accumulated human experience, is that mothers and fathers are what God or nature intended as the preferred means of raising a child, but we are now being asked (asked? It is being demanded.) that we discard this as ignorance, because we now know better. 
And how do we know this?  Actually we don’t.  It will be taught in our schools to our children that this is settled science, but that would not be true.
But here’s the kicker.  Unlike previous issues where, if we are wrong, we will live with the regrets, here it is the next generation which will suffer the consequences.
We are now going on record as saying that a child not only doesn’t need its natural mother and father, but any advantages of its having that are insignificant enough to be ignored.

If children grew on trees and didn’t require an upbringing, nobody would care about marriage, gay or otherwise.  For science to prove that it doesn’t matter whether children grow up with their natural fathers and mothers versus removing at least one and maybe never knowing who its actual parents are would take 20 years and involve thousands of children from birth to adulthood.  And who would be the ones paying the most for our mistakes?  The ones that we claimed to love the most, the children.