poligion: The Dismantling of America

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

The Dismantling of America

The Dismantling of America[1]

We like to read about and interview successful people. We admire them. Invariably we ask them the secrets of their success. Maybe we can learn something and become more successful ourselves.

I don’t think, though, that I have ever heard of a successful person who intentionally threw off all the principles and practices that brought that success thinking that that success was secure and could not be lost.

But this is exactly what has been happening in to our country. We are abandoning the very things that made us what we are. The difference is that as a country we don’t know what it was that made us great in the first place. We think it is democracy and free markets, but we are not a democracy, and that has been tried before with limited success. Free markets as understood today also definitely did not play a role in our country’s rise and, if anything, is contributing to our demise.

So what are the things that made America great? And why would I say that we are/were great? The simplest answer is that there is no country in the world that more people have wanted to come to.

The first factor was freedom, a freedom that we are giving up day after day, little by little, such that you almost need to go back a generation or two to see how much we have given up.

Look at the wording of the Bill of Rights. No laws “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion, unless, of course, it is in a school, or the military, or you work for the government, or it’s government property, or it’s in public.

No laws “abridging the freedom of speech,” unless, of course, anybody can be offended by it, or the words have been banned from public usage, or the speech isn’t politically correct, or it challenges current accepted truths.

“The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed,” except, of course, by taxes, fees, registrations, gun-free zones, and restrictions on how many bullets a gun can hold.

Freedom is inversely proportional to the size of government. The larger the government gets, the more our freedoms shrink.

When our country debated whether to adopt our present Constitution, Alexander Hamilton listed the functions of this new federal government. He named four. FOUR. That’s it. (Federalist Paper No. 23)

The common defense of the members (states)
The preservation of the public peace, as well against internal convulsions as external attacks
The regulation of commerce with other nations and between the States.
The superintendence of our intercourse (relations), political and commercial, with foreign countries.

For most of our history, the federal government was small. It was almost entirely funded by taxes on imports (more on that later). The War of 1812 and the Civil War temporarily introduced other taxes to pay for the war, but as noted, they were temporary.

If there were no government today, none, your buying power would. Your income won’t double, because not all taxes are taken out of your paycheck. But if you made $20 an hour, that is what you would take home. Now about half of that $20 pays for government and that isn’t even close to what it spends.

[1] This title is very similar to that of a book by Thomas Sowell. While I did not intentionally mimic his book’s title, the fact that I read the book and have a copy at home probably influenced my choice of words.