poligion: The Qualities of a Leader: 7. Discernment

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 11, 2014

The Qualities of a Leader: 7. Discernment

The Qualities of a Leader:

7. Discernment

Some people can see the forest without actually seeing any particular tree. Others can see the trees but not the forest. To get the full picture, we need both ways of seeing things. One is not right and the other wrong. One is not even better than the other, though in any given situation one may be more needful than the other. The key is knowing which view is the more needed at the time.

Sometimes when someone is disagreeing with us, they are looking at the trees and we are looking at the forest. Or vice versa. The point is: if someone doesn’t see something just like we do, that doesn’t make them wrong. Sometimes we need to see the thing in another way.

We talk about whether a cup is half full or half empty. Well, the answer is not always simply a matter of whether one is an optimist or a pessimist. The realist asks: what is the cup supposed to be? If the cup is supposed to be full and it is not, then the question is: Why isn’t the cup full? Why is it half empty? But if the cup was empty and our goal is to fill the cup, then we are halfway there; the cup is now half full.

The optimist who says the cup is half full when it is really half empty may be trying to make the most of a disappointing situation, but if he or she is to be a leader, they need to know the difference.

The quality of discernment is the ability to know the difference. The leader needs this ability, because problems, obstacles, and challenges will come to face any worthwhile endeavor we attempt. When they occur, the leader has to understand the real nature of the situation. “Discernment enables a leader to see a partial picture, fill in the missing pieces intuitively, and find the real heart of the matter. If you can see the root issue of a problem, you can solve it.”

p. 48

Of all the qualities we have discussed so far, this seems to be the least teachable. If you don’t have it now, you may never get it. It may be the hardest to cultivate. Why? Because you will need to learn to see things in new ways. And how do you do that? One of the biggest ways is by listening. And asking questions.

Few things in life are clear-cut, cut-and-dried, obvious to everyone involved. Usually there is some subtle twist, another way of looking at something that can give it a whole new look. And guess what? That person with that opposite way of seeing things, the person with that different way of understanding something, may be on your team. They may be the person you get along with the least. They may be the person you need to listen to the most.