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

Friday, May 2, 2014

How to Stop the Killing

How to Stop the Killing

 A letter to the editor

Another child is tragically killed in Chicago, and people look for answers to this senseless violence.  Your editorial focuses on the two parts of this problem: the children and the guns. 
The emphasis seems to be on the guns, the need for more laws.  I think we forget the fact that we already have a law against killing people.  The gun used in the murder in question was stolen.  And we have laws also against stealing.  The gun used in this killing jammed, and the killer’s friend even fixed it and gave it back to the killer to shoot with.
The problem here is a lot bigger than guns.
You pointed out the need for a parent to teach their children.  I found it interesting and significant that you referred to “a parent’s responsibility to raise a child right” and not to ‘the parents’ responsibility.’  You implied correctly that most of the children involved here only have one parent close at hand. 
In our efforts to rid our society and culture of outworn tradition (viz. religion, specifically Christianity), we have separated sex from love, commitment, and marriage in the name of freedom and equality.  We have separated children from marriage in the name of personal autonomy.  And we have separated women from the home, again, in the name of equality. 
We laugh at and ridicule what we call the Ozzie and Harriett lifestyle as symbols of an unenlightened past where women are seen as serfs in a male-dominated society.  We’ve destroyed the home, which was always the primary source of teaching our children how to live.  We have taught our daughters that it is more important to have a career than to have a family.  And to be sure that we have as few women as possible left in the home, we sent millions of our better paying jobs overseas to ensure that everybody would have to work if a family wanted to afford a middle class lifestyle.
So there is no home to speak of anymore to raise our children and to teach them how to live. 
So you tell us we need to hire “more school social workers and counselors” to make up the difference, and “invest in the teaching of core social skills, such as anger management and conflict resolution.  . . . [because r]esearchers have long known that an emphasis on social skills in schools yields impressive gains in classroom performance and school culture.”
So we destroy the home and the answer is to hire more and more government employees, trained in teaching children how to adapt and get along but not how to live.  As the state assumes more and more responsibility for the lives of its constituents, it goes deeper and deeper into debt, as it costs the people more and more to pay for these services.
Teaching students “core social skills, such as anger management and conflict resolution” does not teach students to value human life or to know right from wrong.  It does not teach them to actually love or care about their classmates. 
Our schools and society used to embrace values from a Christian perspective.  The Bible used to be a part of the school curriculum.  Christianity teaches people to love one another, love your neighbor.  Now we teach our children to tolerate each other.  That means to put up with, or, in practice, to ignore each other.  It is only religion that teaches love.  There is no basis or reason in secularism, evolutionism, or science to love your neighbor.  Even social compact theories, while valuing the collective body, give no incentive to actually love anybody.
We have promoted diversity in the theory that we would learn from each other, but it often only widens the gulf between people, highlighting and even encouraging the language and cultural differences that emphasize how much we don’t have in common rather than what we do.  There is less and less glue to hold our society together as more and more people are seen as parts of smaller distinct groups.

As we have destroyed the family in the name of freedom and rid ourselves of our traditions (read: Christianity) in the name of progress, we find we are destroying our freedoms from another direction as the state assumes more and more control over our lives, which we seem to be no longer able to manage by ourselves.
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