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

Sunday, November 23, 2014

Is the Equal Rights Amendment a good idea?

The Herald ran an article advocating the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (Nov. 21):  “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
There is an old saying: Never say never.  In political terms, that means: Beware of blanket laws that allow no exceptions, particularly when they make broad general statements.
The danger here is that an amendment so sweeping, so all-inclusive can and will have results that were never intended.  Someday a court will apply this amendment to something that the framers of the Amendment never dreamed of.  Today we are seeing a Constitutional Amendment from the Civil War era that ensured citizenship to ex-slaves being used as a driving force for millions of people to illegally enter our country. Another  Amendment passed at the same time written to see that ex-slaves are treated fairly under the law is now being used to redefine what marriage is, even nullifying State Constitutions and laws that had already defined it.
I would expect that at some point this amendment would be used to eliminate all gender based sporting events.  And knowing the government, this would mean that team sports are inherently discriminatory by setting physical standards that will be seen as meant to limit female participation.  Just like the military is being forced to lower standards to allow more women in more roles, sports teams will be required to make accommodations that would admit women.
In fact, all gender based facilities would eventually be phased out: locker rooms, rest rooms, single sex schools.  It won’t be immediately.  In fact, we will be told that this is not the intention and that this will never happen.  But it will.  It may take a generation or two.  Children will be taught complete gender equality from the earliest ages in schools and gender distinctions will be minimized if not ignored. 
I think there is some confusion on this concept of equality.  Are hammers and screwdrivers equal?  Is one inherently better or superior to the other?  Well, it depends if you are working with nails or screws.  Men and women are uniquely different.  As one example, woman can bear children and men cannot.  Should we allow women unique accommodations because of that fact? 

Frankly, I think in many ways a woman is lowering herself in her attempts to be considered equal to men.
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