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, December 16, 2014

immigration, religious violence, money and elections


Responses to letters in the Daily Herald
Immigration
There are a few matters regarding immigration that are not being talked about in the news:
1)         Nobody is questioning the value of immigrants. But a nation has the right and needs to know just who is coming into its country.  And that includes the right of refusal.  Nobody has a right to move to another country.  And if a person will break the law with regard to entering the country, he no doubt will break other laws to stay in this country.  And why are some laws okay to break and not others?
2)         It is wrong to say that immigration legislation has been sitting idle in Congress for over a year.  What has been sitting idle has been an 800 page comprehensive bill with regard to immigration, a bill that must be accepted or rejected in its entirety.  That’s never a good option.
The House passed over 350 smaller bills that the Senate never even considered.  I am sure many of them had to do with immigration, but we need to wait until the Republicans have more people in the Senate to find out.
3)         The President’s actions were wrong, because all lawmaking is to be done through Congress, and his actions do a lot more than just defer some deportations.  The ultimate effect will be that it will only make it harder for Congress to pass any laws that are not as favorable to these immigrants as the President’s orders.

Religious violence
Several recent readers were critical of religion for all manner of violence in the world.  They make the mistake of attributing to religion something which is just a human trait not limited to religious people and of lumping all religions into the same bundle, as if they are all interchangeable.  That would be like saying that all governments are bad, because some governments have become oppressive at some time in history. 
In the last century when atheism finally achieved political power, it was directly responsible for the deaths of perhaps 100 million people in Russia, China, Cambodia, and Cuba.  People don’t need a god to motivate them to force other people to their way.

Money and elections
I agree that it is unfortunate and troubling when money plays such a large role in the outcome of elections.  The solution is simple, but it is not one that the government can fix and probably wouldn’t if it could. 
How is the public to learn about the issues necessary to intelligently decide how to vote?  They could do the research but that would take far more time than most people could give to it.  But the media make choices everyday about what news they consider newsworthy and what they will print in their newspapers or talk about on television or the radio.  They could make all this money irrelevant if they were more concerned about seeing that the public has accurate and helpful information about the candidates and the issues.











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