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 29, 2015

a response to this "humanitarian crisis"

The Sun-Times (Dec. 29) printed a guest column telling us to put our fears aside and bring in thousands of Muslim refugees into our country.  What could go wrong?

In the old days, Americans were proud of their Western culture.  We taught it in our schools to our children, and immigrants were expected to assimilate into our society.  And they did.  Gladly.

But now we celebrate diversity, where every culture is as good as another, and American culture has a lot to be ashamed of.  So we no longer expect assimilation, and not surprisingly there is less of it.
Europe has taken in Muslim immigrants for generations now, and the continent is in turmoil.  Watch some of the thousands of videos on youtube coming out of Europe showing the clash of cultures.

We forget too that Muslims have a problem unique to their religion.  At any given time, they can become radicalized and start to kill people.  This can happen without warning, and apparently it can happen to anyone, Muslim, that is.  Radical Christians or Jews may pray more, but they don’t blow themselves up or shoot lots of people.  There is a worldwide epidemic of this going around right now, and it is irresponsible to think that we are not endangering the lives of people here by bringing in thousands of people most likely to be infected with this disease.  We forget that when people move here, their families are here forever.

There are between 19 and 55 million refugees in the world today (depending on who’s counting).  Are these the only ones we can help?  And is making them a permanent part of our country the only or best way to help them?  Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to provide assistance until the war is over, and they can return to their own homes?


We have a responsibility to the people living here first.  Sorry, but that’s what governments are supposed to do.  Take care of their own people first. 

Monday, December 28, 2015

Muslims and human rights

A Herald political cartoon (Dec. 26) touched on three hot topics and got them all wrong.

It began talking about “human rights violations” of Muslims committed or suggested in our country.  Some would refer this to the suggested suspension of Muslims entering our country.  They forget that entering another country is never a right but a privilege, except perhaps if you are fleeing across a border to save your life, but certainly not if it is across an ocean. 

I just read that as of 2013, there were over a million people on our terror watch list, probably 99+% of whom are Muslim.  That is more than 1 in ten the number of Muslims currently living in our country.  Why should we spend billions of dollars every year monitoring them to see if or when they commit an act of terror, hopefully before they do?  We recently saw a case where we failed and 14 people did.

We are told that they don’t represent true Islam, yet the entire Muslim world is divided between Sunnis and Shiites who will go to war in an instant over which is the truer Islam.  And there are very few Muslims countries in the world where Christians or Jews would feel comfortable yet alone safe.

The question must be asked whether there is something inherent in Islam that explains all these Muslims involved in mass killings.   This is not a problem with other religions, only Islam.  We are told that these are only violent people who use religion as an excuse for their violence.  But again.  Why is it only in Islam that we have this problem?

Many Muslims in our country defend Islam, denying the violence link, but that’s a bit like calling City Hall or the police department and asking if there is any corruption there.  Better to bring in somebody from the outside to answer that question.

The cartoon mentions Gitmo, suggesting that this is where human rights violations are indeed common.  The Guantanamo Bay prison is where we keep our prisoners of war.  Countries at war do this to keep enemy combatants away from the fight until the war is over.  It’s unfortunate this war is taking so long.  Our country is trying to fight a kinder, gentler war than in the past, and those don’t end quickly.  If we have used harsh interrogation tactics, the intent has been to gain information.  Our policy has never been to inflict pain merely for our own enjoyment.

Lastly, the cartoon mentions this common refrain about who we are as a nation.  Let me tell you who we are as a nation.

We are a nation that will recall a million pounds of ground beef if we think there is a possibility it might be contaminated.  We are the last nation in the world to approve a cancer treating drug, because we want to be absolutely sure this drug is safe for use.

There has been a worldwide epidemic of Muslim terrorism for decades now.  Exercising some caution with regard to Muslim immigration is indeed called for, particularly since Muslims can apparently become radicalized without warning at any given time.  This is not a problem with any other identifiable group of people.

If Muslims were airbags, they would have been recalled a long time ago.  And if they were imported airbags, they would never enter our country.


Trump is right.  We have a lot of stupid people running our county.

Friday, December 25, 2015

Should we believe in climate change?

The Sun-Times (Dec. 14) and at least one reader (Dec.24) believes that it is important that we elect a President who believes in climate change.  This decision will have long lasting major implications for our country.  Even if our country did everything that these proponents of climate change want, the impact on global temperatures, even by their calculations, would be minimal, yet the costs would be enormous.

Personally, I am skeptical of the whole thing.  Why?  Several reasons, but the first fact we need to understand is that prior to the age of satellites, the very idea of knowing an average global temperature was impossible.  So that means we only have about 60 years of reliable data. 

Yet we know of a number of long periods of cold and warm ‘ages’ lasting hundreds of years, and these were all prior to the industrial age.  I understand that roughly around 800 A.D. to 1200 A.D. there was a warm spell, which allowed the Vikings to sail to the Western hemisphere.  There followed then another period of cold that lasted around another 400 years.   


Sixty years of precise data about a climate that they say has existed for billions of years is not enough to prove a long term trend that requires us to further depress our economy and to spend (borrow) untold billions of dollars on government approved and funded projects that will most likely just profit the insiders with the connections, like with Solyndra, where an Obama donor got billions of dollars for a company that soon went bankrupt.

what's wrong with affordable housing

A reader (Dec. 24) is disappointed by some of the responses to the proposed affordable housing in Wilmette.  I am one of those who oppose this, and I wrote to both the village and the organization involved to express my concerns.

‘Affordable’ is code for subsidized, and federal tax credits is another way the government spends money it doesn’t have in a way where they can avoid calling it spending.


The government feels compelled to solve every hardship and problem of society by spending money on it such that we are now $19 trillion in debt.  This is not only irresponsible but criminal.  We used to deal with problems like this through private charitable organizations.  Relying on the government has sapped and stifled true public involvement in the lives of others.

A letter to my son

Hi ______

You are my son.  I love you more than anything else in the world.

There is one way that I have let you down, and I am sorry for that.  Let me try to make it up to you.

There is nothing more important in life than God.  You’ve already experienced a miracle in your life when I saved it that day.  But then you said that you didn’t remember anything.  I remember it very vividly, and it makes me sick.  That noise I heard in the kitchen when I knew something was wrong.  What if I hadn’t been there right at that time?  I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t had that heart attack.  I should have been at work.

Lifting that weight off you was a miracle.  I had to lift it over that curling attachment.  I don’t even remember doing that.  I grabbed the bar and set it on the floor.  I don’t remember anything in between.

You went into convulsions.  I immediately put my hands on your chest and neck and commanded you to be healed in Jesus’ name.  And you were.   Most people I am sure at that point would have run upstairs to call 911.   You might have been a vegetable by then.  I don’t know.  But you were fine and went back to your workout. 

Nobody knows how life works out.  What I mean is that nobody knows how much God influences or brings together events.  This event required a number of ‘chance’ circumstances for everything to have worked out.

I had to be close by when it happened.  Why was I home at all?  If I didn’t believe in healing like I do, your life today could be living in a wheelchair or being dead. 
One thing I do know about God is that He wants and expects to be a very big part of our lives.  Actually first.   The most important thing in life to do is to love Him with all of our heart, soul, strength, and might.  Those are His words. 

But what does that look like?  It shows itself in different ways with different people.  But there is at least one common thread.  It affects one’s whole life such that you can’t do it in secret.  It changes your priorities, the things you do, the things you love, how you spend your time, everything.  God is what gives any real sense of meaning to life.  Without God we are just random molecules that collide and have reactions with other molecules.  There is no real point in living apart from just enjoying yourself until you die.  Doing good things for other people can give one some satisfaction, but life is just a matter of staying busy so as not to get bored, trying to minimize any pain or discomfort until we die and go into oblivion.

But God says that we are created in His image.  That means that we are not just physical beings but that we have a mind and a soul.  Our lives exist and will exist apart from our bodies, and there is no real end to our existence.  Heaven or hell.  Life has consequences.  We have purpose.  Life is about something. 

Everybody will have a different specific mission in life, but there are some common threads.  The Bible is our instruction manual, our guidebook, the rulebook, our education in the fine workings of life, the communication from headquarters, our Father’s heart to heart talk with us, our spiritual food for the soul that we need to feed on, our light in the darkness, our compass giving us directions, our protection against error, deception, temptation, or bad choices. 

Anybody who doesn’t read the Bible regularly and tries to learn it doesn’t have a clue about God and life.  They are walking in darkness and are lucky that they don’t walk off a cliff.  I saw an old Bible that you had sitting in our attic.  Do you have another one?

Another common thread is church.  I know I don’t go, and the reasons are actually complicated.  I certainly would rather be in church on Sundays than working.  When I started in this business, they didn’t even sell meat on Sundays.  But I wanted to go into the ministry, but that didn’t work out for a lot of reasons. But this is after a lifetime of going to church, so what I am missing now is not as critical, at least in most ways.  It’s not as important for a person who graduated from college to go to school compared with somebody who never finished grammar school.  Church is about a lot more than just getting an education, but I believe God is preparing me for something else.  But that’s another story.

You and I are both loners.  That’s why we work out with weights instead of joining a basketball or bowling league.  But the Bible says that church is like a human body.  Each part has a different function, but they all work together to form a person.  So the church is like a huge team, an army, a nation, a multi-national corporation.  It has a mission of transforming the world, and it can’t do that as a bunch of individuals.  A running back is going nowhere without blockers. 

Now if none of this is making your heart beat faster in anticipation, then there is something that is missing.  Your life isn’t plugged in.  The switch is shut off.  The motor is out of gas.  There are no batteries.  The thing is broken.  You need a new one. 

A new what?  A new life.  Spiritually we all start out dead.  Young children are aware of God more than we are, but as they get older, it’s like the light just keeps getting dimmer.  They need an awakening, a new beginning.  Actually it’s called a new birth.  And it’s a lot like getting married.  Life is full of so many analogies that picture this reality of God.  That’s why so much of life is the way it is.

Marriage is a choice where two lives become one.  A relationship with God starts with a choice.  Not always conscious whet n it begins, but a definite choice nonetheless.  Marriage has a ceremony that marks the beginning of it, and sex is called the consummation of the marriage.  Without it the marriage is not complete.  But sex alone doesn’t make the marriage; both are required.

So accepting God, or beginning a life with God, requires a conscious beginning.  The Bible calls this baptism, though the Church has kind of garbled the message.  It emphasizes the fact of a personal commitment to Christ, sometimes called asking Jesus into your heart.  Baptism is often neglected.  

But both are important.  Just like a wedding is a ceremony, it needs vows.  A wedding without vows is just a ceremony, and vows without a wedding don’t hold weight. 

So a life with God needs a beginning.  We aren’t always sure when it begins, but we can tell if it has begun by what we see afterwards.  If you plant a seed, you will see something grow.  If nothing is growing, there is either no seed or it never took.  And if it is growing, it will be seen by everyone who looks at it.

I know you accept the Christian worldview.  A religion is a description of life, basically telling what is true in life.  But it is also a person, a relationship.  And like getting married, it involves a commitment.  You know a lot of people, but there will only be one who you are married to.  This person becomes the center of your life.  The one you always go home to.  And God is the same way.
Jesus is the one who connects us with God.  (Deep theology here.)  God in Himself is just too big and too holy to connect with human beings as we are.  Not originally but something happened early on that changed things.  So Jesus’ death and resurrection make it all possible.  And Jesus is the one who we get married to, though He is actually the husband, but that’s another story as well.

When we invite Jesus into our lives, commit ourselves to Him, accept His as our savior, get baptized, something happens.  Again, this part gets a little garbled at times as well, but we become born again.  The Bible talks about having someone lay hands on us (this is another way the church is important), and we receive the Holy Spirit.  Most Christians don’t do this, but I think they are missing something important.  But anyway, things change.  God starts working in our lives to change us into his image.  

It’s a slow, lifelong process, but it’s like stopping your car, turning around, and going in the opposite direction.  But there should also be desires and a new passion for God.  We finally realize just what God is all about, and we are overwhelmed.  They call that worship.  Churches try to do that on Sundays, and it’s always better to do that in groups, though it takes place all the time in people who have encountered God.

So Christmas is in a few days.  This is why it is so big.  God entered the world so He could have an intimate relationship with people like us. 

You grew up in a family where we always believed all this, but just like you moved out and started on your own, your life with God requires just as decisive of a move.  At home we cooked your meals and made many of your important decisions for you.  Now you do that.  Same with God.  If you had made this decision with God, I think at least mom and I would be more sure that you had. 

God gave us families for a lot of reasons.  But know that He loves you more than we do.  And He wants your love and respect just like we do, only on a much bigger scale. 

Everything I have done for you in life is for nothing, if this part isn’t right.  My life isn’t complete until I know that my sons love God as much as I do and that they want His will for their lives.

love,

pops


Saturday, December 5, 2015

Two Invented Diseases that will Destroy our Country

Did you see it?  Did you hear about it?  Possibly the scariest things I have seen or heard in my life.  Just happened.  No, not the shootings.  After that.  On the news.

I call these things diseases.  Invented diseases.  Few things scare people like diseases.  You never know when it will strike, and most people feel powerless when it does.

The first is the disease of radicalism.  It can take hard working average Americans and turn them into mass murderers almost overnight.  One day they are normal as heck, and the next they are bloodthirsty killers.  No warning signs.  No symptoms.  It just happens.  Apparently it can happen to any of us.

At least this is how it is presented.  And they expect people to actually believe it.  They seem to believe it themselves.

And this radicalism apparently has nothing to do with the religion of peace. 

Let me quickly introduce this second invented disease, because there is a close connection between the two.  One will shed light on the other.

The other disease is political correctness.  Now I know that has been around for a long time, but much of it has been harmless.  We talk about people being intellectually challenged rather than retarded or humans rather than the generic man, as in humankind vs. mankind.

But there is a pathological side to it where you are trying so hard to put a positive spin on things you miss some things that can put you in danger.

We talk about Islamic extremists or Islamic radicals, and then we want to say that they have nothing to do with Islam.  But we miss something.

I have known or known of radical Christians.  They might spend the night in prayer, they might fast for a week or longer, they might stand on street corners and preach to the people walking past.  Now all the moderate Christians believe in prayer.  They know a bit about fasting and that many Christians do it from time to time when they are serious in prayer about something.  They also believe it is important on reaching people for God, though they can’t see themselves doing street evangelism. 

I have known of radical Catholics.  I went to a Catholic church for a while.  I love the quiet before the Mass.  The whole atmosphere speaks of worship and God’s glory.  But then there was this man who kept saying the Hail Mary out loud real loud, over and over.  I started wearing ear plugs before the service so I could get some peace and quiet again.  A radical Catholic.

There are orthodox Jews who only eat Kosher, won’t even turn on a light switch or the heat on the Sabbath, and let the hair on the sides of their face grow long.  All these practices have some basis in their holy book, the Bible, or The Torah.  Radicals, or orthodox as they call them.

So the question that nobody wants to ask is:  if a Muslim becomes radicalized or extreme, what Muslim practice or practices are they taking to the extreme?  That’s what radicals and extremists do.  They take something that everybody in their group does or is supposed to do, or is written somewhere in their holy book that is a good thing, and then they do it far more than anyone else.  They do it to the extreme.

Why do all these radical Muslims think it is important to kill people?  Can’t they show their radicalness in some other way?  Why aren’t they praying ten times a day instead of only five?  Why not visit Mecca every year and not just once in a lifetime?  Why not fast more than just that one month?  Why not give twice the amount an average Muslim gives to the needy?

Either these Islamic terrorists are just bloody murderers, or they are radical Muslims.  For some reason they all think they are doing this in the name of Allah.  Why would they think that this is what Allah wants?

One way to see what a radical Muslim looks like is to look at regular Muslims.  Our leaders and 
media think the way to do this is to interview Muslims in our country.  No.  The way to know what moderate Islam looks like is to look at Muslim countries to see what they do when they don’t have to put up a good front, or try to make a good impression, where they don’t have to try to blend in.
And what do we find?  With no real exception, we find a culture that is hostile to both Christians and Jews.  It is true that the Church has had a long history in a number of Muslim countries, most notably Egypt, Syria, and Iraq.  The Church actually did alright when those countries were run by dictators, but when the dictators left, for whatever reason, Christians were either forced to flee or face almost certain death.  Same for Jewish people.

Now these diseases of becoming radicalized or political correctness see no connection between radicalism and Islam.  Radicalism can happen to anyone regardless of one’s religious or cultural background.  And they see nothing inherent in Islam that would explain why they have so many radicals and why they all manifest their zeal in the same bloodthirsty ways. 

So trying to see the best in everybody, the United States and Europe are doing their best to bring in as many Muslims as they can, and they see this as a good thing without any real dangers here.  Go to  youtube and watch the countless videos coming out of Europe about what happens when the number of Muslims in a country reaches a certain critical mass.  If we can’t or won’t see what is happening, we will be powerless to stop it when it happens.  Why would we want to throw away all that we have? 


It’s happening slowly like the frog being boiled to death.  If it happened suddenly, we would all wake up and know we are in danger.  But it is happening slowly.  We accept a little bit here, a little bit there, and then it’s too late to undo.

Friday, December 4, 2015

Vetting the refugees: a page from their handbook

A lot of people are concerned that these Muslim refugees that our President wants to bring into our country are properly vetted.  I was able to obtain a page from the vetter’s handbook that we use to vet them, and I reproduce it here.

6)         You have a neighbor who is an evangelical Christian.  He invites you to his house for a Bible study.  What do you do?
            a)         Go to it.  Maybe you can then invite him to your mosque and tell him about Islam.
            b)         Thank him for the invitation, but say that you would rather not at this time.
            c)         Kill him.
7)         You are worried that your young daughter will be corrupted in modern American culture.  What do you do?
            a)         Get her involved in a youth group at the mosque to keep her busy.
            b)         Get her a female genital mutilation.
            c)         Kill her.
8)         Your nephew has become a born-again Christian.  He wants to talk to you about Jesus.  What do you do?
            a)         Ask your imam to go see him.
            b)         Talk to your Muslim community with people with similar problems seeking their advice.
            c)         Kill him.
9)         Your child’s teacher at school tells your child that all cultures are equal, and that we need to be tolerant of other cultures.  Your child agrees with her.  What do you do?
            a)         Meet with the teacher and explain how Islam is an exception to this rule.
            b)         Kill her.
            c)         Kill her and your child.
10)       A co-worker got into a discussion about religion and said that all religions are alike, manmade inventions, and people like Muhammad are just charlatans.  What do you do?
            a)         Engage him in discussion and ask him to show evidence for his statements.
            b)         Invite him to your mosque so he can see the truth of your religion.
            c)         Kill him.
11)       Your teenage daughter has begun dating a non-Muslim boy.  What do you do?
            a)         Have the adult members of the family talk to her of her responsibility to her family and her religion.
            b)         Ban her from seeing this boy anymore and restrict her social life.
            c)         Kill her.
­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­______________________________________________________
Scoring:           There are no right or wrong answers to these questions.  What matters is that you answered the questions truthfully and sincerely.  Who are we to judge the religion or culture of another?  In the West, we consider all religions and cultures to be equal.  All we ask is that these are sincere beliefs.

You have passed the vetting process.  Welcome to the United States!  You will be contacted shortly about where and when you may move into your new home, and your government assistance payments will begin a week or so after you move in.  Again, welcome to your new home!

Do we need more gun laws?

Our country once banned alcohol.  It kept a lot of people from getting it, but it gave rise to a huge underground business.  Remember Al Capone?  We ended up repealing the ban.

Guns have always been a part of the American way of life.  Our Founders thought this was a good thing.  Guns were a safeguard against dictators like they saw so often in Europe.

If guns have now become a problem after 240 years, we should first ask why.  What happened?  What changed in American culture?  Guns didn’t just now become available to the public.

I will say that this is due to the rise of the secular society, the marginalization of religion and the removal of it from our public schools, the multiculturalism that refuses to take moral stands on right and wrong until something gets really, really big.


Schools used to have rifle clubs; now we have metal detectors.

Thursday, December 3, 2015

The one thing missing in all this discussion about the Syrian refugees

When I read articles about the Syrian refugee crisis, it usually reminds me of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes.  There is something important here which nobody wants to mention. 
Refugees are not abandoned and abused puppies who will become good pets if given the right home.  Refugees are people whose descendants will become a permanent part of our country, in numbers far greater than that of those who first came here.. 

This latest article in the Sun-Times (December 3) wants us to think of all refugees as simply people who we need to let live in our country.  This is the only way apparently that we can help them.  The author makes no mention of the fact that the refugees in question here are almost all Muslims. 

Many people today find it necessary at this point to ask why this is significant.  People are people who just yearn to live free and go on welfare.  (Sorry.)  No, the real reason why this is important is that Muslims only seem to assimilate to another culture when they are in the smallest minority.  As their numbers reach a critical mass, you will be asked first to accommodate them and later to assimilate to their culture.

In the West, we teach in all our schools now that all cultures are equal.  None is better than another.  So why should we expect anyone to embrace ours? 

But Muslims have been moving to Europe for generations now, and the results are in.  Europe is being torn apart as the two cultures clash, and it is only European culture which is acquiescing.  After all, Europeans (and Americans) are taught to be tolerant.   That is another word for being passive. 

Anyway, the Europe we had come to know and love from our history books and travel, the knights, the castles, and the cathedrals, is looking more and more like a third world country.  Don’t take my word for it.  Go to youtube and watch the countless videos coming out of Europe showing how Muslim migration is changing Europe. 

Our Constitution begins like this:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of ...

This is what our government is supposed to do for the American people.  We fought a war for the right to have a government that would do these things.


Bringing in thousands of Muslims who will in time become millions into our country will not form a more perfect union, will not insure [sic] domestic tranquility, will not promote the general welfare, and will not secure the blessings of liberty to our children (posterity).

Sunday, November 29, 2015

It’s Time for a Second American Revolution

It’s time for a second American Revolution.  Wait.  Let me correct that.  It’s past time.  If the Founding Fathers were alive today, we would already be either in a second revolution or it would have been over.

Why do I say this?

We need to look first at what they said at the time of the first one, beginning with the Declaration of Independence. 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident:That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that,

to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,

deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;

that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and

organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.  Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that

mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism,

it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.”

The Founders said that we have rights as human beings given to us by God which include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Government exists to see that we have and enjoy these rights, and governments derive their power from the consent of the people. 

When government works against those purposes, the people have a right, even a duty, to alter or abolish it.

But wait.  Isn’t this what elections are for?

The election process has become so corrupt in our country as to often dilute if not thwart the will of the people:

1)         First, representative districts have become so gerrymandered that there are few choices for many political offices (most, in my state) and the same people who stay in office become less responsive to the needs and wants of the people as they rely more on certain people to help them stay in office.   
2)         The number of illegal immigrants is so high that their numbers inflate population numbers to skew the number of representatives a state is legally allowed to have, shifting political power to states more likely to favor a role of government that is more actively involved in the lives of its people, in a word, socialism.  This is contrary to our Founders’ vision of liberty and pursuit of happiness, because it involves the government controlling more of your labor and wealth to use as it sees fit rather than you doing that yourself.  
            This also gives a state more electoral votes than it should have in Presidential elections. 
3)         Political parties, while an early feature in American history, greatly limit the choices for political office and essentially block any person not in those parties from being elected.  Having a third person in most elections allows a person to win an election with less than a majority of the vote, usually giving the election to the candidate of the other major political party who should not have won.
4)         Our government has created so much government dependency that it is impossible for people to vote to end it when they are the recipients.
5)         We have lost our moral compass so that parties will do whatever is necessary to win an election.  The city I grew up in had (has) a motto: Vote early and vote often.  Many states and cities are so welcoming to illegal immigrants and so resistant to means of safeguarding the integrity of elections, it would be naïve if you thought illegal residents are not voting in numbers that are significant.
6)         Media have become so lax and useless in their role as informants of the public that they make it necessary for people seeking political office to raise enormous amounts of money to get their message out.  This ends up giving us politicians who owe a lot of very rich people a lot of very large favors

And when these politicians do get elected, they find a government so unwieldy that gradual change won’t help it.  It’s like a person so obese, he is confined to bed.  To try to reduce his weight enough so he can resume normal activity solely by diet would take years, if it is at all possible.  His metabolism has become so slow, he would probably die before achieving any kind of mobility.  This person would require radical surgery to remove an enormous amount of his bulk.  I don’t even know if that is possible.  Can you imagine eliminating a million government employees?

It’s true that our Founders wanted to make change a slow process in government.  That helps to prevent sudden mass swings on government policies based on public emotions, like we saw happen with the gay marriage issue.  We’ve lost a lot of that slow process.  Courts can now change major issues overnight.  Doesn’t matter what the people want.

But after several hundred years, small things have become big things.  Small changes over time become big changes.  But small changes are easier to accept when they occur.  Incremental changes in the same direction over generations will produce huge changes, but newer generations won’t know what was lost, how far we have come as a nation, or how it was supposed to look in the first place.  We keep getting ‘a new normal’, and only the older people know what the old normal was.

One example is that of government agencies.  Originally all lawmaking was to be done by Congress.  With the creation of all these various agencies, thousands of regulations are made every year, which have the impact of laws.  They just don’t call them laws.  Otherwise, people might wake up and realize what’s happening.

Another example is government assistance.  We all think that having some kind of safety net for people is a good concept.  But the number of people or households who aren’t receiving some kind of government assistance keeps shrinking, and the government has to borrow money it can’t pay back to pay for it.  If you talk about cutting some of this, be prepared for being portrayed as a heartless SOB.  But talking about cutting these benefits rarely happens, because politicians are afraid of losing these votes.

All these things have been going on for years, starting small and incrementally increasing in size and scope, burdening our nation with debt and diminishing the freedom and wealth of those who live here.  But like the frog being slowly boiled to death as the temperature of the water rises, those who call for major changes are labelled extremists and out-of-touch with the national consensus.

We all know these are problems, but at least they seem to be errors of judgment, natural human tendencies and faults.  Decisions made for short term gain but failing to see the long term outcomes. 

But what about government actions that are more intentional?

It’s Time for a Second American Revolution Part 2

The Founders wrote something else besides the Declaration of Independence: the Constitution.  We hear a lot about whether things are constitutional or not, but we miss the overall goal of the thing.  That will tell us whether we are even heading in the right direction at all.  The answer to this is found in the Preamble to the Constitution:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

All those other problems of government can be excused to an extent, but this is where we can see the real intent of government.  I believe this is where our Founders would take their stand and say, “No more.”

The first purpose of our government as listed in our founding document is to “form a more perfect union.” 

It would be helpful before looking at the role of government to look a bit at some background.

When the court called supreme removed religion (Christianity) from our schools and our public life, something that had been a part of them for almost 200 years before our nation’s founding and 170 years after its founding, something had to be found to replace it. 

A religion is not simply a system of one’s personal beliefs about God.  It’s an all-compassing worldview that describes all of life.  Nations have this as well as individuals.  So while not everybody in our country was a Christian, Christianity was the worldview under which our country ran and maintained itself.  That is why Christmas could be a national holiday, why we have a Thanksgiving, why stores and businesses were closed on Sundays for most of our history, why the Ten Commandments were posted in schools, courtrooms and government buildings all across the country, and why there were so few or no government assistance programs until the 1930s.  Churches and Christian organization did all that for free, i.e. free of public taxpayer dollars.

When that court said in 1947 that government cannot “aid religion,” it eventually removed all mention of God from our schools and public life.  A few things remained like the motto on our coins and a few words in the Pledge of Allegiance, but education became completely secular.  Everything happened in life without God causing it, motivating it, guiding it, blessing it, and there certainly was nothing that He commanded people to do so that they knew how to live. 

So a new moral code and worldview were needed to fill the void.  It was obviously secularism, but there was no complete moral system yet.  It had to be made up as we went along. 

The Ten Commandments were reduced to five guiding inviolable rules: multi-culturalism, tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.  Only tolerance was the responsibility of individuals.  The others were the responsibility of government.  But you had to believe in all of these to be an accepted member of society.  If you rejected any of these, you are deemed as racist, phobic, bigoted, extreme, right-wing, or any combination of these.

Again, these changes happened gradually.  With each passing generation, people knew less and less about our founding documents and what concepts like church and state meant.  So people learned to live with these things.

But something changed.   A new attitude of government developed.  It is now:

We know better than you.  We will tell you what to do, we will do what we want, and you will like it.

So go back to the Preamble.  The first goal of government mentioned is to form a more perfect union.

And just how do we do that?  For years the government has been pushing diversity.  I don’t want to push exact word meanings here, but diversity means “unlike in kind or character” and “implies both distinctness and marked contrast such diverse interests as dancing and football>.”

I’m not talking about, say, a job field that is almost entirely homogenous in its work force because people in that work force have sought to exclude others who are different.  I would submit it is wrong to lower any kinds of standards for those jobs where we get less qualified people just so we can achieve some kind of diversity.

But the kind of diversity I am talking about has primarily to do with cultures, where all cultures are considered as equal, and there is nothing unique or better about American culture that is worth keeping or protecting.  So there is no reason to favor or not favor any groups of people from coming to our country.  In fact those with cultures most like ours are almost barred from entering, and those with the greatest differences are not only preferred but sought out.

Our Founders wanted and expected and formed our government the way they did because they wanted the nation united.  How is a nation to be perfectly united when its people can’t even agree on the most basic questions about life?  Married people have a hard time achieving a perfect union, and they enter that relationship willingly and after having committed themselves to each other in love.  Asking or expecting people to unite who don’t share the same culture or values is asking quite a bit.  I don’t believe a nation has ever done that before.

The government is supposed to make things easier for us, not harder.  It is not supposed to force things on its people that they naturally see problems with.  That is not the role of government.

The Preamble goes on: to insure [sic] domestic tranquility. 

Do you know what tranquility means?  Freedom from disturbance or agitation.  It is not the government’s job to force things on the American people and tell us to like it.  No, they would say we are to tolerate it.  Or, put up with it.

The latest of a long series of government imposed changes to our country is its immigration policies.  It is intent on bringing into our country as many people as possible with apparently the greatest cultural differences.   Immigrants from countries that helped build our country are routinely denied entry in favor of people the most disparate.

And now the government wants to bring in hundreds of thousands of refugees from a culture as far different from ours as any can be.  These same peoples have been migrating to Europe for generations now.  While there are exceptions, they are not assimilating.  They want to create in Europe the life they had back home.  They want Europe to become like them.  When their numbers are large enough, they will vote their way of life into existence, and you will learn to like it or live with it.  Did you know that Christmas is very offensive to them?  Not the part about exchanging gifts and having family over, but the part about the birth of Jesus, the Son of God.             

In the past, we made all of our goods here, so we could absorb new immigrants readily, because as the numbers of people grew, so did the jobs.   But our government essentially drove the jobs overseas, and now most of the new people coming here will be on public assistance for years.  Paid for with borrowed money that we will never pay off.

Sure, we have always been a nation of immigrants.  European immigrants.  Was that because we were racists?  No.  That’s because it was Europeans who founded our country, and they thought it wise to preserve the make-up of our country. 

European countries were all Christian nations, or what could also be described as Western Civilization.  Our schools used to all teach classes on Western Civilization.  There were reasons why science developed in the West, and human rights, and property rights, and immense wealth.   Even the poorest people in the United States had more than almost anyone else in the world.

The main difference between the United States and Europe is that the United States had the concept of equality of people and did not have a state church.  Europe had a noble class from which they had their kings, queens, and royalty.

Does this mean that these other peoples cannot assimilate, or melt in our melting pot?  No, but it does mean that previously there was a lot less to assimilate and that they were more likely to do so. 

But we also had a common all-encompassing worldview that covered all of life.  And we taught this to our children in our schools, and it guided our public life.

Our Founders broke from the British government, because, in a word, it was not protecting and promoting our “safety and happiness.”  Got that?  They expected the government to contribute to the happiness of its people.  And that was worth fighting for.

Government is supposed to work to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare. and secure “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  Our government is hellbent on doing everything possible to divide our nation, ensure unrest and discord, promote the welfare of everybody else over its own people, and cripple our posterity with an unconscionable amount of debt.

Our government is miserably failing the task given to it by our Founders.  Maybe that is worded wrong.  That would assume they are even trying.  If the Founders were alive today, they would be thoroughly fed up to the point of abolishing our government and starting over.  Unfortunately, there aren’t enough people in leadership positions today who have the knowledge and wisdom of our Founders to make it right.  And the people don’t have the moral and Christian values to have the self-restraint to shun government assistance and the knowledge and strength to debunk secularism, restore a Christian worldview, and correct the false narratives as to our nation’s history. 


In other words, we need a revolution, but we don’t have the wherewithal right now to make things better.  We need a revival among the Christians, an active engagement of them in public life, like they used to do before government made much of it illegal, and, lastly, we need an education in American history so that we really know what our country is all about.

A response to the plea for Syrian refugees

The United States is $19,000,000,000,000 in debt.  It plans to house, clothe, feed, provide medical insurance for, and further subsidize thousands of people for about 5 years.  If you were broke, would you borrow thousands of dollars that you could never pay back to feed homeless people?

The House of Representatives passed a bill overwhelmingly to stop taking in more refugees until they were assured that they were screened better.  There is a very good chance there are people among them who want to kill large numbers of our people like in Paris.  Would you open your house to homeless people when the police were warning everybody that a lot of criminals were posing as homeless people to gain access to people’s homes?

The House controls federal spending, but if the President rejects what the House offers, the government could shut down.  The House could fund everything in the world but this one program, the President could then refuse the whole thing.  This is wrong, but we have gotten so screwed up, it could happen.  So then the government would shut down, and whose fault would it be?

The President would blame those crazy Tea Party extremists in the House who are putting partisan politics over the welfare of the country, and the media would buy that and tell everybody that the Republican Party is run by a bunch of crazies who oppose everything the President wants, partly because he is black and they oppose everything he has ever done.  But also because there are a bunch of extremists that everybody needs to be aware of and get rid of.

As I said in my article, there are 55,000,000 refugees in the world today.  That doesn’t count all the people who are just dirt poor and who may just be dying early from starvation and disease.  So what’s the best way to help them?

Our country used to be the richest nation in the world.  After WW2, we began foreign aid programs to help people all over the world.  When our nation lost its Christian roots due to supreme court decisions, the country gradually adopted socialistic policies to replace the role of the church, and the country went into debt fast, and we now have more debt than any country in the world.  All this lowers the standard of living for everybody who lives here, and the economy could collapse impoverishing millions.

There are people who are using the ruse of helping people to keep borrowing and spending money to bring the downfall of our way of life.  A lot of people would contend that the best way to help people who are poor is to show them how to get rich.  Why did the United States become rich yet other nations much older than ours continued to stay poor?  They weren’t doing the things that we were doing.


But refugees?  What about all the Christian refugees who being driven out of Muslim countries and slaughtered if they stay?  Why aren’t we helping them?  They assimilate quite well in our society.  Muslims generally don’t, as evidenced by what is happening now all throughout Europe.  Take some time to watch the videos on youtube.  We are having a lot of people who came over years ago who are joining ISIS or other terror groups.  The Boston bombers were refugees who came over as children.  Muslim thinking doesn’t usually align very well in Western civilization.  There are exceptions of course, but we are inviting a hose of serious problems that we don’t need.  We could help millions of people who would pose almost no problems but we choose to help the ones with the highest risk.  Why?

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Compassion for refugees: a response to a Facebook post

The United States is $19,000,000,000,000 in debt.  It plans to house, clothe, feed, provide medical insurance for, and further subsidize thousands of people for about 5 years.  If you were broke, would you borrow thousands of dollars that you could never pay back to feed homeless people?

The House of Representatives passed a bill overwhelmingly to stop taking in more refugees until they were assured that they were screened better.  There is a very good chance there are people among them who want to kill large numbers of our people like in Paris.  Would you open your house to homeless people when the police were warning everybody that a lot of criminals were posing as homeless people to gain access to people’s homes?

The House controls federal spending, but if the President rejects what the House offers, the government could shut down.  The House could fund everything in the world but this one program, the President could then refuse the whole thing.  This is wrong, but we have gotten so screwed up, it could happen.  So then the government would shut down, and whose fault would it be?

The President would blame those crazy Tea Party extremists in the House who are putting partisan politics over the welfare of the country, and the media would buy that and tell everybody that the Republican Party is run by a bunch of crazies who oppose everything the President wants, partly because he is black and they oppose everything he has ever done.  But also because there are a bunch of extremists that everybody needs to be aware of and get rid of.

As I said in my article, there are 55,000,000 refugees in the world today.  That doesn’t count all the people who are just dirt poor and who may just be dying early from starvation and disease.  So what’s the best way to help them?

Our country used to be the richest nation in the world.  After WW2, we began foreign aid programs to help people all over the world.  When our nation lost its Christian roots due to supreme court decisions, the country gradually adopted socialistic policies to replace the role of the church, and the country went into debt fast, and we now have more debt than any country in the world.  All this lowers the standard of living for everybody who lives here, and the economy could collapse impoverishing millions.

There are people who are using the ruse of helping people to keep borrowing and spending money to bring the downfall of our way of life.  A lot of people would contend that the best way to help people who are poor is to show them how to get rich.  Why did the United States become rich yet other nations much older than ours continued to stay poor?  They weren’t doing the things that we were doing.


But refugees?  What about all the Christian refugees who being driven out of Muslim countries and slaughtered if they stay?  Why aren’t we helping them?  They assimilate quite well in our society.  Muslims generally don’t, as evidenced by what is happening now all throughout Europe.  Take some time to watch the videos on youtube.  We are having a lot of people who came over years ago who are joining ISIS or other terror groups.  The Boston bombers were refugees who came over as children.  Muslim thinking doesn’t usually align very well in Western civilization.  There are exceptions of course, but we are inviting a hose of serious problems that we don’t need.  We could help millions of people who would pose almost no problems but we choose to help the ones with the highest risk.  Why?

Monday, November 23, 2015

Taking in Refugees

The Sun-Times (Nov. 22) printed a long opinion piece that tried to make the case for accepting the Syrian refugees.  Turning the page in that same paper, we read that there are 55,000,000 refugees in the world today. 

So why the insistence on taking Syrian refugees?  Why the insistence on taking Muslim refugees?

These refugees are fleeing a civil war.  Christians are being driven out of Muslim lands, being tortured, crucified, beheaded by ISIS, risking imprisonment in other Muslim countries for the slightest or trumped up offenses.

They won’t go to these refugee camps, because they fear for their safety there.

Europe has been taking Muslims for years now, and it is about to break apart from the social division and unrest.  Watch some of the countless videos from Europe on youtube. 

Have we forgotten the purpose of our government?
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, . . . , insure domestic Tranquility, . . . , promote the general Welfare, ….


This government is hellbent on doing everything possible to divide our nation, insure unrest and discord, and promote the welfare of everybody else over its own people.

Friday, November 20, 2015

a response to a newspaper letter regarding religion, terrorism, and the Constitution

A reader (November 20) asked and raised some questions that need to be answered.

The reader suspects “that what ISIS is doing in the name of Islam bears as much relation to the religious tenants [sic] as the man-in-the-moon does.”  I think what he means is that the violence that ISIS perpetrates has nothing to do with Islam.

USA today recently summarized all the worldwide terrorist attacks for the last month.  There were about 30 attacks killing hundreds of people, and they were all committed by Muslims.  It’s a logical fallacy to conclude that Islam caused all these terrorist attacks, but I think it is safe to assume that there must be something about that religion that so many people seem to abuse it and in extraordinary ways.  I think maybe somebody needs to research why so many of the world’s terrorists are Muslim.

The reader also repeats one of the biggest misunderstandings about our Constitution that gives our Founders a bad name.  He says that “the Founding Fathers . . . constitutionally established an entire race as being worth only two thirds as relevant as they themselves.”

Not quite.   Most of the people he is referring to here were slaves.  Those of that race who were not slaves were not counted as 3/5 like the rest.  And the reason why slaves were counted as 3/5 of other people was that slaves could not vote.  And to count slaves as full persons would give slave states a greater representation in government than they should have had.  That would have made it harder to end slavery in the first place.

To make slavery an issue at that time might have resulted in not one new nation but two.   But the South could have remained loyal to the Crown, and in that case the northern colonies probably wouldn’t have been able to win a war for independence by themselves.  So we would still be a colony of England.


The reader ends by remarking that “it is never wise to paint an entire race or religion with the same paint brush.”  The problem is that there are just too many instances of horrible things being done in the name of one particular religion that it seems naïve not to see a link here.

What Should We Think About Islam?

The United States is the midst of a debate about admitting Syrian refugees.  Related to this is also a debate about Islam itself. 

USA Today recently surveyed all the terrorist attacks worldwide over the course of a month, and there were about 30.  I believe all of them were by radical Islamists. 

We are constantly being told that this radicalism has nothing to do with Islam itself, and that we should welcome any non-radical Muslims to our country. 

How should we respond to this statement?

We have heard a lot of rhetoric on both sides of the issue.  I would like to present two points that I have not heard yet.

1)         If you want to see what true Islam is, I would say you need to go to a country that is entirely or majority Muslim.  There are 47 Muslim majority countries in the world.  Are there any of them that you would like to live in?  Especially if you are Christian.  Or Jewish.  Open Doors publishes a monthly list of the countries with the worst persecution of Christians.  This would be killings, imprisonment, torture, etc. merely for the fact of being Christian.  Thirty-seven of the top 50 are Muslim countries.  

I am guessing here, but I think the only reason the other ten countries didn't make the list is because there are too few Christians there to judge.  By the way, the Middle East was largely Christian until the rise of Islam.  No, they did not convert to Islam, at least willingly.  Most were either killed or just fled to other countries.  I suppose Mohammed was a radical and doesn't represent true Islam. 

Are we to assume that  all these countries don’t really represent Islam?  That they are aberrations?  Where are true Muslims to be found?  Are they only the ones who already are living or who want to live in our country?

I venture to say that if Jews compiled a similar list for hostility to Jews, or even a list of perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence, the vast majority of incidents would be caused by Muslims.
Any group of people living in our country could achieve majority status at some time.  What would our country look like as a majority Muslim country?  How much different would it be from the other 47 Muslim countries in the world?

2)         Muslims have been moving into Europe for several generations now.  How is that working out?  You need just go to youtube and you can find dozens, maybe hundreds of videos, from Europe documenting or telling of changes that you would not want if it were to happen here.  Many of the stories tell of violence.  Not merely crime but violence attributed to Islam.  Is this only committed by a radical fringe?   Then this fringe is too large to be called fringe.

But more importantly it shows that this radicalism, if you want to call it that, is inherent in the system.  While any particular Muslim can be nice, friendly, and a good neighbor and citizen, as their numbers increase, so do the number of those who are called ‘radicals.’ 

But isn’t this the same as saying that any time the population increases, the number of crimes increases proportionally?  Perhaps, but ordinary crime usually involves rapes, murders, and thefts motivated by personal greed, lust, or anger.  Certainly nobody wants any of these. 

But radical Islamic violence seeks the destruction of as many people as possible and not for personal motives but for the sake of the religion.  Misguided or not, once it takes root in a society it’s almost impossible to root out.  

Introducing Muslims into our society has put incredible costs on our law enforcement community as it tracks thousands of potential offenders waiting for them to offend.  Why would we want to do this?  There are millions of people who would like to come here where this wouldn’t be a risk.  Why would we want to jeopardize the lives of our own people?


Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Merry Christmas

It doesn’t matter whether you think Christmas is a celebration of the winter solstice or the birth of Jesus.  Christmas is a federal holiday in the United States.  It is the one day of the year when the country basically shuts down.  Almost all working people will get a day off from work with pay, regardless of your religion.  And most people, regardless of their religion, will spend the day with friends and family.  So I think it is entirely appropriate in any circumstance to wish anybody in the United States a Merry Christmas. 

American Foreign Policy and the Rise of Islamic Terrorism

A reader (November 17) lambasts American foreign policy in the Middle East but seems to forget why we got involved there in the first place: 9/11.  We made a lot of mistakes there, and I would list different ones than he did, basically because we assumed the people there were more like us than they are. 

Anyway, if we had never gone into Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and ignored Iran, Syria, Yemen, we still would be encountering Islamic terrorism.  We did all this in response to 9/11.  What did we do that was so wrong before that?

Islamic terror is rampant throughout Africa, and we never touched that. 


Islam has an agenda apart from retaliation for our intrusion in the Middle East.  It goes back to its founding in the 7th century.  Islam was quiet for a while after WW1 when France and England controlled most of their lands.  But as they relinquished control, the beast awoke.  Some people believe that World War III has already begun.

Christianity in a Post-Christian West: a response to Christianity Today

It panged me to read several of the articles in Christianity Today (November) about the relationship of the church and the culture.  They gave me the sense that Christians should feel fortunate to have lived in a country that gave them such generous and unusual religious freedoms and that they shouldn’t have been surprised or alarmed that the culture turned against them.

On the contrary, our country was ‘fortunate’ to have been founded by Christians who created a new kind of government that guaranteed all kinds of freedoms for its people.  I know there is disagreement over the exact nature of the faith of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, but the facts remain that the First Congress among its first acts proclaimed a day of prayer and thanksgiving for our nation, it published Bibles to be used in all the public schools, the Capitol building itself was used as a church for a hundred years after our nation’s founding, and Thomas Jefferson asked Congress for funds to help evangelize the Indians.

Religion, specifically Christianity, and morality were considered by our Founders as essential for the health and happiness of our nation.

The culture in America changed basically because of the government.  The court called supreme ruled that government cannot aid religion (1947) and later removed the Bible and prayer from our public schools (the 1960s), undoing practices in place since well before our nation’s founding, hundreds of years.  This morphed into the removal of all mention of God in schools and public life essentially establishing our country as a secular nation and basically changed the definition of religion from a description of truth and reality to a person’s private beliefs, along the lines of a person’s taste in music or food.

Few people anymore question what the First Amendment actually means by “the establishment of religion.’   (Answer: the creation of a state church as still exists in most of Europe.)  Christians and everybody else blithely accepted the expansion of this principle to include essentially prohibiting any and all mention of God in our public schools and public places and discourse. 

This new definition, or view, of religion removed the idea of religion as a worldview, so nobody questioned that secularism is as much of a religion as Christianity, where government replaces God as the ultimate authority, the people’s lawgiver, benefactor, protector, and savior.  The government is now responsible for solving everybody’s problems and ensuring their welfare and happiness. 

Where were the Christians while all this was going on?  In 1954, Congress passed the Johnson (as in LBJ) Amendment, a little attachment to another entirely unrelated bill that linked tax exempt status and political involvement, and churches afraid of losing their tax exempt status stopped most or all of their political activity, something they had been doing since well before our nation’s founding.

What the early Christians in our country knew that Christians today don’t think of is that we don’t have rulers, kings, or Caesars in our country; we have representatives.  The rules about submitting to our leaders don’t apply here, at least in the way described in the Bible.  Like an employer who hires and fires people according to how the employees contribute to the interests of his company or someone who may hire a lawyer to oversee one’s affairs, government officials essentially work for us.  And discussions public and private about their policies and practices is what responsible people do.  Forbidding tax exempt status to churches who discuss politics and political candidates is a practice that the Church should have challenged and demanded to be changed.

The articles discouraged Christians from thinking that electing the right people will solve their problems.  But Christians more than anybody should know the value of leadership.  Those who know Biblical history know that how the leaders go, so goes the nation.  Moses appointed Joshua, who led the people into the Promised Land.  Joshua didn’t appoint a leader, and the nation couldn’t follow through. 

The pattern is seen over and over through the stories of the kings.  A godly king brought about a revival in the nation.  An ungodly king turned the nation away from God.  It was only when President Obama came out in favor of gay marriage that the courts and the media showed strong support for it, leading to the overturning of 30 State Constitutions prohibiting it and the eventual supreme court [sic] ruling legalizing it.  If he had not done that, gay marriage would still not be legal in our country.  Yes, the institution of marriage had been breaking down for decades, but there was still a public consensus supporting it. 

The Book of Acts seems to paint a new paradigm, where society changes from the bottom up as people turn to God.  Yet even today, as Christians well know, churches thrive or die depending on their leadership.  If Christians won’t lead the United States, we leave it in the hands of the ungodly, and we shouldn’t be surprised by the outcome.

The culture war should be a wake-up call to the Church that it has become irrelevant in a society that for the first time in history was put together in a way that gave it every advantage.  Maybe the Church was unprepared for a political fight or considered it unfitting for the Church, forgetting that our government is not our rulers but our representatives. 
The Church in America sees politics as distractions outside of its area of concern and influence, yet every member of the Church has locks on their doors and fences around their property to protect themselves from theft and intrusion.  And they wouldn’t hesitate to hire a lawyer or call the police when their material property rights were violated.  If their bank was skimming from their accounts every month, they would be in an uproar.  

Loss of rights and freedoms are not as obvious as property encroachments; and, since they happen incrementally, they are often not noted or they are accepted as necessary compromises.
Christians are careful to give their ten percent to the Church as good stewards of what God has given them.  And then they are supposed to let the government take another 50% (add up all the federal, payroll, medicare, state, local, sales, property, gasoline taxes and fees), and they are not supposed to have a say on how that money is spent?

The Church is losing the cultural war in the West, and that is seen as a good thing.  Ooh, now we get to be persecuted! 

But the Church is losing the cultural war in the West, because it failed the culture it lived in.  It showed itself as poor examples, as powerless to help people in their problems, and unable to answer the challenges presented to it, like evolution or moral and cultural relativism. 


It doesn’t make sense to think that we as a Church can and should only help people with their spiritual problems or material problems on a personal basis.  If we are not involved in our school boards and our public policies, we will be presenting ourselves to the world, not as conveyors of the truth, but like a commercial product just trying to increase its market share just to make a name for itself.