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

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Does a Child have a Right to a Mother and a Father?


A response to a letter January 24 on the legal reality of gays and gay marriage:

We keep hearing today about people’s rights and how more and more things are now considered a right. 

When the Bill of Rights was passed, rights were seen as things people could do without government interference.  Starting with Franklin Roosevelt, rights came to be seen more as things that people were entitled to and that the government had the responsibility to see that people got these things.  Roosevelt admitted that the goal here was to get votes, stay in power, and increase the role, size, and reach of the government.

So more and more things today are talked about as rights.  Everybody wants what they want, and they believe they are entitled to them.  With regard to gay marriage, I ask the question:

Does a child have a right to a mother and a father, and to be raised by them?  We have already normalized and accepted single motherhood in our society.  There is no longer any stigma for a single woman to have a child.  While their children often turn out well, statistically they are at a steep disadvantage.  But nobody is saying that single motherhood is just as good, or equal, to a family with a mother and a father.

But in gay marriage, we are intentionally removing one parent out of the child’s life and calling this just as good as a two parent home.  Equal, in fact.

Whether you believe in God or evolution, they both ended up in the same place.  It takes a man and a woman to create a child.  Who has the right to say that a child doesn’t need both of its parents?  Does a society have the right to remove a mother or father from a child’s life in order to please someone else?

The fact that something is legal doesn’t make it right.  Laws are often made by political pressure whether through money or potential votes

If children grew on trees, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.  People wouldn’t be getting married at all except perhaps as a safeguard for getting old, so that they wouldn’t be alone.  But marriage has always been society’s means of seeing that the children that inevitably result from men and women getting together are raised to be good, productive, moral citizens.

We don’t talk a lot about children being the reason for marriage, because too many couples find out that they are unable to have children, and it is usually very painful when they do.  But we don’t know up front who those couples will be.  But we do know that children need strong homes to be raised in.  Yes, some parents don’t parent well, but it’s wrong to remove a parent from a child’s life before the fact and call it just as good as if it wasn’t removed.


So whatever laws there may be, there will always be people who will insist that gay marriage is not equal and should not be called equal, because it encourages the raising of children without one of their parents and saying it doesn’t make any difference. 
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