where religion and politics meet

Everybody has a worldview. A worldview is what you believe about life: what is true, what is false, what is right, what is wrong, what are the rules, are there any rules, what is the meaning of life, what is important, what is not.

If a worldview includes a god/God, it is called a religion. If a bunch of people have the same religion, they give it a name.

Nations have worldviews too, a prevailing way of looking at life that directs government policies and laws and that contributes significantly to the culture. Politics is the outworking of that worldview in public life.

We are being told today that the United States is and has always been a secular nation, which is practical atheism.

But our country could not have been founded as a secular nation, because a secular country could not guarantee freedom of religion. Secular values would be higher than religious ones, and they would supersede them when there was a conflict. Secularism sees religion only as your personal preferences, like your taste in food, music, or movies. It does not see religion, any religion, as being true.

But even more basic, our country was founded on the belief that God gave unalienable rights to human beings. But what God, and how did the Founders know that He had? Islam, for example, does not believe in unalienable rights. It was the God of the Bible that gave unalienable rights, and it was the Bible that informed the Founders of that. The courts would call that a religious opinion; the Founders would call that a fact.

Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’ have the United States of America.

A secular nation cannot give or even recognize unalienable rights, because there is no higher power in a secular nation than the government.

Unalienable rights are the basis for the American concept of freedom and liberty. Freedom and liberty require a high moral code that restrains bad behavior among its people; otherwise the government will need to make countless laws and spend increasingly larger amounts of money on law enforcement.

God, prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments were always important parts of our public life, including our public schools, until 1963, when the court called supreme ruled them unconstitutional, almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.

As a secular nation, the government now becomes responsible to take care of its people. It no longer talks about unalienable rights, because then they would have to talk about God, so it creates its own rights. Government-given rights are things that the government is required to provide for its people, which creates an enormous expense which is why our federal government is now $22 trillion in debt.

Our country also did not envision a multitude of different religions co-existing in one place, because the people, and the government, would then be divided on the basic questions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our Constitution, which we fought a war to be able to enact, states, among other things, that our government exists for us to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It could not do this unless it had a clear vision of what it considers to be true, a vision shared with the vast majority of the people in this country.

I want to engage the government, the culture, and the people who live here to see life again from a Christian perspective and to show how secularism is both inadequate and just plain wrong.

Because religion deals with things like God, much of its contents is not subject to the scientific method, though the reasons why one chooses to believe in God or a particular religion certainly demand serious investigation, critical thinking, and a hunger for what is true.

Science and education used to be valuable tools in the search for truth, but science has chosen to answer the foundational questions of life without accepting the possibility of any supernatural causes, and education generally no longer considers the search to be necessary, possible, or worthwhile.

poligion: 1) the proper synthesis of religion and politics 2) the realization, belief, or position that politics and religion cannot be separated or compartmentalized, that a person’s religion invariably affects one’s political decisions and that political decisions invariably stem from one’s worldview, which is what a religion is.

If you are new to this site, I would encourage you to browse through the older articles. They deal with a lot of the more basic issues. Many of the newer articles are shorter responses to particular problems.

Visit my other websites theimportanceofhealing blogspot.com where I talk about healing and my book of the same name and LarrysBibleStudies.blogspot.com where I am posting all my other Bible studies. Follow this link to my videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb-RztuRKdCEQzgbhp52dCw

If you want to contact me, email is best: lacraig1@sbcglobal.net

Thank you.

Larry Craig

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Free Speech and Pictures of Muhammed

The Sun-Times has a syndicated columnist who wants to school us on the First Amendment (May 16) but proceeds to label Pamela Gellar a bigot, which he is free to do, before exploring the thinking behind her actions.  This diverts our attention from the argument, enlisting our emotions to side against her without hearing her side of the story.

The writer bases his argument on his understanding of the part of the First Amendment that talks about ‘no establishment of religion,’ something Congress is forbidden to do.  He understands this prohibition on the establishment of religion as a position of government neutrality on religion.  I’m sorry, but that’s a modern rewriting of history.

Establishment of religion in the 1700s meant a state sponsored Church, like The Church of England.  Our government strongly supported Christianity as was seen in the First Congress publishing Bibles to be used in all the public schools and even using the Capitol Building itself as a church for about a hundred years after our nation’s founding.

A religion is a worldview, an all-encompassing framework for viewing life and reality, including the rules for living, such as what is right and wrong and true and false.  You remember our nation used to have the Ten Commandments displayed in schools and courthouses and Nativity scenes on public property. 

It was only in 1947 (170 years after our nation’s founding) that the court called supreme ruled that our government must be separate from all things religious.  That essentially relegates religion to one’s private life, like one’s hobbies or taste in music and positions government outside of religion with a worldview that for all practical purposes is atheistic, where our nation’s values become a sort of lowest common denominator, e.g. tolerance, fairness, equality, and diversity. 

So what does all this have to do with free speech?  Since religion has been separated from what a nation views as true, fundamental religious disagreements, or better, expressed disagreements on worldviews are now viewed as personal attacks, since a secular society must accept all worldviews (religions) as equally valid, viz. harmless thoughts on unimportant things.

So Pamela Gellar should be called a bigot, because she sees an entire worldview (Islam) as incompatible with American values.  Before we ostracize Gellar for breaking the new rules of social conduct (tolerance, fairness, etc.), we need to look again at the foundations of American and Western Civilizations to see what exactly it is that made us what we are.  Take a quick look at all the Moslem countries in the world today and compare them with the Western countries, specifically the United States, and see how many differences you can name and then explain why they are there.  And then explain how these two systems can coexist in the same place without dividing the country into two separate societies, as is happening today in Europe.


And then we can talk again about Pamela Gellar and free speech.
Posted by at