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

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Obama's speech on immigrants - a response

The United States went from being a British colony in the 1700s to the richest and most powerful nation in the world in about a hundred years.  It reached its peak in success as a nation probably in the early 1960s.  We had by far the best schools in the world, one of if not the lowest crime rates, highest standard of living, greatest wealth.

Now we are one of the poorest nations.  Don’t be fooled by all the material stuff you see.  The nation is bankrupt and only goes on as it has because the dollar is the world reserve currency, which could change shortly.  We owe trillions of dollars to China, Japan, Russia, Brazil.  If and when they want to collect, we could be selling them our national parks.  They already own many of our companies.

What happened?  A lot of things.  We used to be a Christian nation that taught the importance of hard work, self-reliance, and loving your neighbor.  That was officially rejected by the Supreme Court, and the government now became the supreme benefactor, provider, and protector of the American people.

Christianity was replaced by political correctness and socialism, though that had to be introduced gradually so the people wouldn’t react too strongly against it.  They had to gradually accept being dependent on the government for their security.
The country started to be flooded with immigrants, starting in 1965, from all over the world, where before that we limited immigration to basically the countries that were present so far in the history of our country, countries that shared our basic Western (Christian) values.

We now have more first generation immigrants in our country, both in actual numbers and per cent of our population, than at any time in our history.  The schools are below average in the world, crime and violence are rampant, and the country is broke.

We sent millions of jobs overseas and can’t even provide jobs for the people who are here, yet alone millions more mostly unskilled, uneducated people from around the word.      

Nobody even knows anymore what built our country.  Why did the United States achieve the success and wealth it had?  Everybody wants to come here, but without knowing and keeping the things that made us great, we have become a shadow of what we were and are falling rapidly in decline.  The whole house of cards could collapse as early as this year when it is believed the dollar will no longer be the world’s reserve currency.             

They try to tell you that all it takes for a country to become rich and great is for it to be a democracy, and everybody can come here and all will be wonderful.  Without a Christian foundation, governments take on the role of God becoming protector, provider, and benefactor.  The country then heads straight to poverty as the people become dependent on it, and the government takes more power to itself to control the behavior of its people. 

Obama’s speech is true up to a point, not telling the whole story.  But countries need to know who is coming in, who is here.  The country, any country, has always had the right of refusal.  We used to turn back anyone coming into our country who was sick, couldn’t read, had no skills, or was likely to become dependent on the government. 

We didn’t even have welfare in the old days when immigration was so strong.  People could come over here with $5 in their pocket and become rich.  Now they come over poor, they get on government assistance, and then they don’t want to work too hard otherwise they will lose it. 

I could go on but I’ll stop.