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

Friday, November 20, 2015

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?


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