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

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.
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