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, December 5, 2015

Two Invented Diseases that will Destroy our Country

Did you see it?  Did you hear about it?  Possibly the scariest things I have seen or heard in my life.  Just happened.  No, not the shootings.  After that.  On the news.

I call these things diseases.  Invented diseases.  Few things scare people like diseases.  You never know when it will strike, and most people feel powerless when it does.

The first is the disease of radicalism.  It can take hard working average Americans and turn them into mass murderers almost overnight.  One day they are normal as heck, and the next they are bloodthirsty killers.  No warning signs.  No symptoms.  It just happens.  Apparently it can happen to any of us.

At least this is how it is presented.  And they expect people to actually believe it.  They seem to believe it themselves.

And this radicalism apparently has nothing to do with the religion of peace. 

Let me quickly introduce this second invented disease, because there is a close connection between the two.  One will shed light on the other.

The other disease is political correctness.  Now I know that has been around for a long time, but much of it has been harmless.  We talk about people being intellectually challenged rather than retarded or humans rather than the generic man, as in humankind vs. mankind.

But there is a pathological side to it where you are trying so hard to put a positive spin on things you miss some things that can put you in danger.

We talk about Islamic extremists or Islamic radicals, and then we want to say that they have nothing to do with Islam.  But we miss something.

I have known or known of radical Christians.  They might spend the night in prayer, they might fast for a week or longer, they might stand on street corners and preach to the people walking past.  Now all the moderate Christians believe in prayer.  They know a bit about fasting and that many Christians do it from time to time when they are serious in prayer about something.  They also believe it is important on reaching people for God, though they can’t see themselves doing street evangelism. 

I have known of radical Catholics.  I went to a Catholic church for a while.  I love the quiet before the Mass.  The whole atmosphere speaks of worship and God’s glory.  But then there was this man who kept saying the Hail Mary out loud real loud, over and over.  I started wearing ear plugs before the service so I could get some peace and quiet again.  A radical Catholic.

There are orthodox Jews who only eat Kosher, won’t even turn on a light switch or the heat on the Sabbath, and let the hair on the sides of their face grow long.  All these practices have some basis in their holy book, the Bible, or The Torah.  Radicals, or orthodox as they call them.

So the question that nobody wants to ask is:  if a Muslim becomes radicalized or extreme, what Muslim practice or practices are they taking to the extreme?  That’s what radicals and extremists do.  They take something that everybody in their group does or is supposed to do, or is written somewhere in their holy book that is a good thing, and then they do it far more than anyone else.  They do it to the extreme.

Why do all these radical Muslims think it is important to kill people?  Can’t they show their radicalness in some other way?  Why aren’t they praying ten times a day instead of only five?  Why not visit Mecca every year and not just once in a lifetime?  Why not fast more than just that one month?  Why not give twice the amount an average Muslim gives to the needy?

Either these Islamic terrorists are just bloody murderers, or they are radical Muslims.  For some reason they all think they are doing this in the name of Allah.  Why would they think that this is what Allah wants?

One way to see what a radical Muslim looks like is to look at regular Muslims.  Our leaders and 
media think the way to do this is to interview Muslims in our country.  No.  The way to know what moderate Islam looks like is to look at Muslim countries to see what they do when they don’t have to put up a good front, or try to make a good impression, where they don’t have to try to blend in.
And what do we find?  With no real exception, we find a culture that is hostile to both Christians and Jews.  It is true that the Church has had a long history in a number of Muslim countries, most notably Egypt, Syria, and Iraq.  The Church actually did alright when those countries were run by dictators, but when the dictators left, for whatever reason, Christians were either forced to flee or face almost certain death.  Same for Jewish people.

Now these diseases of becoming radicalized or political correctness see no connection between radicalism and Islam.  Radicalism can happen to anyone regardless of one’s religious or cultural background.  And they see nothing inherent in Islam that would explain why they have so many radicals and why they all manifest their zeal in the same bloodthirsty ways. 

So trying to see the best in everybody, the United States and Europe are doing their best to bring in as many Muslims as they can, and they see this as a good thing without any real dangers here.  Go to  youtube and watch the countless videos coming out of Europe about what happens when the number of Muslims in a country reaches a certain critical mass.  If we can’t or won’t see what is happening, we will be powerless to stop it when it happens.  Why would we want to throw away all that we have? 


It’s happening slowly like the frog being boiled to death.  If it happened suddenly, we would all wake up and know we are in danger.  But it is happening slowly.  We accept a little bit here, a little bit there, and then it’s too late to undo.
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