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

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Should Muslims Be Banned from Entering the United States?


Should Muslims be banned from entering the United States?  Donald Trump thinks so, and he is the only political figure I know of who does.  Speaking as a Christian, I know that a lot of Christians disagree with him as well. 

But wait a second.  What is the actual issue here?  Many of the people in our country, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, contend that Islam is a religion of peace.  Yet the world is experiencing an epidemic of terrorist violence in the name of Islam.

So which is the true Islam?  And this is the whole point. 

This is what is called a theological controversy.  Christianity has had many of these throughout its history and still does.  In Christianity’s earlier years, it would call a worldwide church council and hash it out, and the matter would pretty much be resolved. 

But then in 1054, the Church split into East and West, Catholic and Orthodox branches, and they each went their own way.  In the 1500s, the Church split again into Protestant and Catholic.

So Islam has a controversy over which is the true Islam.  People in the West want to believe that the peaceful Islam is the true one, but they are not in a position to say.  No non-Muslim government or individual has the right to take sides in a religious controversy of a different faith and declare who’s right.  At this point in Islam’s history, there is every reason that these two sides will both exist together forever.

So what does that mean for the West?  In a religious controversy, people of faith often can and will move from one side to the other. Even children of peaceful Muslims will at times hear the siren call to destroy the infidel in the name of Allah and will answer the call.  This is not a problem with any other religion.

We spend billions of dollars every year tracking over a million people on our terror watch list.  We have to take our shoes off before boarding an airplane.  Why?  Because Islamic terrorism can strike anywhere. 

There has always been violence in the world, but since the withdrawal of European powers controlling the Middle East, Islam has resumed its ambition of world domination through violence, and the world has now become a very dangerous place to live.  This danger only increases with the increase in the number of Muslims living in the West. 


I have to think that Donald Trump is right on this one.
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