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

Sunday, September 18, 2016

OK, So I’ve Read the Constitution


Maybe you remember the man at the Democratic National Convention who pulled a copy of the Constitution out of his pocket, waved it around, and then addressed Donald Trump, challenging him if he had ever read the Constitution.

Well, I have, and I would like to share with you some of my thoughts about it.

I think the Preamble, or the beginning, of the Constitution is the most important part, because it tells us what kind of government it was that we fought the War of Independence to get, the purpose of this government, or you could say, the goals for this nation that our government is supposed to work toward.

And this is what it says:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Looking at it a little more closely, we see first of all that it is the people who establish the government.  The government exists for the people and not the people for the government.  Instead of the government telling us what to do, we tell the government what we want it to do.

The first goal mentioned is to form a more perfect union.  This probably originally applied to the states being united, but still the idea is that the country is to be united.  Everything I see in politics today is division, dividing up the country into all kinds of different people with competing interests and needs, and we have to take from one group to give it to another. 

Whoever says that diversity is our strength should not work in government, because diversity does not unite people.  People unite with people they have things in common with.  Our government is showing no interest in seeing that people have things in common.  They have no common vision of what we should unite around, but they encourage people to be as different as possible.  The people they seek to bring into our country are as different as possible from those who are already here.

Establishing justice would mean that the government seeks to ensure that the people have the freedoms to live out those rights spelled out for us in the Bill of Rights.  And these listed rights were not intended to be all-inclusive, and it was understood that these rights came from God and not from the government.

Our government is now finding limitations to these rights, because a) it no longer trusts the people to live freely, because it has removed the moral framework that provided the personal self-control that is necessary for people to really live free lives, and b) the government has created new rights that directly conflict with the understood rights and moral code that have always existed in our country.  

Insuring domestic tranquility means that the government really wants the people to live in peace and safety.  I see a government that is constantly forcing things on the people and telling them to like it.  Immigration, for example, is one of the most divisive issues in our country today, yet the government insists on forcing things on our people which most people don’t like, if they ever cared to ask.

Defending our country is not just protecting the country from attacks from foreign countries.  The goal of war is to change the government to something else than from what it was.  If this can be done without killing people, so much the better. 

I see people who don’t care about what this country was intended to be.  They want to make us into something different, and they are just as much of an enemy to our country as a hostile foreign power.  No, they are not killing people, but they are taking our country away from us nonetheless.

Promoting the general welfare means that the government should pursue policies that benefit everybody.  That is hardly the case anymore.  The guiding principle today is to take from those who have and give it to those who don’t.  There are more people who don’t have so they become a larger voting block than those who do.  But helping people, or let’s just say giving things to people, at the expense of other people is not promoting the general welfare, but the welfare of the people chosen by the government.  That is unconstitutional.

And, lastly, to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.  This means that we shouldn’t do things now for the benefit of people if it diminishes the blessings to the people who will come after us.  We are now $20 trillion in debt.  This means that we are doing this for people at the expense of those who will come after us.  This is robbing our children to buy off people today.  This is wrong.  You don’t run a country on borrowed money, especially when there is no intention of paying it back.


So I read the Constitution.  I am wondering now what the point was that this man at the convention was trying to make.  What exactly did Donald Trump not understand? 
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