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 25, 2016

Remember the Trojan Horse

One of the earliest memories I have is sitting in a movie theater watching Helen of Troy, a movie about the Trojan War.  Basically the war was a ten year war between Greece (I think just one of their city states) and the city of Troy in what is now Turkey.  Finally, the Greeks built a large wooden horse (maybe 60 ft tall) and sailed away.  The Trojans thought it was a peace offering or something like that and brought it into the city.  In the middle of the night, Greek soldiers from inside the horse came out and were able to open the gates to the Greek army that had gathered outside.  The Greeks won the war that night.

What brought this movie to mind was a news segment from ABC recently about a refugee family that was settled in California.  It focused (as far as I watched) on two young girls as they started school in their new country.  Two sweet little girls in a strange new world.  It made you want to go over to Syria and bring them all over.

There are between 19 and 65 million refugees in the world today, depending on who’s counting.  What should the world do in response to this crisis?

The best way to answer that question might be to ask yourself this question: To what lengths would you go personally to meet this need?  How much would you give up in terms of freedom, security, wealth, or your children’s future?  How much change would you accept in this country?  How much financial sacrifice?  Are there any other countries in the world that you would like to move to or rather live in?  Because the country you know will not be the same as the one it will become, and you have to decide how much change you would be willing to accept.

Most of the refugees that our country is currently focused on bringing into our country are Muslims.  When you see a child suffering, who cares what religion they are.  You want to help.  So this year we brought in about 10,000 Muslims refugees.  Hllary Clinton wants to bring in 65,000 more, and President Obama addressed the United Nations urging all the countries of the world to take in as many of these refugees as possible. 

Some Muslim countries have set up refugee camps, but I know of no Muslim country that is actually trying to assimilate refugees into their society.  This burden seems to be given to all the non-Muslim countries. 

So at great expense, all these non-Muslim countries, from South America to Australia, and the United States and Canada, are trying to bring in refugees to relieve some of their misery. 

But then what.  In a generation or two, these Muslim people have now become a Muslim community, and they need a mosque.  Now they need to bring in an imam to lead and teach them.  And what do they teach them?

I have an Assyrian friend who is fluent in Arabic and has clients who have asked about mosques in the area.  So he attended at least one local one with them.  He told me they teach their people to stay separate from the Americans, especially the Christians.  Sharia law is the way of salvation for Muslims.  It shows them how to please God.

Islam is incompatible with Western Civilization.  Women wear hijabs and burkas to live according to Sharia.  But what they don’t tell you is that you should be wearing them to, even if you are not a Muslim.  Your short dresses and tight pants and shorts show what low morals you have. 

We are told that America is a land where everyone is free to live out their religion.  When our Founders wrote that, they were thinking about the various disputes between Baptists and Presbyterians, not Jews and Muslims.  We went to war with a number of Muslim nations soon after our nation’s founding, and the Muslims leaders showed our leaders from the Koran that it was their duty to attack our ships and enslave our sailors.  That’s what Muslims do. 

So, no, our Founders were not envisioning a country where all kinds of religions with very different standards of right and wrong and morality would try to coexist in some sort of utopia.  Western culture is decadent to Islam.  It just might take a generation of two before they feel free enough to tell us that.  They will need a few more mosques to teach their people their obligations to Allah.

All this is being clearly played out all over Europe right now.  There are probably thousands of videos on Youtube that show this clash of cultures.  And you don’t think it will happen here?



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