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

What is the left, and what are they trying to do to our country?

[Somebody wrote the following article about the left, and I was asked what I thought about it.  My comments follow the article.  These issues are important for understanding what is going on in our country right now.]

"Republicans think that the battle with the left is over issues like these:
Welfare
Taxes
Debt
Personal Responsibility
Crime
Morals
Abortion
Wages
Pork Barrel Spending
War & Peace
Civil Rights
The environment
Corruption
But these are issues debated WITHIN a constiutional system; this is the game on the surface. The left is playing on a different level. They are not debating policy within the system, they are trying to ALTER the system itself.
The REAL game is a list of issues about the system itself. This second list shows a much deeper level of understanding of the left and it’s tactics; a reality that many on the center right won’t name or acknowledge. The right mocks the left because they can’t call Islamic Terrorism, Islamic Terrorism, and then we turn around and won’t use the correct words to label leftism. 
These issues are not being debated in mainstream media, but they are what leftist activists debate and study among themselves. How many of these terms are elected republicans familiar with? If I asked republican officials to explain these terms, what they mean to the left, how they affect their strategy and tactics, and how they relate to one another, would they know the answers?
Cultural Marxism, Marcuse and the Frankfurt School
Hegemony (patriarchy, white privilege, cisgender)
Critical Theory
Critical Race Theory
Liberation from Oppression
Liberation Theology
Structural Functionalism - systems of oppression
Social Construct
Alienation
Exploitation
Political Correctness
MultiCulturalism
Social Justice (food, environmental, etc.)
Antonio Gramsci
Social Constructs
Agency
Agenda 21/Sustainability
Moral Relativism
Microaggressions
Hegel & the Dialectic/dialectic materialism
Scientific Socialism
Vanguardism
Long March thru the Institutions
For example, Gay marriage appears to be an issue of civil rights, an end in and of itself. But actually, to the hard left, it's a an issue of Critical Theory and Social Justice. Not an end, but a plan of attack against the foundations of the Republic. Marxist tactics are filled with jargon, front groups, and front issues.
I don't blame Trump for not knowing this. I think dozens of friends of mine on facebook could answer a quiz on the above topics better than EVERY elected republican in congress. But whereas they all cave to it, Trump instinctively fights back. Not intellectually, but on a gut level that he's on the right side."
----Jeffrey Varasano
(from Flavia Eckholm)

I see two dynamics at work here.  I have often thought that, after looking how things have progressed (regressed) over the generations, it looked like there were a group of people who sat in a room and planned out a hundred-year plan to take over Western Civilization.  (Islam did that also by the way, but that is separate from this.).
Through the first half of the twentieth century, there was a strong fear and awareness in our country of communist infiltration into our government.  After Joseph McCarthy,
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American politician who served as a U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread Communist subversion.[1] He was noted for making claims that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the United States federal government and elsewhere. Ultimately, the controversy he generated led him to be censured by the United States Senate.
The term "McCarthyism", coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy's practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today, the term is used by critics of McCarthy in reference to what they consider demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.[2]
the whole idea of communist subversion in our country just seemed to disappear.  Even to talk of communist spies and of communist plots to take over were dismissed as crazy conspiracy theories.  Apparently they are not.  Most of these terms are Marxist, but nobody thinks of Marxism anymore as an existential threat to our country.
The other dynamic I don’t know if it is independent of this or a result of this.  The whole drive to get religion, specifically Christianity, out of the public square and establishing the idea that our country was founded to be a secular nation. 
Once secularism is established as the ruling worldview, the need arises to create a new value system, which essentially is made up as we go along.  But the determining values are equality, fairness, diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism, and relativism.  This is directly related to the rejection of Christianity as providing the moral framework for our country. 
I have often wondered how secularism was able to take hold.  The Supreme Court’s decisions played a big part, starting in 1947 when it ruled that government cannot aid or favor any religion.
In terms of strategy, someone has said that he who frames the argument wins the argument.  As soon as gay marriage was framed as one of equal rights, the outcome was assured. 
The left is quick to use such terms as homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, sexist, racist, discrimination, inequality, nativist, protectionist, and separation of church and state.  All these terms are meant to simply end the discussion.  There is nothing that you can say against any of these.  Once these words are used, it is understood there is nothing more to be said.
This is where Christians and conservatives are failing.  They don’t know how to respond to these either with a quick rejoinder or some response that gets to the heart of the issue and shows the issue in a different light that the public can quickly see as making sense.
Now Marxism is atheistic as well as secularism.  Did one spawn the other, or did they both begin and grow independently?  In the first case, we can read and learn of their overall strategy, but still nobody sees them as the problem. 
The whole idea of secularism is the root issue that Christians need to challenge.  It’s a debate rooted in history, but we then need to show how Christianity was responsible for the rise of Western Civilization and the establishment and flourishing of our country.  Secularism inevitably leads to socialism, maybe communism, but ultimately the demise of a nation.  It bankrupts it financially and morally.  Christians need to insist that the country needs their work and influence to prosper again, and Christians need to challenge the Supreme Court’s rulings and the common (mis)understanding of the separation of church and state.  Without this, there is little we can do to reverse the course of our nation.



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