heaven: a letter to a newspaprer columnist

Hi Mary

I am sure you that you will receive a lot of mail after your column about heaven.  I’m guessing you might not read them all, or if you do start reading a lot of them, you will start just skimming through them, expecting them to all read alike.

I have rethought my religious beliefs a lot.  Life hasn’t been easy, so I wanted to be sure I was on the right track.

Life is short, and usually there is no way to check our answers before it is over.  So we are left with trying to make the most sense out of what we see by what we have.

I start with the whole idea of God.  Is there a God or not?

I find the answer easy here.  I see any attempts to explain life, existence, consciousness, the complexities and marvels of the human body, and all animal life, without the aid, involvement, or work of an outside Intelligent Being as being contrary to all human experience. 

The idea that life can spring from non-life and then by random acts develop things like brains, cells, eyes, DNA, is simply people trying too hard to deny the obvious.  The idea of a God makes people think that somehow they are responsible to this Being, and so a lot of people will try very hard to find ways to deny His existence, and they end up believing things they would see as being silly if they didn’t want to believe them so much.

The next question is whether this God cares about and wants to communicate with the people He has made.  Of course, why would He bother to do all this if He didn’t care about what He made?  Our human experience is that things we make are expressions of ourselves and, yes, we value them far more than that of someone else.

Humans universally ask  questions about God, and throughout history the vast majority of people have always believed in a God.  I find it quite reasonable to think that God would want to communicate to us and tell us what the whole thing is all about.  Like you buy a new appliance and you get an instruction manual telling you how the thing works. 

We could spend our whole lives trying to figure out the MOL (meaning of life) and never know if we have the right answer, or spend our whole lives learning things and then wishing we had known these things when we were young, so we wouldn’t have wasted so much of our lives doing the wrong things.

So if God wanted to communicate with human beings, surely He would have done so by now.  And I would find it reasonable to assume that this knowledge, or source of knowledge, would be widespread by now as well. 

The obvious first place to look would be at the major world religions.  There are the Asian religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism.  They have a lot of people who believe in them, but they have made no real attempts to spread this knowledge throughout the world.  So unless you think God only cares about Asians, I think we need to keep looking.

Islam is considered to be the fastest growing religion in the world today, but then how is it growing?  Historically it has grown through military force.  The countries that are Muslim today I believe without exception were conquered by Muslim forces.  They did not send our missionaries.   And while Western countries have greatly reduced birth rates, because we teach our daughters it is more important to have a career than a family, Muslims in general have very high birth rates.  And they don’t take kindly to anyone who thinks about leaving the Muslim religion. 

Is this the way God is?  I suppose it’s possible, but I would keep looking before I decided it was.

Judaism is a world religion, though its numbers are small by comparison.  One big reason for that is that Christianity considers itself to be Judaism 2.0, and Jewish people who agree identify themselves as Christians as to their religion.

Christianity is obviously the most widespread religion in the world.  In fact, many nations in the world are literate today, because Christian missionaries went there, learned their language, and then translated the Bible into that language so that they could read the Bible for themselves.  Seeing the Bible as God’ revelation to humans, they didn’t just tell people what to believe, they gave them the book and the means to read it for themselves and come to their own conclusions.

The Bible is grounded in history.  It is not just the thoughts of a holy person sitting in a cave musing over the idea of God or having a vision from above.  It traces God’s interactions with humans throughout history. 

How can we know it is true?  There are scores of books written to show how the Bible can be trusted, whether through archaeology, psychology, literary criticism, textual criticism, but in this short life that we have, there are not unlimited options. 

Many books have been written in objection to the Bible, and more books have been written that adequately defended the Bible from these criticisms.

The Bible says there is a heaven.  No, not everybody goes there, otherwise it wouldn’t be heaven anymore.  But God wants people to go there.  No, it doesn’t say that all roads lead there.  That really doesn’t make any sense.  The Bible says that Jesus is the way to heaven.  Is that so hard to believe?  Even those who are Christianity’s biggest critics find it hard to say anything bad about Jesus.

Yes, the truth is that we all die.  And, no, we don’t know a thing about what happens after death unless God Himself tells us.  Has He?  On something as important as this, I would expect that He would.  And the Bible, I would say, is the best answer to those who look for the MOL and the other questions about what comes after.

I wish you well.

Larry Craig

 heav

What is an American: a response to a newspaper column

I hope you are doing well.

You had a column printed on February 27 that has been on my mind since then.  I wanted to write you sooner, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say.  I do a lot of political writing, and I have written on this before, but I’m sure you wouldn’t have wanted a four-page response.  I needed something different and finally figured out what it was.

Your column asked the question: what ‘American’ really means?

What has made our country different from all the rest is our level of freedom, our understanding of human rights, plus the separation of Church and State.  Europe recognized most of our understanding of freedom and rights, but each nation had a Church that was a part of the government. 

England had the Church of England, a number of countries were Lutheran, some Reformed, and some Roman Catholic.  Our Founders didn’t want that.  But they also didn’t want a secular country.  That’s why the Bible, prayer, and the Ten Commandments were a major part of our public life and schools for almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.  They didn’t want God out of our schools and public life, but a particular Christian denomination as a part of our federal government.

But that’s not the point.

They said our rights come from God and not the government.  If they came from government, government would have the power to take them away.

Now this is the point.

How did they know that these rights came from God?  No other nation recognized these same rights.  What was different? 

The Founders believed in the Bible as revealing God to humankind.  That’s where their understanding of God and rights came from.  They believed that Christianity is true.  They, unlike what we are told today, saw a religion as a description of reality.  Today we think of religion as a person’s personal preferences, like a person’s taste in food, music, or movies.

If religion, and in this case Christianity, is not true, then all our talk about human rights is simply our opinion.  People don’t die for their opinions, and they certainly shouldn’t try to impose them on others.

If our human rights are not based on the Bible and Christianity, then we have no basis to believe in them except as a majority of opinion in our country.  Meaning, at some point in our history, we can vote them out of existence.

For example, Muslims have a very different view of God and rights.  You have 50 Muslim countries in the world, and not one of them is anywhere near to the United States in their understanding of rights, liberty, and representative government. 

Europe in a generation of two will become a Muslim majority continent.  When it does, you will see major changes taking place in the laws of those countries.

I

f we in our country do not agree on what is the foundation of our rights and our liberties, then we can find them removed, limited, or changed by elections and changes in our leadership. 

There is talk now about repealing the Second Amendment, the second item in our nation’s Bill of Rights.  But the Bill of Rights was supposed to be a statement of some of these natural rights that come from God.  John Adams, our second President, said that our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people.  It is wholly inadequate for any other.   You can’t have true freedom without a people who have self-restraint through a high ethical code, like the Ten Commandments, which we have banned from our public life and schools. 

If we deny the importance of religion, and in this case specifically Christianity, we lose the entire foundation of our country.  If we don’t know, believe, and affirm these basic principles, our country will gradually change over generations into the lowest common denominator of all the nations, or eventually a Muslim nation.

The changes will be gradual, as the older generations die out, and the younger generations have no clue about what made us what we are, what we fought a war to create.

We no longer teach these founding principles in our schools, to our children, and certainly not to the millions of people who come to our country. 

Being an American is having a certain belief system, a certain worldview.  And, frankly, Christianity is at the core of it.  Remove it or ignore it and we lose the foundation of our beliefs about liberty and human rights.  And without the foundation, we will lose them.  Maybe not in our lifetime, but we will lose them.  If we don’t teach our children and all those millions coming here what it is that made us what we are, then we will lose it, just like the rest of the world doesn’t have it.

xenophobic America: a response to a newspaper opinion column

The Sun-Times (April 9) ran a full-page article about xenophobic anti-Muslim Americans.  Xenophobic was the word of choice in describing Americans who oppose Muslim immigration or who have not been enthusiastic about the growing Muslim population in our country.

There is an issue here, though, that is not being discussed. 

The United States, when it was formed, was unique among the nations of the world.  No other nation in the world had the same views as ours on human rights and freedom

The Declaration of Independence states that these rights come from God.   In saying that these rights come from God, the Founders were saying that the rights were based on our understanding of God as shown in Christianity and the Bible.  This is why the Bible was an integral part of public school education and public life for almost 200 years after our nation’s founding. 

Islam had been in existence for a thousand years when our nation was founded; and today, when there are about 50 Muslim countries in the world, there is no Muslim country in the world that is anywhere close to the United States in its Constitution and its views on human rights and freedom.  The God from whom our Founders believed they received these natural rights is not found in Islam.

Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world today.  Not because it has a high conversion rate but because it has a high birth rate and a unique response to those who want to leave it..  The birth rate of Western countries, including the United States, apart from first generation immigrants is below replacement value.  In a generation of two, for example, Europe will become a Muslim majority continent.

The court called supreme was wrong to remove the Bible and the Ten Commandments from public life, including our schools, because they are the basis of our freedoms as Americans.  Apart from the Bible and the Ten Commandments, our views of human rights are merely our opinions which can be voted away by a majority vote.

Diversity is good, when you are buying a car or ice cream.  In a nation, not so much.  If we don’t agree on the basis of our rights and freedoms, they are only one election away from being taken away from us.  Maybe not the next one, or the next.  The changes will take place gradually, but they will happen.

Proof that the Church and State separation dogma is wrong

The first Ten Amendments to our Constitution are called the Bill of Rights.  Our Founders were hesitant about including a list of our rights to the Constitution.  They were concerned that the people would think that their rights were limited to only those specifically stated in the Constitution, and they were concerned that the people, and the government, might think that their rights came from the government.  In which case, of course, they could then be modified, limited, or revoked. 

The Declaration of Independence states that these rights come from God.  But every nation at that time believed in a god of some sort, and they did not see human rights as we did.  The difference is that our Founders believed that the Bible was God’s revelation to us about who He is and the nature of the world.  It was from there that they learned of these human rights.  This is one reason the Bible was a major part of public school education for almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.

If we don’t teach this to our children in our schools, then we are not teaching them the founding principles of our nation, and we cannot expect them as our future leaders to know and understand what makes the United States what it is.  After all, most nations of the world do not see human rights as we do.  Human rights are either our opinion, and everybody has an opinion.  Or they are based on transcendent values, which means God, and specifically in this case, the Bible and Christianity.

And what this means ultimately is that our country is not and never was a secular nation as we are commonly told we are.  We cannot separate ourselves from our Christian roots without separating ourselves from our founding principles and thereby weakening the very things that we fought a war over so that we could establish our Constitution. 

The court called supreme was wrong when it said that our government cannot aid or favor any religion, because our nation was founded on the Bible and Christianity.  If we don’t acknowledge and teach this to our children, at some point we will cease to exist as the nation we were founded to be.  Our name may not change, but we will have thrown away the very things that made us a great nation.