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, April 29, 2018

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
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