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

Monday, April 16, 2018

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.

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