poligion: June 2018

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

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Beliefs Have Consequnces

Our nation was founded on a belief in human rights unparalleled in human history. We believe that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We used to teach this to our children and the millions of immigrants who come to our country, but we don’t anymore. We don’t teach it to our children, because we don’t want to talk about God. We don’t teach it to our immigrants, because it’s culturally insensitive.

But if we don’t know where our rights come from, people will believe that they come from the government or are the will of the people, meaning that elections and voting and polls can change the definition and limits of those rights over time.

While Trump’s travel ban is aimed at more immediate security risks, it is a fact that Muslims do not believe in human rights as given in our Declaration of Independence.

How can I say this so categorically? There are 50 Muslim countries in the world today, and none of them has human rights anywhere close to that of the United States. In fact, while Christians and Jews have lived in Muslim countries from the beginning, the hostility toward them has greatly increased as more Muslim countries are now being governed by their clerics.

If we can’t agree on the foundation of our human rights, we should be very careful about who are our future citizens and how they will vote in future elections. We will find our nation giving away the rights our Founders fought a war to gain.

Monday, June 11, 2018

What we are not talking about in our immigration discussions

The Tribune (June 10) ran a long, touching article about a friendship between a Muslim and a non-Muslim person in our country, putting a human face on an often contentious immigration issue.

There is one matter that is left out of all our discussions on immigration that needs to be talked about.

The American experiment is based on a level of human rights and freedom unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Our Founders fought a war in order to be able to establish this country with the Constitution that is currently in place.

The basic idea for American freedom and rights is explained in our Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal (i.e. we don’t believe in kings, a ruling class), that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty,, and the pursuit of happiness – that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed -- that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying tis foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

It is a safe assumption that no immigrant understands or believes these things when they come into our country. Many of our immigrants disagree with these beliefs. Islam, for example, had been in existence for 1,000 years prior to the founding of our country, and there is no Muslim country then or now in the world with a Constitution anything like ours. A Muslim would deny the whole premise of our Constitution.

We as a nation no longer talk about God-given rights, because we are told that any mention of God constitutes an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. So when millions of immigrants vote in our elections and have no idea of or belief in what it is that makes the United States what it is, we will eventually lose the freedoms we fought a war to gain.

This won’t happen suddenly, but gradually as more and more people vote according to their understanding of rights and not according to our Founders. I dare say we don’t even teach these to our own children, given the hostility to anything having to do with God in our public schools.

We are losing our nation. Without a war, without a revolution, without anyone even noticing it.

Is this really what we want to do?