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

Friday, July 20, 2018

Another Look at the Second Amendment


I don’t think most people understand the Second Amendment.  I haven’t talked to most people, but I can read what is going on at least as the media report it.  We’re not teaching our children or the people who come here what this country is all about

Most people think that the Second Amendment gives people the right to bear and carry arms.  That’s wrong on two accounts.

First of all, the Amendments to the Constitution, at least the original ones, didn’t give rights.  They describe rights the people already had and that everybody knew they had. 

The Founders even debated whether they should include a Bill of Rights to the Constitution.  They were concerned that people might think that these rights came from the government, that they might think that the government can take them away or modify them, like is happening today with free speech and guns, and they were concerned that people might think that the only rights they had were those spelled out specifically in the Constitution. 

They asked in the Federalist Papers, which were written to explain and encourage the people to ratify the new Constitution, why they should declare that the press should be free, if the Constitution didn’t give the government any power to restrict it   Some found this unnecessary and misleading.  They eventually decided to add them.  This is why they are Amendments and not a part of the body of the Construction.  Today we talk about repealing or changing Amendments.  When we do that, it shows that we are failing to understand what our Founders intended and gave us.

Secondly, people often think that we have the right to bear and carry arms only because of the need for well-regulated militias.  “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  So if we no longer need well-regulated militias, we no longer have a right to bear and carry arms. 

No.  The right to bear and carry arms is still there.  The Amendment is just reminding the federal government and the people why they should not try reduce those rights.  The right exists nonetheless.

And the Founders would not agree that we no longer need militias.  The Founders were students of history, and they certainly know European history.

In the Federalist Papers, our nation was described as an “armed” people, and that was considered a good thing, unlike in Europe where they were unarmed and ruled by tyrants and kings.  They considered guns in the hands of the citizens as their best protection against a tyrannical government.  They even present the scenario of the federal government sending troops to subject a state in a matter, and the state militia, every able-bodied person joining together, would be able to repel them.  It is said that in World War 2, the reason that Japan didn’t invade the United States was that everybody here had a gun.

Some of this may seem farfetched today, but there are people working very hard today to disarm the American people and to increase the power of government.  A few more generations, who knows?  At some point, we may find that the government wants to impose some policy on the whole country and one or more states says it’s not going to happen here.  And the federal government wants to force them, and the states say no;

The modern Webster’s dictionary defines infringe as an encroachment, so infringing the right to bear and carry arms would be the myriad ways that government tries to discourage and minimize gun ownership through taxes, zoning, the high number of gun laws and rules to weary all but the most ardent gun owners, and the imminent danger of being charged with a crime even if you use a gun in self-defense.

If you go back to the original Webster’s in the early 1800s, very near to the time of the Second Amendment’s writing, the definition is a little different.  Encroachment is not even mentioned as a definition of infringement.  They understood infringement as a breaking of a contract, a violation.  There is also the meaning of hindering, which is not too far from encroachment.

So the Founders weren’t thinking primarily of incremental infringements of the rights of gun owners, but they saw any restrictions as a violation of an unwritten contract that our nation would honor the unalienable right of gun ownership.

Guns have always been a major part of American life.  If now, after 240 years, we are having a problem with them, we need to ask what changed.  I answer that we have removed God from public life and education.  Secularism, which is essentially atheism, does not and cannot form or build a cohesive society where people care for each other.  This is not to say that an atheist cannot be a moral person, but the first atheistic countries in human history were responsible for the deaths of 100 million of their own people in the 20th century.  There just isn’t the same value of human life in secularism or atheism. 

Our second President, John Adams, said: “We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

In speaking about religion, Adams was referring to Christianity, because that was the foundation of their beliefs in human rights and freedom.  True freedom involves a good measure of self-restraint and high moral conduct, otherwise you will need a strong government to force correct behavior.

And this is what we are having more of today.  More and more laws and regulations in an attempt to reduce gun violence when for almost all of our nation’s history, this was done by individuals who respected the lives of others, because they believed that we are all created in the image of God and God tells us to love our neighbors.

The secular moral code is summed up in four words: tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.  Our only responsibility is to tolerate other people.  The government is responsible to see that everything is equal, fair, and diverse.  To tolerate somebody means simply to put up with them, or more practically, to ignore them.

If you don’t teach people to love their neighbors but just to tolerate them, you will not have a cohesive, united society where people are bonded with their neighbors and are eager to help them when needed.  Oh, yes, there are always people who respond in emergencies, but our society is becoming increasingly fragmented, and many places, like Chicago, have an epidemic of gun violence. 

The court called supreme was wrong to remove the Bible from public schools, because that taught us the morality that keeps us from killing each other, or wanting to.  It taught people to love each other and not just tolerate them or ignore them. 

Religion, specifically Christianity, believes that people are accountable for their actions, even those not seen by other people and gives other good reasons for moral behavior.  When you believe that God wants you to love your neighbor and that this is the most important thing you can do, it changes you.  When you believe and are taught that people are just intelligent apes, formed through chance chemical processes, there is less need to get involved with them, let alone love them.  When you see people as created by God and in His image, it changes everything.

The answer to gun violence in our country is to return to our roots.  God gave us rights, but He also gave us a lot more.  He showed us how to live.  Our Founders believed in the Bible, and the Bible was used for almost 200 years in our public schools to teach our children love, honor, purity, integrity, hard work, compassion, kindness, helping people in need, mercy, forgiveness, giving, sacrifice, honesty, responsibility, respect, courage, self-control, discipline, humility, and patience.  The Bible also taught our children to save yourself for marriage, not to have children out of wedlock, mothers and fathers loving, living, and staying together raising their children to do what is right, honoring and respecting them and other authorities, and working through hard marriages rather than breaking up a family.

They believed in the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  And, of course, Love your neighbor as yourself.  This gave our country a moral consensus and bonded us with others.

Our country is trying to solve a gun problem by spending billions of dollars on law enforcement, hiring thousands of more personnel, laws, regulations, rules, mental health, security forces instead of trying to make better people, which is what we did for the first 200 years of our existence.

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