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, July 18, 2018

United We Stand, Divided We Fall


Our country has never been more divided than it is today.  If you look at the Constitution, the very first reason it states why our Founders decided to create the government that they did was in order to form a more perfect union. 

Now they may have been thinking more of uniting the States rather than the people, but the divided people divides states as well.  The states can’t be united if the people are not.

So one of the obvious things this means is that it is not the role of government to do something that the people don’t want, cram it down their throats, and then tell them to like it.  Or to put it a little nicer, if there are issues that are controversial (again, a sign of our division), the role of government should be to try to find a consensus through debate and dialogue before acting rather than doing something that a very large portion of the population is against.

Politically, they would call this bi-partisanship.  In the past, that was common.  Now it is rare.  Why?  Simply, the political parties are just as divided as the people are.

Looking at that a little differently, it’s we the people who are forming this government to help unite us.  It is not the place of government to decide for the people what it deems best and then force the people to live under it.

But we first need to ask why our country is so divided.  How could a country whose first stated purpose for even existing is to promote unity become so divided?  One thing you can say for sure about this division is that it is not accidental. 

So what unites people?  In one word, it’s worldview.  Worldview is a way of looking at life, what you believe about it, what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, what is important and what is not.   What are the rules?  Are there any rules? 

Now in some ways, everybody has their own worldview.  No two people think exactly alike, but there are larger, more universal worldviews, systems of belief that everybody pretty much falls into one of them.  Details may vary, but the basic framework is the same.

Our country started out with a common worldview.  Our government, primarily through the court called supreme, called promoting that worldview unconstitutional.  There are, of course, many other basic worldviews that exist, and those who believe in one often feel it their duty to try to get as many other people as possible to follow it as well. 

So while that original worldview would be challenged wherever people talk about ideas, the court called supreme essentially removed that worldview from even being discussed in our schools.  So, on the one hand, the original worldview that united our country was prohibited from public education and the public square, and then there is the push for a different worldview from the people who hold to them, and then add to that the millions of people who come to our country with no clue about the original worldview that formed and united our country and each bringing the worldview of their home country, and voila you have a divided country.

You may have guessed that I was really talking about Christianity.  Well, that’s what religions are, worldviews, a complete description of life with all the rules and values spelled out.

There are also secular worldviews, ones that don’t include God, gods, that you could essentially call a secular religion.  Defining a religion as only including a god, God, misses the whole point of worldview.  The idea is supreme value, the system of belief that you, or your country, live your life by.   

We are told that our government must be neutral when it comes to worldviews that include a god, God.  So we must replace that with a wolrldview that doesn’t? I’m sorry, but that is beyond the role of government.  We must replace one worldview with another, because the government says so?    So our country, no, our government replaced Christianity with secularism.

But you say, our country is too diverse to favor one religion, I mean, worldview, over another.  Again, that was not accidental.  That was an intentional decision of our government without asking the people of our country.

Our country was founded on Christianity.  Our country was founded as a unique country in human history.  It believed that God gave humans unalienable rights that government cannot take away.  That was Christianity.  No other country, or religion, or worldview, believed in that.  The Ten Commandments used to be our moral code.  Now it is: make it up as you go along. 

Actually, the tenets of our new national religion, worldview, moral code are: tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.   Your only responsibility as a human being is to tolerate, meaning put up with, or ignore, other people.  The government has the responsibility of seeing that everything is equal, fair, and diverse.

Add to that the myriad of worldviews that others bring to our country while we don’t teach them the worldview that started our country, and you have division, a divided country. 

Going back to the beginning, the government’s role in our country is to form a more perfect union.  It is not to force, and that is the correct word, another worldview on its people and then expect them to live by it. 

I didn’t say that the original worldview was to be forced on everybody either.  But we have to recognize the worldview that our country was founded on.  Disagree with it, if you will, but our government has essentially banned even having the discussion.  We not only not teach our children and the millions of people who come here what our country is based on; our government even forbids that we even talk about it in the public square.  I call that a government takeover, a foreign or domestic enemy that our leaders took an oath to defend our country against. 

The fact that our country is so divided is proof that our government is not governing according to what it was created to do by our Constitution.

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