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

Saturday, August 11, 2018

Six Ways Our Government is Failing Us (Part 1)


I really wanted to have a positive title for this article, but that kept sounding like it was making some suggestions or just sharing some good ideas.  No, our government is broken.  Can it be fixed?  Yes, but there is so much wrong you can easily doubt it.  You almost don’t even know where to begin. 

So, we need to start from the beginning.  The very first words of the Constitution give us the purpose of our government, why we have one, this one, in the first place.

I think it is important to remember that our Founders fought a war in order to be able to establish the government we have.  Or, shall I say, the government we used to have.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The first reason we have the government we have is to form a more perfect union. Our nation has never been more divided.  Is that the government’s fault?  Apparently, our Founders expected our government to have an important role in uniting us. 

For years our government has been pushing diversity.  They keep telling us that diversity is our strength.  They don’t say how this strengthens us, but it’s hard to see how it can unite us.  And that’s the first reason given why we have a government in the first place.

When people question the value of diversity, they are often labelled in ways that are meant to shame them and essentially shut down any discussion on the issue.  But the question is still there: what is the government doing to unite us?

Government itself is divided, and divided more than at any time in its history.  So how can a divided government unite a divided country?  It can’t, especially since one of the major political parties in our country actually wants to divide us. 

How can I say this? 

For one thing, they insist on putting everybody in our country into a group.  We are never just Americans; we are all identified by our race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or whatever, and we are all made to feel that we are competing for pieces of an ever-shrinking pie.  No one group can ever prosper except at the cost of another group.  Ask a Democrat if they want our country to be united, or at least why they want to divide us.

Another major cause of this division is multiculturalism.  It’s a belief that there is nothing unique or special about American culture that is worth keeping or protecting.  All cultures are basically equal.  So, there is no reason to favor or not favor any groups of people from coming to our country.  In reality, those with cultures most like ours are almost barred from entering, and those with the greatest differences are not only preferred but sought out.

One example here is religion.  Religion is not just a collection of beliefs or preferences that people have, like their taste in music or food.  A person’s religion is an all-encompassing worldview of life, their entire value system. 

Yes, people have a right to live according to the consciences, a right to free expression of their religion.  But that does not mean that if you mix a lot of religions together, you should expect peace and harmony, because they are all alike.  On the contrary, you will have inevitable clashes of worldviews, where everybody has a different value system.  Recently a Muslim boy in India was either attacked or arrested for killing a cow, which is sacred to Hindus. 

Our Founders wanted and expected and formed our government the way they did because they wanted the nation united.  How is a nation to be united when its people can’t even agree on the most basic questions about life?  Married people have a hard time achieving a perfect union, and they enter that relationship willingly and after having committed themselves to each other in love. 

Asking or expecting people to unite who don’t share the same culture or values is something that might not have ever been done before.  In a secular country, secular values are higher than religious ones, and they will enforce them with the full power of the government.  So, where in the past, moral values were things that the people would do based on their personal beliefs, now morals are behaviors enforced by law to compel people to comply with them.  Is that freedom?  Or liberty? 

The government is supposed to make things easier for us, not harder.  It is not supposed to force things on its people that they naturally see problems with and then tell them to like it.  That is not the role of government.

So our government has failed to unite our nation yet alone make it a more perfect union.

The second purpose of our government is: to establish justice.

The idea of justice is very common today in political speech, and there are numbers of websites that give their views on what it means here to establish justice.  They talk about the court system that the Founders set up, jury trial and all, but if you read much of what the Founders wrote, that was not the biggest thing on their minds.

Liberty was.  And freedom.  If justice is, as the First Webster Dictionary defined it, “The virtue which consists in giving to every one [sic] what is his due,” then it would be a mistake to think that the Founders didn’t have the government’s role in securing those unalienable God-given rights in mind.

Is the government failing us in securing these rights?  Yes.

How? 

They keep telling us that we are a secular nation and that we were always intended to be a secular nation.  But that’s not true, because our nation is based on a belief in human rights that were given to us by God.  And just not by any God.  Islam had been in existence for 1000 years before our county was founded, and both then and now there is no Muslim county in the world with an idea of human rights like we have.

Our Founders believed in God as taught in the Bible.  When they say, and this is what Democrats say, that we are a secular country, they don’t mention anything about our rights coming from God.  So where do they come from?  The only thing left is that they come from the government or the consensus of the people, in which cases they can be changed or revoked. 

We see that happening today with the First and Second Amendments.

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and exercise of religion.  But you can’t guarantee freedom of religion unless religion is consistent with the highest values of the land, otherwise there would be conflicts.  And this is what is happening today.

If we are a secular nation, then you don’t have unalienable rights.  Those can only be given by God.  But secularism doesn’t recognize any religion as being true.  They are all just people’s preferences.

But, no, they will answer.  Secularism only means that our government must be neutral with regards to religion.  It cannot prefer one religion over another.  But you can’t say that unless you regard all religions as not being true.  In a word, secularism is practical atheism.  It won’t come right out and say that.  That wouldn’t go over very well with a lot of people, but they are hoping that people won’t figure that out.

But if Christianity is not true, then you don’t have unalienable rights.  If you don’t have unalienable rights, then you have rights given to you by the government and/or the consensus of the people.  If you don’t have unalienable rights then our country has been taken over by an enemy who wants to destroy our country.  The takeover won’t be complete until the Christians and all the older people who remember how things used to be are dead.  The secularists have pretty much control over all our public schools, most of the universities and the media, so the coup is almost complete.

This is the number one reason why our country is so divided today.   Ask a Democrat where our rights come from.  If they say “from God,” ask them which God.  If they say from the government or the consensus of the people, then they are seeking to overthrow our government.

Is that too strong of a statement?  When people want to overthrow a government, what is it they want to do?  They want to install a new government.  And if you want to change our country from one based on unalienable rights given to us by God to one where rights are given and defined by the government and / or the consensus of the people, then you have fundamentally changed the whole foundation and structure of our country.  That is a takeover as serious as a foreign power had come in and taken over.  But because they are already Americans and elected officials and the media doesn’t say that they are doing anything wrong, they are getting a pass.

And what is this new government they want to install?  Socialism.  Where the government pretty much controls everything.  It takes from the rich to give to the poor. 

The problem is that you end up with fewer rich people, because why would you work 80 hours a week and give all your money to the government so they can give it to other people who aren’t working as hard as you if at all.?  They picture the rich as being idle people who spend all their time playing tennis or sailing boats.

Secularism is the religion of the land, so we are told, though they don’t call it a religion.  But a supreme value system is a religion, whether you have a God or not.  Its values are higher than religious values, so then there are conflicts between religious practices and the government.  And secular values win, because as a secular country, well, secular values are higher than religious ones.

The same goes for free speech.  The First Amendment says that freedom of speech cannot be abridged, but it has been decided that any speech that anybody can construe to be offensive to anybody in any way must be forbidden.  And this includes anything you might say in a private conversation or even if you were to say it out loud with no offended people present

This has had a chilling effect on freedom of speech, and frankly it is wrong.  There is no question that the Founders would rather allow speech that someone might consider offensive rather than having other people decide whether or not you have the right to say it.  They recognized the importance of being able to discuss and debate anything.  Government imposed restrictions on speech and practice was one of the main reasons so many of our Founding Fathers came to our country in the first place.

So in the matter of our government securing our rights given to us by God, it is failing.  It has denied that God has any place in our public life, so they won’t even talk about rights given to us by God. 

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