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, October 19, 2018

What is an American?

The Heritage Foundation asked what it means to be an American.  This is what I wrote them.


What is an American?

The definition of an American is changing in that the definition of America is changing. 

We are not teaching the children of our public schools or in our colleges what America is, and we are certainly not teaching it to the millions of people who come here from all over the world.  They don’t need to become citizens, because we give that privilege to their children, whether their parents are Americans or not.

When they begin voting, getting elected to public office, and make laws, they will do them in ways that are contrary to the founding principles of our country.  In a generation of two, we will find ourselves in a very different country.

There are fewer and fewer people today who know the founding principles of our country, and they generally don’t have the platform to challenge what is going on.

The Declaration of Independence defines our country probably the best.  The core principle is that God gave humans unalienable rights.  Unalienable rights are individual rights that precede and supersede government.  Government cannot take them away, and government exists to protect those rights.  When it fails to do that, we have the right to replace it with a different government.  Our Founders would have done that already if they were still alive.

But wait a second.  How did the Founders know that God gave us rights, and what God were they talking about?  Every nation in the world at that time had their god(s) and their religion(s), but none of them believed in these unalienable rights. 

Our Founders believed that the Bible revealed God and His plans for humans, and they believed Christianity was the vehicle through which God was working in human lives. 

Today we are told that our country is a secular country and was always intended to be one.  As such, government cannot favor one religion over another and must act indifferently to all of them.  Essentially, a secular country is an atheistic country, but it can’t say so until the transformation is complete.

But if Christianity is not at the core of what we are as a nation, then you don’t have unalienable rights.  Your rights come from the government.  And those rights are different from the rights that come from God. 

The rights from God are things you can do freely without government intrusion.  Rights from the government are things that belong to you, and it’s the government’s job to see that you get them.  This requires laws that restrict behaviors of other people and usually requires them to pay for things for which the government deems is their right.  So the government requires people who don’t believe in abortions to pay toward those who do.

A country that believes in freedom, such as what unalienable rights entails, is a country that must also be moral and religions.  Like John Adams said, our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  You can’t give all kinds of freedoms to people if the people don’t have a strong moral code that directs them to do good to other people. 

Our country has turned its back on the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, the love your neighbor as yourself, which formed the moral foundation of our country for almost 200 years and traded it in for tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.  We can see the results in the incredible increase in spending today to protect our people from those who would do us harm and the increase in those who would.

You don’t have to be a Christian to be an American, but you do need to see that Christianity is at the core of what we are as a nation.  We need to teach the principles of Christianity if we are to continue as the nation we were founded to be.

The First Amendment is about the government not creating a state church as they had and still have in England.  It is not about removing God from our public schools and the public square.  Otherwise, it wouldn’t have taken almost 200 years for the courts to rule that way.  Our Founders knew what they meant by it.

Also, they could not have guaranteed freedom of religion, unless religion, and a specific one at that, was consistent with the highest values of our land.  It is a statement that all religions are equal and are free to come here and practice their religion in blissful harmony.  The Founders fully expected that in a free society there would be free discussions that would prove the truth of Christianity. 

At the time of the founding of our country, one major world religion was burning alive widows on the pyres of their dead husbands, and another was enslaving and killing those it considered to be infidels.  While people have a right to practice their religions, the First Amendment is not to be understood that any and all religions could practice everything they believe in our country.  Religions are not equal, and the morals of Christianity were the morals that guided our country and its laws.




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