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

Monday, December 3, 2018

the most important issue of our time,and nobody is talking about it


Our country has never been more divided or in more turmoil than it is today.  I lived through the Civil Rights and Viet Nam eras, but those were more focused protests, while today we are divided on just about everything.

I wanted to figure out why.  I wanted to know how we got here

I read an article in the paper about what it means to be an American.  After reading the answer given and thinking about the overall divisions in the country, I knew something was missing from the discussion. 

Then I saw it, an issue so fundamental to everything that is going on, and nobody was even talking about it.  And what’s more, this is the issue that will determine the future of our nation in every way that matters.

The single most important issue facing our country has to do with what it is that defines America.  I have read a number of different definitions of what it means to be an American, but frankly they are missing the point, because they are not going back to the sources.

The best description of what America is is found in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, 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 its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

God gave human beings unalienable rights, rights that precede and supersede government, rights that the government cannot restrict, modify, or take away.

But wait a second.

What God gave people unalienable rights, and how did the Founders know that? 

Every nation in the world at that time had their god(s) and their religion(s), but no other nation had unalienable rights.

It was the God of the Bible, and the Bible and Christianity were seen as the vehicles used by God to reveal Himself and His purposes to humankind.

God gave unalienable rights to human beings.  The courts would call that a religious opinion.  The Founders called it a fact.

If you don’t have Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights. 

If you separate Christianity from the foundation of our country, or if you deny the existence of God, or if you lump all the religions together as being equal with no religion being more important or more true than another, if our government cannot favor one religion over another, then you don’t have unalienable rights.  Unalienable rights require a Higher Power, an authority higher than our government that our nation as a whole accepts.  If there is no higher power, or if that Higher Power is not the God of the Bible, then you don’t have unalienable rights.  You only have what rights the government will give you, and those are two very different things.

Unalienable rights have to do with things that you are free to do without the government’s permission, interference, or restrictions.  This is what our Founders meant by liberty, or freedom. 

Government rights are rights that require the government to compel other people to do things for the sake of the people who have now been given certain rights.  Usually this will require enormous amounts of money. or it will require a curtailing of certain unalienable rights if they are seen to conflict with what the government wants to give other people.  For example: freedom of speech ends if your speech is considered offensive to someone else.  In other words, your freedom of speech is determined by someone else, so you better be careful what you say, lest you offend somebody and are held liable for your speech.

Our Founders also recognized that liberty requires high moral standards.  If people do not want to do what is right as a general rule, freedom will lead to anarchy and eventually back to despotism.

For 200 years, the moral code of our country was the Ten Commandments, Love your neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, all from the Bible.  But that was ruled unconstitutional, because it was considered to be religious sentiments.

Now they have been replaced with secular values: tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.  The only responsibility here for individuals is tolerance, which can mean nothing more than ignoring your neighbor.  The rest require the government to closely monitor society and people’s behavior to ensure that everyone complies with these new highest values.

The First Amendment cannot guarantee freedom of religion unless religion is consistent with the highest values of the land, otherwise conflicts will inevitably rise, and secular values will take precedence, because secular values are now higher than religious ones.  And that is what is happening today.

This proves that our nation was never intended to be a secular nation.  It also shows again that Christianity is at the root of our country, because religions all have very different value systems.  At that time, Hindus routinely burned widows alive on their dead husband’s funeral pyre, and Muslims then and now believe(d) in subjugating or killing those who will not subject themselves to Islam.  Our country fought its first war against Muslim countries in Africa.  Their leaders showed our leaders from the Koran that it is the duty of Muslims to enslave or kill the infidels.

And, of course, the entire idea of establishment of religion in the First Amendment has been entirely misunderstood, because people have not read enough in the early documents. 

The Founders did not want a national Church as they had and still do in Europe.  That the First Amendment had nothing to do with our government recognizing God and Christianity is evidenced by the fact that most if not all of the original states had a State Church written into their earliest Constitutions.  They soon came to see that they were simply duplicating on a smaller scale the very thing many of them had fled from in Europe, so this omitted in later versions of those Constitutions.
To say that we cannot talk about God in our public schools is wrong, because how are we going to be able to teach our children about unalienable rights if we don’t talk about God?

The entire founding of our country is not being taught in our schools, at least the parts that are most important in establishing the true nature of our country, because it has to do with God.  And we certainly aren’t teaching it to the millions of people who have been moving to our country over the years.  Well, that would be culturally insensitive. 

When our children and the millions of immigrants start voting, getting elected to public office, and making our laws, they will not do it with the knowledge of what made the United States unique among the nations.

So over the course of a few generations, our country will change as surely as if there had been a war and we were taken over by a foreign power.  We will have lost everything that made us what we are.  But because it is happening slowly, over generations, nobody is alarmed.  All the changes that are happening in our country are seen as inevitable, good, a sign of progress, or as just another political debate as there have always been. 

Our country is at the tipping point.  This can be seen by how close most elections are. 
More and more people will question why the religion question is that important.  Below are five inevitable changes that have followed on the heels of our secularization as a nation.

1..        Our country has no uniqueness, so we can and should follow the lead of other nations with regard to health care, gun laws, welfare, speech codes, globalization.  To think differently is considered to be arrogance and willful blindness.

2.         As a secular country, government now assumes the role that God used to play in people’s lives.  Government now is the provider, protector, and benefactor of the people.  This comes at an enormous expense to our country:

a)         This is why government spending will never be cut.
b)         This is why our federal debt has ballooned so much so quickly and will not come down.  People have a right to so many things that cost so much money.
c))        This is why socialism, or a version of it, is almost inevitable.  People have a right to be taken care of.

3.         What were unalienable rights now have become government-given rights.
a)         Freedom of speech has to be limited to protect people from hate and offense.
b)         Secular values are higher than religious ones, so religions freedom must be limited where religious values differ from secular ones.
c)         The right to life assumes the right to defend that life.  But the State believes it has the right and duty to restrict, regulate, and closely monitor that activity under the guise of public safety.

4.         Our new moral code is failing to restrict bad behaviors.  Our country has become an unsafe place.
a)         We may say that crime has not risen, risen that much, or even falling in some cases, but we are falling to acknowledge at what price.  We have made it much harder to get away with a crime at an incredible expense: the cost of technology, additional police personnel (salaries, enormous pensions).
b)         People are afraid to walk alone, at night, or in less public places.  Heck, they are afraid in our public schools.  It used to be common to leave cars and house unlocked.  We weren’t worried that someone was going to steal from or rob us.
c)         Guns must be restricted or banned for public safety reasons.  Your right to bear arms can be qualified: it is only for hunting, recreation, within your home, limited to only a few shots before reloading, and, of course, guns must always be unloaded or disassembled when not in use. 
d)         We now require security guards everywhere: schools, churches, all public places.  We have to keep hiring more and more police and install more and more cameras, all at great public expense.
e)         We have to be inspected, searched, and restricted for public safety in more and more places.
                        1)         Schools are now locked down.
                        2)         We now have to be screened to fly on an airplane, go to a ball game.  We are restricted on things we can bring in and at more places, e,g. liquids, backpacks.

5..        Our religious neutrality has allowed for the presence of a burgeoning Muslim population in our country.  To even express concern for this prompts a knee jerk reaction of horror, because we have become conditioned to think only of our common humanity.  Ideas are not relevant.  Religions are all equal.  Worldview is code for racism. 

            But:

a.         this is the only reason we now have airport security screening everywhere.
b.         While individual Muslims are just that, individuals who we are taught to judge and respect as individuals, the history of Islam and what it looks like in a Muslim majority country is plain for all to see.  We can see the future of our country in Europe today and in any of 50 Muslim majority countries.  If you like what you see, don’t worry, it’s coming to America.

c.         The fact is that Islam has a goal of making the entire world Islamic.  The basic strategy is mass migration to non-Muslim countries and then mass reproduction.  The West is not reproducing at even maintenance levels.  We are teaching our daughters that it is more important to have a career than a family.  It is only a matter of time before Muslims will have a majority in the various countries.

All of the above are natural and inevitable results of our country separating itself from our founding principles.  We need to have, I don’t want to say, a debate.  We need people to confront and challenge the current thinking.  Jefferson said that if our government doesn’t secure our unalienable rights, we should alter or abolish it and institute new government. 

We’ve got to get this information into the public consciousness and get everyone talking about it.  It is not a debate, but it will look like it for a while.  We have to demand our country back.  There is no more important issue in our country at this time.  If we lose here, we lose everything.