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

Thursday, May 9, 2019

today's newspaper and today's society


I saw 4 articles in the paper today (May 9) that spoke volumes about what kind of society we have become today, and it’s not pretty.  At least in my mind.

The headline, the most important story of the day, was about someone who made a hand signal that was deemed to be offensive and hateful.  This person had to be banned from Wrigley Field for life. 
I’m going to guess that this person, if he was indeed a hater, continues to be a hater after the ban.  As a society, we can’t fix hatred as we currently conduct it, so we just ban various expressions of it and somehow we pretend that we fixed the problem.

Then there was an article about a police officer who touched a woman on the butt, gave two women hugs, and a third he actually held her wrist and raised her arm, all without the women’s consent.  And for this he was charged with three felony counts of official misconduct and one felony count of aggravated battery?  Really? 

Reading the whole story, I would say the man could be fired for conduct unbefitting a police officer.  He clearly intimidated the women without just cause. 

I’m not minimizing sexual misbehavior it, but our society has exaggerated it beyond any norm of common sense

Which brings us to the neverending Russell Addison saga.  He was accused of domestic violence by his ex-wife a long time ago.  Why is the date important?  Because if he had broken the law, that should have been resolved by now.
 
It seems domestic violence is the new unpardonable sin, and Russell Addison must be punished forever, or at least until he loses any chance of making a career from the one thing he is good at.  Is that the goal here?

And lastly there is, again, Joe Ricketts, blasted again, because he thinks Islam is a danger to Western Civilization.  You may disagree with that assessment, but you’re wrong to try to shame him with such words like bigot, racist, or Islamophobe. 

Is there a common theme here?  I would say yes.  Our society has elevated certain values beyond what they should be, and then it quickly and severely seeks to punish the offenders, but it is incapable of solving the underlying problems.  It just tries to stifle any expression of it and thinks we’re a better society for it.

We don’t know how to teach love instead of hate.  We don’t know how to teach kindness and respect for women, only the need for consent.  We don’t know how to forgive people.  We will dig things up from the past and never expect a person could ever change.  And we try to shame people we disagree with without trying to understand what they are saying.  We need to do better as a society.



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