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, June 26, 2021

The government wants to teach your kids about sex

Our federal government created standards for sex education for the public schools in our country.  States get to decide if they want to implement them. Illinois passed the legislation to do that, but it seems that the governor has not yet signed it.

I believe this curriculum not only fails our kids but is harmful to them in three major ways:

1)      It claims to be medically accurate, yet it ignores basic biology.   

Biologically, human beings have what we may call sex organs, but most of them biologically are considered to be reproductive organs.   They are all part of an intricate reproductive system that the species needs to continue existence.  According to modern biology, life, all life, is driven by the need for its species to survive, and this curriculum sees reproduction merely as an adverse side effect, a condition that people need to know how to treat, like catching a cold.

The curriculum treats these organs as built-in sex toys that exist solely to provide pleasure to the owner.  There are risks involved, such as disease and pregnancy, but the student learns what to do to treat those conditions, where to go, and how to prevent them.

This curriculum sees no normative function of this reproductive system such that its use is a totally arbitrary decision of the owner.  This is like teaching digestion without teaching nutrition, such that ice cream has the same practical value as vegetables, and is even more desirable, because it tastes better.  It’s entirely your choice whether to eat ice cream or vegetables.  One has no more inherent value than the other, and no one has the right to say that one is better than the other.  

What modern lingo calls cisgenderism is simply humans using their sexual organs in the way that they are designed to work.  Obviously, the activity that actually reproduces the species has results and satisfactions that have nothing to do with reproduction.  This curriculum insists that humans should treat this basic biological function as unimportant and secondary to the goal of achieving pleasure, such that a person contemplating their future and how they want to live their life need not and should not even take that into consideration.  It’s all about what you feel comfortable with at the time, meaning, what you feel now.

And obviously, they are asking this question to children who may not even know what this all even feels like, yet alone asking and deciding questions that only adults can answer, like whether to get married and have children. 

2)      This curriculum treats sexual activity entirely on mechanical functioning rather than on its purpose and value.  Like teaching firearms in middle school. 

We teach our kids what guns are, how they work, how to maintain them.  We would give them target practice in school, but we are essentially telling our kids to practice sex on their own, to see what kind they like best.  No thought is given to whether, as an adult, they might not want to marry somebody who has already had sex with half their class or who might want to present themselves to their spouse as one who saved themselves for them.

Kids don’t ask these kinds of questions, and the adults in the room here don’t want the kids to know that they might have those questions later on.  That’s highly irresponsible teaching.  And even abusive to children.  You know something is good for them, but you withhold it? 

What is sex?  Is it merely a form of mutual masturbation, something that exists merely to provide pleasure to ourselves, and having someone do it with us only makes it more pleasurable?

These are questions far beyond the realms of science and medicine.  Science and medicine don’t give us enough information to make these kinds of life choices.  Like studying love and only measuring physiological changes to our heart and brains and thinking we understand it.  We won’t know what came first, the feelings or the love, or whether love is just feelings or something apart from it that creates the feelings.

Science and medicine cannot tell us what sex is, what it means, and what its value is.  That requires, I could say, psychology, but that still approaches life without consideration of God, which many people still believe in and use to guide their lives.

This curriculum tries to teach values by saying that there are no normative values, none that correspond best with your physiology or psychology, let alone religious ones.  That is beyond the purview of a public school.  If they want to present the natural worldview in a public school as an alternative to a religious worldview, they can do that, but they don’t.  They use the words medicine and science to present this as the only viable way to look at this.

3)      And, lastly, this curriculum simply encourages our kids to experiment on all the sexual possibilities so they can figure out which one they like best.  All apart from being married or even loving the person you’re having this intimacy with.  This curriculum divorces sex from commitment, marriage, and even love.  It’s just an act for the sake of pleasure that can lead to pregnancy which you should know how to terminate.  And they will judge its value entirely on how much pleasure they get from it.

This curriculum is not in the best interest of our children, because it is taking one small part of life and teaching it as if it exists or is meant to exist by itself.  This is at best irresponsible and at worst abusive to our children.