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, June 25, 2021

The Transgender Myth

What does the word transgender even mean? 

Part of the problem is that someone, somewhere decided to give separate meanings to the words gender and sex, and society accepted it.

But what is gender apart from sex?

Gradually we are being trained to refer to a person as a man or a woman entirely on a person’s self-identification apart from the objective markings that have defined them throughout all of human history.

So now we often refer to a man as a woman and a woman as a man apart from their biology, yet it is biology that defined them in the first place.

What is a woman, and how is she different from a man? 

A woman has a womb.  A woman is able to create living beings in that womb.  The survival of the human race depends on women creating living beings in their womb.  When the average woman in a society bears less than 2.1 living beings in her lifetime, the society shrinks.  There are fewer people in it, and the average age increases, which gives that society fewer productive people and more people dependent on others for their care.

A man has the ability to get that life started in the woman’s womb.  A woman cannot do that on her own, and a man cannot create life on his own.  The world needs the two to join together in the process.

It can be argued today that science can make the need for human interaction here unnecessary, but that also removes the human emotional involvement in the life of the child, as if that were not important.  Personally, I don’t think it would be wise to do a longitudinal study on that, because if it were proven to be detrimental to the life of that child, we will have inflicted damage on thousands of children just to prove or disprove our theories.

We have gone so far as to think of sex as having been assigned to us at birth, like maybe the doctor preferred one over the other, or they drew straws in deciding what sex to call the children.

But why is this all important, important enough to call it a myth and no doubt incur the wrath of innumerable people.

If a person thinks they are of the other sex and they want to live like that and even undergo physical changes through surgery, why is that even any of my business? 

It’s not.

Except for one thing.

Our schools and our society insist that we teach this to our children and demand that they make their choices NOW.

We recognize a distinction between children and adults, where adults can assume full responsibility for their actions, and children need the consent of an adult or guardian to do certain things and other things they are strictly forbidden from doing until they reach adulthood, because we deem them not mature or knowledgeable enough to make wise or informed decisions.

But now, we are telling our children that the biology they were born with means as little as the clothes they wear as to who they really are inside.  They can really become one of those other humans who we detect are different from us, and we are now encouraging these children to undergo life-changing medical procedures that alter their outward appearances yet cannot change what they are inside.

The most egregious example of this is an enormous number of young girls who believe that they are boys, whatever that may mean.  Or that they can become boys if they take the right medicines and have the right surgeries.  And the medical community has been coerced into accommodating their wishes.  They routinely give hormone treatments and do surgeries even without the children’s parents’ knowledge or consent.  I understand that there is a push such that if parents object to this, they may be deemed abusive parents and lose custody of their children.

So young girls, long before they have ever thought of having children or getting married, are pushed into making permanent decisions about the rest of their lives.  Some will argue that the effects of the medicines are not permanent.  Surgeries certainly are.  And I understand that puberty blockers and then later hormone injections do have permanent ill effects.

These girls will never play on the boys’ sports team nor will they ever become comfortable changing in a boys’ locker room.  They will never create life in another woman’s womb, though they will still have that ability in their own, but they have made it as difficult as possible.  So what exactly do they think they are becoming, and what are we telling them that they can become? 

This is all absurd, wrong, and nothing other than child abuse.