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, July 2, 2021

Ending the Hate and Gun Violence

Those who live in the Chicago area are used to hearing weekly reports on the gun violence from the previous weekend.  They may have broken the record last weekend with over 70 shootings, and I think 11 killed.  Weekends are worse than weekdays, and hot weather just ups the totals dramatically.

These shootings are mostly black on black crime, and therefore they are not listed or prosecuted as hate crimes.  It seems that hate crimes only apply when you hate people of other races or religions.  It doesn’t count if you hate people of your own race.  That’s absurd.  It takes a lot of hate to gun down people, whether it’s one or 11, as in one of those last shootings.

Politicians focus their attention on guns.  People kill, because they have easy access to guns.  But Chicago’s gun violence is mostly from street gangs.  These same gangs have no problem flooding Chicago’s streets with illicit drugs.  It shouldn’t be difficult for them to add guns to the drug shipments, though it might be cheaper for them now to buy just them from gun stores.

People kill because they do not value human life.  Their anger and hatred impel them to do violence against other people.

You can’t fight hate with laws.  Laws may stop a few people from expressing that hate, but there already are laws against shooting and killing people.  You want to stop hate crimes, mass shootings, or any killing?  You need to get people to love each other. 

That may sound like a tall order here, but realize, gun violence is a relatively new problem in our country. 

We forget that America has always had guns.  The Founders called it “being armed,” an advantage “which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.”  “The [other] governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”[1]  We were free, because we were armed, and Europe was run by kings, because the people were not.  

We forget that we used to be able to buy guns like you were buying a screwdriver at a hardware store.  We used to have gun clubs in public high schools.

Guns weren’t a problem, because we taught our kids, even in public schools, that you should love your neighbor as yourselves, and do unto others as you would have others do unto you, and, above all, do not kill.

Those are all from the Bible, which used to be a part of our public education for almost 200 years, until the court called supreme said we couldn’t.  You would think the people who wrote the First Amendment knew what they meant by it.

Love is a religious word.  We don’t use it much in public circles today.  We don’t talk about religion much in public either, but I don’t see any way out of this gun violence apart from it.

And not just any religion either.  Not all religions teach about loving our neighbors.  Or doing unto others as we would have others do unto us.  Or the, Thou shalt not kill.

It may take a generation to raise a generation of kids with love in their hearts rather than hate, but any other proposed solution is like trying to hold down a lid on boiling water with your hand.  It may work for a while, but the boiling water will always spill over.

But what about the separation of church and state? 

The separation of church and state as commonly understand means that the government must not bring God or religion into any of its policy-making discussions nor into our public schools.  It must treat all religions equally and even to mention religion is showing favoritism of theism over atheism, so practically speaking, we must act like an atheistic nation in order to be fully neutral to all religions.

But for those who know about the early days of our country, the establishment of religion meant having a national church run by the government, like they have in Europe.  The Queen of England is the head of the Church of England.  That’s what the First Amendment prohibits, not talking about, teaching about, or believing in God.

The Founders believed in the right to bear and carry arms, because it is only when you have an armed populace that a people are able to remain free.  Having an armed populace, the Founders also knew that you need a religious people who loved their neighbors if you wanted the people to live in peace.

 

 

[1] Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, 1998).

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