poligion: Uniting a divided country

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, September 20, 2021

Uniting a divided country

A Tribune reader was bold enough to suggest the answer to America’s divisiveness. (Eisenhower’s ‘Middle Way,’ September 19)

I submit that Eisenhower’s answer was suitable to Eisenhower’s time far more than ours.

If half of America was traveling northeast, so to speak, and the other half was traveling northwest, you could probably convince a lot of them that traveling north would give them much of what they both wanted, enough to live at peace with the other half.

Today’s political climate is more like half of America wants to travel east and the other half wants to travel west. Any advance in one direction takes away from the goals of the other half.

The reader suggests his middle way positions as the way to unite our country, but frankly those are some of the very issues that currently divide us.

I do think that most Americans have not clearly defined their political philosophies as those at both ends have, so I do believe there is hope for us.

I submit that the root problem is that we have been lax in teaching to our children and the millions of people who have moved to our country in recent generations the true foundations of our nation.

A few examples: Those of us who are older are quite familiar with stories of our ancestors who came here with nothing, started their own businesses, and achieved the American dream. We were the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Now we view the government’s role as taking care of people, so there is no need for bravery any more. It’s the government’s responsibility to eliminate poverty, and they can’t spend enough money to do that.

We used to teach our kids in our public schools to love their neighbors as ourselves, to do unto others as we would have others do unto us, and the Ten Commandments. But that was deemed too religious for us, so now we just teach them to tolerate each other, which can mean no more than to ignore each other. We have lost the ties that bind us together.

These are not differences that have an easy middle road.

I agree with the reader that there is hope for our nation, but we lack an Eisenhower who has the position that we might listen to him and the wisdom to show us the way.