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

Tuesday, October 12, 2021

The Sad Truth about Freedom and Countries like the United States

I am writing this a few hours after I learned that Jon Gruden, a head coach of a professional football team, resigned his position after the New York Times dug through his past and found private emails from years ago where he spoke crudely and disparagingly about certain protected peoples in our society.

I was wondering if Gruden would now be allowed to get a job somewhere else, or would his remarks from years ago bar him from any meaningful employment in the future.  Would any apology be considered truly remorseful and acceptable, considering he’s only doing it after all this was made public, so, of course, he has to.  But did he really mean it?

But this article isn’t really about Gruden, but about freedom, and what are the risks that are inherent in that, and whether they are worth it.

It is a fact in life that not everybody will like everybody else.  And it can be for any of a myriad of reasons.  A lot of the time we don’t even know the reasons.  We don’t usually stop to think about it.  It can be their personality, their appearance, their eating habits, their general attitude, or, it can be something really important, like their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

When our country was founded, it was based on inalienable rights, things you could do without the government’s permission, interference, or regulation.  Now, rights in our country are not focused on things you can do, but things you can’t do and things that we are to do for you. 

So before, the government was focused on things you can do, freedom.  Now it is focused on things you can’t do, unfreedom, and things that we do for you, meaning, that the government must now compel other people to do things for you, whether it is merely paying for it, as in taxes, how you run your business, and how you treat people.  I don’t mean here things like robbing, stealing, assaulting, or killing people.  I mean where we hurt people’s feelings.

When our country was founded, the Founders debated whether to include a list of inalienable rights to the Constitution.  They finally agreed to and did so through amendments to it.  They were concerned that people would think that these rights came from the government rather than from God.

None of these rights compelled anybody to do anything for anybody else.  A few compelled the government to do certain things.

The Declaration of Independence states that governments exist to secure these inalienable rights given to us by God.  Now government exists to see that everybody gets what their new rights are, things that the government, meaning everybody else, has to provide for them.

You now have rights to things.  And other people are compelled to give them to you.  Either things that cost money, payable through our taxes, or intangible things like not being offended.  Now we have speech monitors to make sure you say nothing inappropriate, as judged by the crowd, social media, and certain loud voices in our society that we are supposed to listen to.  Anything you have said or done privately at any time in your life can be made public and held against you in the court of public opinion.  And other brazen acts of offending people are enforced by the courts and the law. 

Changes in countries, especially those like ours where we make laws to govern us change slowly.  We see a problem, and we make a law to prevent that from happening again.  And over time, like planting trees, we have changed the entire landscape of our nation.

I agree that people should be nice to each other.  I don’t think that this is something that must be compelled by the government or public pressure, such that people lose their jobs over it.  People may act more cautiously, but they still won’t like you, and we shouldn’t compel them to act like they do.

Sure, the world is a better place where people are kind to each other, care for each other, and respect each other.  The problem is that these are not things that any law will produce.  Forbidding people to say disparaging things to or about other people can limit the disparaging things that people say to or about other people, but it also limits a lot of other things people will want to say as well.

When we have society or the government policing people’s speech, such that their jobs, livelihoods, and reputations are at stake and that people’s entire past can be trolled looking for any possible offense against the written and unwritten laws of social decorum, then we are allowing a tyranny as stifling as any dictatorship.

Yes, I know that we are not allowed to shout ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre if there is no fire.  But that extreme example is now used to justify limits all across the spectrum.  We are no longer focusing on freedoms but limitations.  We have turned the whole system on its head. 

The Founders knew that with freedom comes responsibility.  If the people did not have a moral code to willingly want to do what is right and fair and kind, they would have needed a large government to closely monitor the people.  They believed a moral education was imperative, so they promoted the use of the Bible in all their schools to teach love for other people and a high moral code. 

Our modern emphasis on rights as things that the government must provide for people and things that are intangible like words and feelings is contrary to the entire spirit and intent of our nation’s founding. 

How can I be so sure?

Since our government assumed responsibility for taking care of everybody, they have found there isn’t enough money in the country to do all that.  They are driving the country deeper and deeper into debt, merely paying the interest on the debt yet continually borrowing more. 

I submit that the United States is the freest country in the world, and part of that freedom is the freedom to say wrong things, inappropriate things, bad things even, as long as you don’t do bad things to other people, like the aforementioned robbing, stealing, killing, etc. 

When we put our focus on what people say more than on what they do, we are making a petty tyrant dictatorship such that people become afraid to say anything important anymore or saying what they really think about things. 

And that is not how you want to run a country.  And that’s certainly not the United States of America.

 

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