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 5, 2021

Two essays on religion and human rights

The Sun-Times editorial (Hold firm, Benet Academy, for LGBTQ rights, October 1) touches on some of the fundamental issues facing our country today. 

The issue at hand is whether human rights conflict with each other, how they might conflict, and how we might resolve the conflict. 

The free exercise of religion is one of the foundational rights of our country.  The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution to clarify what some of these inalienable rights that God gave to human beings are, and the free exercise of religion was put in the very first Amendment. 

But our country has removed God from the public square, our public schools, and the public’s consciousness so that our society now finds higher values than religious ones such that religious ones are now trumped.

Many religions believe that homosexuality is not God’s plan for human beings, and they have a right to teach their adherents what they believe is that plan.  Gay people have a right to work.  Nobody’s arguing about that

These religions are not teaching that gay people don’t have a right to work, nor are they trying to prevent them from working.  They just believe that if they are to teach their values to their students, then everyone who is in a position of teaching should embrace those same values.  That’s not too much to ask or expect.  And society should respect that and not try to force everybody to conform to the latest enlightened thinking of the day.

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I am not a Roman Catholic, but I feel I need to respond to a letter published in the Times regarding the Catholic Church.  (Benet Academy and 21st-century Catholicism, October 4)

Christians are not impressed by the enlightened thinking of the day.  We do not believe that everybody who lived before the 21st century was somehow morally and intellectually inferior than people living today. 

We believe that this wonderful, magnificent world that we live in was not the result of random and necessary chemical reactions.  We do not believe that life, all life, and the human body with all its intricate tiny parts can be explained without an intelligent Being being responsible for it.

We believe that God created human beings in His image, and loving His creation, He gave them the instructions on how to live this life.  The owner’s manual, if you will.

We don’t look at opinion polls or read newspapers to decide what to think and believe.  Forgive us if we don’t immediately respond to what the public or the media or the elites deem as the enlightened present state of human wisdom.  We are not impressed by the latest marches or parades or court rulings.  We see truth as eternal and not shaped by public opinions or polls.  We believe that the Creator knows best how the creation is supposed to function, and that He revealed this plan to human beings.  We do not believe that human beings are left to learn the laws of life by trial and error, but they are informed by the Inventor Himself.

We will never deny any person’s right to work, but please don’t tell us that we should ever hire a person who should be representing our values someone who doesn’t believe in them.  You wouldn’t ask that of any other organization. 

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