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

Wednesday, December 8, 2021

The Court Called Supreme and Abortion

There is a case before the Supreme Court now that affects all of us.  On the surface, the case is only about abortion, but it deals with five important issues that concern all of us. 

The first issue is the question of what a Constitutional right is. 

There is talk that this case might overturn a previous Court ruling that not only made abortion the law of the land but also engendered the belief that abortion is a Constitutional right. 

At the time when our Constitution was written, the only rights anyone was talking about were unalienable rights, those spoken of in the Declaration of Independence, rights that precede and supersede government and that government cannot restrict or take away.  These, the Founders said, were given to human beings by God.

The Founders debated whether to include some of these unalienable rights in the Constitution itself.  They were concerned that people might think that these rights came from the government rather than from God.

They finally decided to add them as amendments to our Constitution, and the first ten became known as the Bill of Rights. 

So a Constitutional right would be an unalienable right, one that government cannot restrict or take away. 

Abortion is now legal, but is it a right, a Constitutional one at that?

This is the second issue: how do we know a right is a Constitutional one?

A Constitutional right would have to be an unalienable right, given by God. 

The thinking of the Court was that abortion was a part of some privacy concerns of the Fourth Amendment.  That would be limiting government intrusion into a person’s life.  Is a limitation or ban on abortion an intrusion into a person’s life?  Or are they prohibitions on wrongful activity?

If I were making bombs in my basement, do I have a right to privacy?  If I were aborting a baby, would I still have that right to privacy? 

One of the foundational rights of our country is the right to life.  When does a baby get that right?  When we decide?  When her mother decides?  Then how is that an unalienable right, if other people can decide when or if a person gets it?

That’s the basic issue of abortion.  Not the mother’s rights but the baby’s.

So then the question: how do we decide if an issue, a right, is a Constitutional right? 

I think we should be very careful before we assert that some new right is a Constitutional right.

I frankly doubt that, after 200-some years, anyone is going to discover a new right today that everybody would agree that this right comes from God.  And that’s what a Constitutional right is.

Should we decide these questions by taking opinion polls?  Are unalienable rights unalienable because a majority of nine people on a court say so?  It may not even be a unanimous decision.  Shouldn’t an unalienable right at least have some consensus in a country?  If half the country is opposed to something, can we really say that this right is unalienable, such that it can never be changed. 

Saying that these rights come from God suggests to me that the Founders were thinking of some external point of reference, like the Bible, because other religions don’t all agree with our understanding of unalienable rights, e.g. the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  You can’t really talk about God in a generic sense.  It would have to relate to a religion that the people were familiar with.  A religion is a common understanding of God.

Thirdly, the fact that something is legal doesn’t mean that it is right.

Lying is illegal if you do it in court while under oath, but in everyday life, there is no law against it.  Does that mean it’s alright to lie, if you haven’t taken an oath beforehand that you won’t?  I would say no.  I’m guessing some would disagree, saying it depends on the circumstances.

But we could probably agree that there are things that are right and things that are wrong.  But our laws don’t forbid everything that is wrong, and in some cases may specifically allow things we believe to be wrong.

So whether something is right or wrong is not determined by laws.  Laws only determine if certain behavior requires a public response to inhibit it, not whether something is intrinsically bad. 

Fourth, something isn’t a right, just because loud voices insist that it is. 

People seem prone to declaring rights that everyone is supposed to accept as inviolable ones.  Governments can endow the people with rights, and they can revoke them as well.  And asserting that something is a right does not make it one, and you should not expect that everyone is going to agree with you.    You can expect to be challenged.

Where does abortion fit here?

The public is divided.

And the last issue isn’t about rights but about equal protection.

The Fourteen Amendment to our Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law. 

Does that mean that different abortion laws in different states constitute unequal protection under the law?

By that thinking, states shouldn’t make laws.  Only the federal government should, so every state has the same laws.

No, equal protection under the law means that the law will apply equally to all those affected by the law.  Because you can drive 75 in Montana does not mean that you can drive 75 in Illinois.  And it does not mean that Illinois must change its law to match Montana’s.  But it does mean that in each state, the penalty for breaking the law will, or should, apply to everyone equally.

Soon the Supreme Court will make a ruling on a recent abortion law. 

Just remember. 

The law and the ruling are about a lot more than just abo
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