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

Thursday, January 27, 2022

abortion and the right to life

A reader to a local newspaper wrote a letter and raised the question of the rights of the unborn. Unfortunately, he never tried to answer the question.  I will try.

Our nation is founded on two fundamental principles:  1) All people are created equal, meaning, that nobody has a divine or inherent right to rule over other people; and 2) God, our creator, has given human beings unalienable rights, rights that precede and supersede government, rights that the government did not give and that the government cannot take away.

These rights include the right to life.

The issue as regards the unborn is when do they get this right.

It seems to me that if we are even asking this question, then we are assuming that we have the right to decide that.  As if it is our right to give the child this right.  Like we have a right to decide whether this child lives or dies.

Is it after the child fully exits its mother’s womb?  Is that when the child receives the right to life?  Sometimes babies are born during an abortion process, and they then let the child die.

What about during the process of birth?  Does a child receive the right to life then?  Many abortions are done at this time.

At what point before birth might this child receive this right to live?  But again, why do we act as if it is our right to decide this?

And this is where and why our country is so divided on this issue.

Our country was founded on the belief that human life was created by God and that He gave all people unalienable rights.

If people were not created by God but are merely the results of random and necessary chemical reactions, then life has no meaning or importance beyond what we choose to give it. 

But the Bible, which used to be a major part of the public education in our country and is still regarded by a large majority of people in our country as God’s guide to life, speaks often of life before the womb, people whose lives were chosen by God before they were born and their whole lives were planned out ahead of them as well.

Is a child a restriction on a woman’s rights, or is it the greatest privilege that God can give to a human being?  God created the first human beings, but now we, we, create all the new ones.  Beings in the image of God, we get to create them.

Having a child is like the king himself came to your house and told you that you have been chosen for a very special mission.  You are being entrusted with the task of raising the next creation of God.  You are to nurture and instruct this new living being in the wisdom of life. 

The issue isn’t woman’s rights.  The issue is: what is this thing that we want so much to be able to kill?

 

 

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