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, February 21, 2022

Diversity: how important is it?

The editorial today insists that corporations must have diversity on their boards.  (It will take more than symbols to achieve corporate board diversity, February 21)

The very motto of our country is e pluribus unum.  Out of many, one.

Why does our country even have a motto like that?  A very wise man said that a house divided cannot stand, and our ancestors knew that. 

It seems that all our political leaders and all the activists shouting loud who seem to get the attention of the media are acting against the core beliefs of our country.  They are all trying to divide our country into myriads of groups all competing for a share of the pie.  Our ancestors believed that the pie was always growing, by the way, as our country created wealth, but that belief has gone by the wayside too.

Every human being is an individual, unique, and with their own stories.  It is a mistake, an enormous one at that, to say that, hey, all my neighbors are white, they all lived privileged lives, I have nothing to learn from their experiences, they are all just like me in every way.  I am deprived in my core being if I don’t have more people of other races in my inner circle.  Like that one characteristic is more significant than a person’s education, culture, religion, personal interests, and personal background.

We are told not to stereotype, but that is exactly what diversity advocates are doing.  All blacks, for example, are similar in so many ways, that we need black people to represent them on our corporate boards, our police forces, our teachers, and our elected officials.  And the same for an ever-increasing number of other demographics. 

They say that diversity is our strength, that it enriches us.  At the same time, diversity is more likely to divide us.  Most people, everywhere, at all times, tend to develop closer relationships with people most like them.  Not just ethnically, but interests, culture, education, religion, age, and family status. 

Our society will be healthier and happier, not just overall but individually, when we just stop being so race and ethnic conscious and just see each other as human beings.  Stop with the counting and the constant analysis and the labeling, insisting that every group must have their certain numbers of representation for a society to be just.  Those people who do the constant counting will never be happy or let society be happy, because they are always looking for more evidences of something else to fault society for. 

 

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