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, March 15, 2022

a wake-up call to America

When I was a kid, we made everything in America.  We had a strong middle class, jobs paid good living wages.  Spouses didn’t have to work in most cases.  You could stock shelves in a grocery store, and your wife could stay home with the kids.

We taxed all our imports.  We didn’t even have an income tax until 1913.  Taxes on imports paid for most of our federal spending.

But the need for this tax became important later on for other reasons.  Foreign companies generally don’t’ have labor unions, pensions, employer-provided medical insurance, minimum wage laws, child labor laws, standard workweek and overtime laws, OSHA, and government subsidies.  How could our companies possibly compete against companies like that?

We always imported a lot of products.  But they were genuine foreign products like Swiss chocolate and French wine.  They cost more, and nobody cared.  They were getting something unique.

Then somebody had the bright idea that trade should be free.  This would make consumer goods cheaper.

Oh, and millions of our jobs sent overseas.  Not just in the sense that we started buying more foreign products, but the foreign products were our products now being made in other places.

So we lost millions of middle class jobs.

Then at the same time, we flooded our country with immigrants.  Legal and illegal.  And this drove down wages. 

So now, we are heavily dependent on other nations for a lot of really important stuff.  And as in the case of China, millions of our everyday products.

And we are finding, no, this international cooperation and dependency is not contributing to increased harmony and goodwill among the nations, but it not only creates hardship for our people at home, and it also gives undue leverage to nations that are not friendly to achieve goals that are not in our best interests.  We have less good paying jobs, and we are reliant on nations with different values and goals than ours.

We were energy independent; now we buy oil from Russia.  So we stop that to punish them, and we hurt our own people too.  That is not how government is supposed to work.

China is a tyrannical country with global ambitions, and we feed the beast with our insane dependence of them for just about everything.

What the bleep are our leaders thinking?

We let our leaders lead us on the wrong paths, while we were perhaps too busy just living our lives. 

Enough.

Time for us to raise our voices and tell them to start acting in the interests of our country, like they’re supposed to.  Too many of us have stood by and watched our country slowly being destroyed, and we didn’t know what to do.

The first step is to start talking about it and keep talking about it.

 

 

 

 


Posted by at