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

Sunday, May 8, 2022

Thoughts on Abortion

The big news story of the day is abortion.  When big stories break that consume all the news programs, you need to watch the news more closely.  Politicians see big news stories as distractions, so they do things they might not do otherwise and hope nobody notices.

Abortion is a complex issue that I wanted to think about more before I wrote anything.  A newspaper columnist today says that we need to talk about abortion.  We have pickets and protests on both sides of the issue, but we are not talking about the issue.  And this is what we need to do.

People are concerned today that the ‘right’ to an abortion may be lost.  I put the word ‘right’ in single quotes, because this is one of the points that the debate about abortion falls on.

Is it actually a right?

People often conflate the legality of something with a right.  It’s legal to turn right on a red light in most cases, but it is not a right.  If you believe that abortion should be legal, because it is a right, then we need to talk about that.

Rights often imply too that the government, meaning taxpayers, is required to either pay for or subsidize that thing.  When tens of millions of people believe that abortion is murder, no, they should not be required to pay for them.  Now THAT is imposing your beliefs on society.

But what is a right?

There are three kinds of rights, but only two that concern us here.

The Declaration of Independence says that our nation is founded on the fact, not the belief but the fact, that God gave unalienable rights to human beings.  Unalienable rights precede and supersede government such that government did not give them and government cannot take them away. 

The Constitution does not explicitly discuss abortion, so the Court decided that the Fourth Amendment, which protects people against unreasonable searches and seizures. gave people a right to privacy which would encompass a right to abortion. 

But does that mean I have a right to kill small animals or watch kiddie porn in the privacy of my own home?  This ‘right to privacy’ is not a solid foundation for a ‘right’ to abortion.

It is often touted that a woman has a right to autonomy over her own body.  Her body, her choice.  And I would agree.  Yet these same people will insist that everybody get vaccinated with drugs that many people believe to have more and serious problems than what they are meant to solve.  Here society, read government, feels empowered to override your personal beliefs and autonomy to impose their will for the sake of the greater good. 

At least be consistent. 

The problem here too is whether this thing growing inside the woman is actually part of HER body or somebody else.

The question that needs to be discussed is what exactly is this thing that we want so hard to kill.

We insist so hard that we are a secular society, that religion has no place in a secular society, at least in the public square and in public policy.

Except that there are questions that secularism cannot answer

Like what is the value of a human life.  True secular societies, like communist ones, have no value of human life.  It is easily expendable for the greater, the common good.  It is religion, specifically Christianity with its teaching that human beings are created in the image of God, where human life is deemed valuable, even precious. 

In the creation account in the Bible, God creates animals and fills the world with them.  But when ir comes to human beings, He creates only one.  And from that one, He forms a mate for it, and then from those two, all future human beings created in the image of God come from human choices and actions and not from God.  We share God’s creative activity. 

Now society, and including government, may not be permitted to take such things into consideration, but when half the country believes in this, you can’t just tell them to shove it.

We need to have the discussion about what this thing we want to kill is, and, yes, that discussion will have to talk about God.  But our society, including government, doesn’t want to have that discussion.  Then this division, this contentious division in our country, is not going to go away. 

Let’s ask this again.

Is abortion a Constitutional right?

What is a Constitutional right in the first place?  Our country was founded on the idea of rights, and it is the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, that defines these rights. 

One of those basic human rights is the right to life.

So when does this child get this right to life?

When we say so?  When the government says so?  When the mother says so?

Then how is this an unalienable right, when other people can confer it or deny it?  If we cannot agree on when this child receives this right to life, then we have no business taking that child’s life.

Kathy Barnette is running for Senate in Pennsylvania.  Her mother conceived her when she was 11.  She had been raped by a 21 year old man.  Her mother’s mother just took her into their family.

Ask her about the value of human life.  She is happy to tell you.

No, life is not easy.  And pregnancy can complicate things very quickly.  But children are not puppies or kittens in a litter that we can just flush down a toilet.  We can find other solutions than just killing the child, and we need to. 

 

 

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