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

Friday, June 24, 2022

Pride Month

June is Pride Month, so I tried to think of all the things that I’m proud of, but it wasn’t much.

I am proud of my country, but a lot of people are saying today that there is nothing to be proud of.  I think they just don’t know what we really have here.

I have a graduate degree, and I’ve written a few books.  I’m happy about that and maybe a little proud too.

I am a white, heterosexual male.  I know these kinds of things are important to a lot of people today.  I am happy that I am a white, heterosexual male, but proud?  That doesn’t seem like the right word.

I am proud of my two sons and their families.  I could just say that I am happy they turned out well.   But they are my sons, so I will say that I am proud of them.

But Pride Month wasn’t created so that people would reflect on things they are personally proud of.  It was created, because some people felt that they were being marginalized and even persecuted for their lifestyle.  Pride was their response.  They said that they are proud of their lifestyle, and they have been devoting their lives ever since to making their lifestyle more acceptable to people everywhere, which is certainly understandable.

But there are a few things here I find concerning.

It’s become popular for people and companies to show support for the people in this lifestyle by simply proclaiming PRIDE with all the appropriate colors, and I think we are sending wrong messages.  People and companies are even being pressured to celebrate Pride Month, and when they do that, they are not merely affirming their support and care for a formerly marginalized group, they are essentially applauding this lifestyle and not just the people.  They are essentially teaching our children that this lifestyle is commendable, noble, just, and good.

Everybody is insisting that we must all embrace this lifestyle without any discussion of its merits or demerits.  Even raising questions about it or wanting to discuss it is immediately derided as hatred, so we are never able to even talk about it. 

We have melded personal identity with lifestyle such that we can’t even discuss the lifestyle without that discussion being understood as a personal attack on the people involved.  There are probably some people reading this article who will call me hateful for even talking about any of this. 

If I scream at a person in the street who doesn’t see a fast-approaching car, I don’t hate them.  I am not even mad at them.  I have information I want to convey that they might find useful very soon.

Now here I think there is a slow-approaching car that is just as likely to hit them, and I don’t need to yell at them, but, yes, I certainly would like to talk to that person before it does.

The federal government has even weighed in on this issue.  It issued new guidelines on sex education for our public schools, beginning from the earliest ages.  It asserts that there is no such thing as normative sex, and all that the various forms of sexual activity are like flavors of ice cream.  One is not better than another.  We must try them all to see which one or ones we like best.  And we need to decide on this at a very young age.  There’s no time to waste here. 

We are asking our children, long before they have ever given any thought about having children of their own, whether they would want or should adopt this lifestyle.  One significant problem with this lifestyle is that it cannot create children by any of the normal means.  Only one partner in these relationships can be a natural parent to any children.  That means that we are intentionally removing one of the child’s natural parents from that child’s life.

This is not good, and we shouldn’t pretend that it is.

They also want us to teach our children that the doctors who assisted in their birth were mistaken to declare a gender for that child.  This is something that they must decide for themselves, and the sooner the better.

Schools all across our country are essentially trying to recruit students to this lifestyle when they declare that all sexual activity is equal in value.  Sex is not taught as a part of establishing families or even as an expression of love.  It is merely a pleasurable experience that children need to be taught about to avoid certain adverse consequences.  One form of sex can result in pregnancy, but we have a cure for that, so you need not worry about that, if you do choose to have that kind of sex.

And we are teaching our children with words of praise for this lifestyle long before they have given any thought to the long-term repercussions of their decisions. 

I don’t think this is wise or good for our children.  I think we can and need to do better.

This is not fair to our children and can even be considered a form of manipulation.  This must be removed from our public schools.  This is a lifestyle choice that only adults are fully capable of making. 

All the major religions that have talked about this issue have been uniform in their disapproval of it, though more and more church leaders today are becoming more accepting of the practice. 

At the same time, Christianity, for example, teaches us to love our neighbors as ourselves and to do unto others as we would have others do unto us.  All people are created in the image of God and are worthy of our love and respect. 

But it also believes that this lifestyle, in any of its myriad variations, is not what the Creator of all intended, and it wants to be able to have that conversation in our society.  It can be hard at times to discuss the lifestyle without the people involved feeling diminished. 

The problem is that people have been trying so hard to normalize this whole thing that Christians have been responding to the lifestyle where they would prefer being able to love the people first and talk about those things later. 

I can’t speak for every individual Christian here, but in general, it is the Christian who understands more than anyone else the intrinsic value of a human being and the importance that God puts on us to love our neighbors as ourselves. 

We wish we could talk in backyards with lemonade rather than with placards and protests.  But, yes, we want to talk.

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