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, July 11, 2022

prayer in public schools

Two questions: if the First Amendment to the Constitution built a wall of separation between Church and State such that the government cannot endorse or favor religion in any of its forms, how could the same Congress that wrote the First Amendment create an office of chaplain for Congress paid for by taxpayer dollars and then have this chaplain open each day of Congress with prayers in the name of Jesus?

If it is constitutional for Congress to open a day with prayer, and that specifically Christian prayer, then why is it unconstitutional for schools to open a day with prayer and that a not specifically Christian prayer?

The Tribune faults the Supreme Court for allowing a coach to pray on the field after a football game. (Court’s ruling on school prayer is supremely questionable, July 11)

The paper notes “60 years of precedent -setting battles to maintain a separation of church and state” that should have made it clear of the unconstitutionality of prayer in public schools.

But they fail to note that there were 173 years of precedent starting from the very beginning of our nation and before where prayer in public schools was considered not only fitting and proper but necessary for the success of the educational enterprise.  When the Court ruled then to remove prayer from the public schools, it wasn’t maintaining a separation of church and state, it was creating it.  At least by modern definition.  That ruling had no precedent to base it on.

Since the Court removed prayer from our public schools, God was removed as well.  Our children are receiving an education that essentially says that there is no God to speak of and that need not concern them.  This is not a position of neutrality toward religion.  Actually, that is impossible. 

There are not three options in the area of religion: pro, con, or neutral.  There are only two.  Pro or con. 

Our Founders were pro.  They realized that God created human beings equal, and He gave them unalienable rights.  Without God, you don’t have equality and you don’t have unalienable rights. 

If our country is founded on a belief in God, then it is not unconstitutional to acknowledge this and God in our public schools.  You may say that some kids don’t believe this or are of other religions.  OK, but this is why they have the rights they do in this country, and why countries that don’t believe in God or who believe in other religions have less rights than we do here. 

This is why the United States is unique.  And we need to teach this uniqueness and not pretend that we somehow have all kinds of rights for no apparent reason other than our Constitution.  The Constitution didn’t give us these rights; it defined them.

Posted by at