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 4, 2022

What does it mean when we say that “all men are created equal?”

What does it mean when we say that “all men are created equal?”

Obviously, there are many ways that we are not equal.  We are all unique individuals with varying degrees of intelligence, looks, and ability.  Any of those qualities offers distinct advantages to those who have them.

Much of what we are stems from our birth.  Many of our traits are inherited and define who we are or will be in many concrete ways: whether we will be fathers or mothers, artists or engineers, white-collar workers or blue-collar workers, entrepreneurs or salaried workers.  Much of what we are is determined by upbringing, where we were born, who our parents were, how we were raised, and what opportunities were given to us as we grew up.

But being created equal has to be different from all of the above.

The defining issue of the time when those words were written in the Declaration of Independence was whether we were to be ruled by kings or to be self-governing. 

Being equal meant that nobody had a divine or inherent right to rule over other people.  We would not have kings to tell us how to live or to rule over our lives, but we would have a voice in the things that concern us.

The meaning of equality here is being scrutinized today, because slavery is still being talked about today.

Our nation had slavery at the time when these words were written.  Our Founders could have created two new nations, one slave and one free, but they decided to create one and to work through the issue of slavery as it could.  It finally took a war to end it.

Slavery has been with us everywhere since very early in human history.  Probably most often, slavery was the result of military victories.  They could have just killed all their prisoners, or they could subject them to forced labor on their behalf.

Now there have always been people who believed that certain races or peoples could and should rule over others.  The Japanese, for example, were extraordinarily cruel to both the Koreans and the Chinese prior to World War 2.  Call that an inherent right to dominance. 

People in debt often worked as slaves to pay off their debts.

Now in the United States, a hundred and fifty years after the end of slavery, we are told that the effects of slavery still linger and affect people.  I’m not so sure that slavery is the real issue today.  I am watching a video series now about the relationship between the Irish and the Chinese in 1870s San Francisco.  No, it was not slavery, but the two groups lived distinct lives with often violent interactions when they occurred. 

I remember the slaughtering of the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda back in the 90s.  There weren’t even distinguishing physical characteristics between them, but the mutual hatred cost them over a million lives. 

Ethnic discomfort didn’t start with slavery in America, and it’s not going to end with government programs and government payouts.  It’s a long slow process as the different groups interact with each other and gradually accept them more.  And it would really help if everybody stopped focusing on all the differences and the constant counting of this and that. 

If you want people to unite, then stop talking about all the differences.  Talk about what we have in common.  It’s doable, but it’s like a headache.  It’s not going to go away if you keep talking about it and analyzing it.  You forget about it, and then realize later that it’s gone.

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