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

Thursday, August 4, 2022

Another look at religion and government

A reader of a local newspaper had a strong reaction against Darren Bailey, the Republican candidate for governor.  She felt that Bailey was injecting his religious beliefs into public policy. 

This reader is an abortion advocate, and she cites the Talmud as justification for her beliefs.  So essentially her religion formed her opinion on a public policy issue, and she is doing what she thinks Bailey should not.

We use the word ‘religion’ often when discussing politics, but I don’t think we fully understand what religion is.

Yes, a religion is a system of beliefs about God.  But that is a very narrow understanding of it.

A religion is a worldview.  It’s an all-encompassing description of life, what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong, what is truth, what is false, what are the rules, are there any rules.

The fact is that everybody has a worldview.  Every country has a worldview.  It’s a system of beliefs that guide how it governs itself.

Religions are worldviews that include God as being a part of reality, actually a major part of reality. 

Our country is trying to impose a worldview on everybody that doesn’t include God.  And a lot of people are having a problem with that.  The reader’s worldview says that preborn babies are nothing.  The Bible puts an enormous value on preborn children.  Not only are they created in the image of God, but their whole future lives are already seen in God’s eyes.

So who is trying to impose whose worldview on the rest of us?  She thinks that this only affects individual women facing an unwanted pregnancy.  But it doesn’t.  It’s a total devaluing of human life that can translate into, for example, violence toward other people, because we don’t see them as being in the image of God.  Life is disposable.   

Worldviews affect everything, from what should be taught in our public schools, the role of government and government spending, the propriety of private property, and the value of human life.  It’s hard to teach our kids the value of human life apart from religion. 

Science can’t tell us the value of a human life.  All it can say is that life is an accident of nature, and the only purpose to life is to reproduce.  Life is also about the survival of the fittest, and all the countries that have embraced atheism have killed millions of their own people because they didn’t fit into their scheme of things, and they have been the most intolerant of those people who did believe in God.

We have representative government, and people who have a religious worldview have as much right to representation as any one else.  If there are differences of opinion, then let’s talk about them and try to understand why other people think the way they do. 

 

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