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, February 18, 2018

Change the Second Amendment?


A reader (Chicago Tribune Feb. 18) suggested that the Second Amendment needs to be changed, because, well, times have changed.  He didn’t actually say what needed to be changed or how it should read.

I think what is important here is to understand the different kinds of laws.  There are laws that our government makes, like how fast you can drive on a highway or the age for voting.  And these change as circumstances change.

But the Declaration of Independence talks about unalienable rights that come from our Creator.  When the Constitution was written, there was debate over whether the Constitution should spell out these rights.

There were two main reasons why they didn’t want to make a list.  The first is that they were concerned that people might think that only those rights that were spelled out were all the rights that belonged to them.  The second was that they were concerned that people would think that these rights were given to them by their government and therefore subject to change.

They decided to make a list.

It’s interesting that the First Amendment had to do with freedom of speech and religious exercise.  Two freedoms that a lot of people today want to curtail: Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion or abridging the freedom of speech.

And the Second, the right to keep and bear (carry) arms shall not be infringed. 

When our Founders decided to start naming the natural rights that people have, the first two had to do with religion, speech, and guns.

They also stated in numerous other contexts the importance of religion and morality for the success of our country.  You can read some of George Washington’s speeches or those of John Adams, the second President.  The First Congress even had Bibles printed to be used in the public schools.

The reader talked about how changes in our society require changes in our laws.  I contend the changes in our society were caused by our government, starting with our courts, that demanded the removal of God from our public life and schools, replacing the Ten Commandments with a secular code of ethics that no longer teaches love for our neighbors but only tolerance.  They have stripped the country of its moral foundations in the names of diversity and secularism.

We used to have gun clubs in our schools.  It’s not the guns.  We have changed the entire moral compass of our nation.

Posted by at