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, January 10, 2019

The Biggest Problem with Immigration, and Nobody is Talking About It


It has become hard to discuss immigration in our country today, because if you have any misgivings about anything remotely related to it, everybody thinks it’s about race.  And now that I have noted the elephant in the room, everything I say will be considered to be code for race. 

But I must try.

Very simply, the United States was founded as a unique nation in history.  It was based on an idea.

Over the last several generations, we have added ten of millions of immigrants to our country, but we have not taught them the idea behind our country.  Oh, and we haven’t been teaching our own children either.

So now we have tens of millions of people who vote, run for office, and make laws, who have no idea about the founding principles of our country.

Is that a problem?

It is changing our country as much as if we had been conquered by an enemy nation, but because it has been happening slowly, over generations, even those who see the changes often don’t know how to explain them. 

Our children and all those who have come to our country have different views of what America is all about.  Every generation grows up with a new normal.  And those who come from other countries, we can only guess what they have been taught about our country.

Our country is based on the idea that God gave unalienable rights to human beings.  And, frankly, that is a Christian concept.  Islam does not know of unalienable rights.  And apart from Judaism, no other religion does either. 

The idea that we are a secular nation that views all religions equally is either a lie or a mistake.  And a very costly mistake at that.

Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights.  And without unalienable rights, you don’t have America.  It’s as simple as that.

The result of denying the Christian basis of human rights has been the creating of new human rights, but of a very different kind. 

Unalienable rights are things you can do without government permission, interference, or regulation.  Now rights are things that the government is responsible for giving to you. 

This generally requires a massive government and enormous amounts of money.  As our country shifted from a Christian basis to a secular one, government spending has exploded such that our federal government alone is $22 trillion in debt, and there is almost nothing to cut.  People are no longer responsible for the outcomes of their lives; the government is.

Thomas Jefferson, in that same document that talks about unalienable rights (the Declaration of Independence), said that our government exists to secure our unalienable rights; and if it doesn’t, we should alter or abolish it and make a new one. 

And this is exactly the state we are in today as a nation. 

I want my country back.