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

Saturday, February 23, 2019

addressing gun violence at the local level: a letter to the village board


Re: gun safety laws

Greetings!

I hope you are all doing well.

Gun violence is certainly something that everyone is concerned about.  As a result, government bodies are spending a lot of time and energy thinking of what can be done to minimize or prevent it.

Often I feel like the need to do something, anything, results in laws that make the lawmakers feel better for having done something rather than nothing, but the laws have little effect on the problem overall.  They may even have serious unintended consequences.

I didn’t readily find anything on the village website on this issue, but the newspaper did provide some information as to steps the village might take in the future.

One step concerns the forbidding of concealed carry in liquor establishments.  I’m guessing that would include the owner of the business as well. 

But this proposal is not being brought forward because there is a problem in our country with people who drink too much and then end up killing people or robbing liquor stores.  The mass shootings that have stirred up the country were planned and carried out by people who had every intention of doing it.  They were not spontaneous acts facilitated by alcohol.

Worse, every mass shooting that I am aware of has taken place in a place where there was no one who could confront the shooter.  If guns are illegal in liquor establishments, those places will become more likely to experience gun violence than before.  They will be more likely of being robbed.  They will be more likely to have a mass shooting, not less.

People who do mass shootings have not been intoxicated.  And they certainly are not going to be thwarted in their mission by a sign at the door saying that guns are forbidden beyond that point.  That is actually a source of great comfort to them. 

Don’t look to Northbrook for guidance here.  Go somewhere where they actually have a gun violence problem and see if forbidding concealed weapons in certain places is really a help or an encouragement to violence.

If you want the answer to gun violence, I can give it to you.  Let me know.  It’s not something that should be summarized in a short sound bite.  If I say what it is, I would need to explain why it is.

Thank you

Larry Craig




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