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, March 7, 2019

The Most Important Issue of our Nation, and Nobody is Talking About It - a revised version sent to the Wall Street Journal


The Most Important Issue of our Nation, and Nobody is Talking About It

Our country has never been more divided or in more turmoil than it is today, and I wanted to find out why.  How did we get here, and what can we do about it?

I have seen articles asking what it means to be an American.  I think we need to go back a step and ask: what is America?

The reason for our being is found in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Our nation was founded on two truths: all people are created equal and God gave them unalienable rights.  The being created equal part means that there is no royal line of people who are rulers because they were born different from other people.

It’s the second part that changes everything.  God gave people unalienable rights.  But wait.  What God?  And how did they know that God gave unalienable rights to human beings.

The courts would call this a religious teaching.  The Founders called it a fact.

It was the God of the Bible who gave unalienable rights to human beings.  And it was the Bible and Christianity from where the Founders came to know of these rights.  Islam does not know of unalienable rights.  Nor does any other religion. 

Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights.  And without unalienable rights, you don’t have the United States of America, at least the one our Founders fought a war in order to be able to create.

But the courts have ruled that all this talk about God is religion, and that is not permitted in the public sphere.  So we haven’t been teaching this to our children, and we certainly haven’t been teaching this to the millions of people who have been moving here for generations.

So now when all these people start voting, getting elected to public office, and making laws, they will do it without an understanding of what our country is/was all about.

They know that we are all about rights, but unalienable rights are very different from government-given rights.  Unalienable rights require a Higher Power to give them.  Unalienable rights are things that you can do without the government’s permission, interference, or regulation.  Government-given rights are generally rights that require the government to compel the behavior of other people in the giving of these rights.  All these rights come at an enormous expense that requires more and more money from some people to give to more and more other people.

New rights are being created with every election cycle.  Since this shift in our country from unalienable rights to government-given rights, the government has not been able to keep spending even close to its revenues.  And it no longer even tries to, because public spending is now the highest good.

Along with unalienable rights came a necessary high moral standard, because great freedom requires great responsibility. 

For most of our nation’s history, the moral code was the Ten Commandments, Love your neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, all from the Bible.  Now since all that has been ruled religious sentiment, the new moral code is tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.  Only one part of this code applies to individuals and that is tolerance, which can mean nothing more than ignoring your neighbor. 

One major consequence of this change in rights and values has to do with gun violence.  Guns have always been a major part of American culture.  In the Federalist Papers, we were described as an “armed” people, unlike those who were in Europe who were unarmed and ruled by kings and despots.  We used to have gun clubs in high schools, and you could buy guns at Sears or a local hardware store like you were buying a screwdriver, but now guns are a problem.  Why?  We have exchanged our religious values for secular ones, and they are simply inadequate for governing a free people.  Instead of being taught to love your neighbor, now we are taught simply to ignore them.

Our country is divided between those who know of a ‘traditional’ United States, who unfortunately are in most cases unable to define exactly what that is or why that is good.  And the rest of the country wants to remake it according to a new secular value system where they are still working out all the rules.  The previous full-blown secular systems in the world have been communism and socialism. 

Government-given rights leads inevitably in that direction, because it requires more and more things of the government and less and less of its people.

This is why our country is divided, and compromise is possible on only a very small number of things.  If we don’t go back to our roots, it’s only a matter of time before our country morphs into an entirely different country.  But because it is happening slowly, over generations, few people will even know it.