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

Monday, March 4, 2019

Why We Need Old Politicians


The Tribune gave a lot of space to a writer who said “It’s time to retire the old (politicians) to facilitate the rise of the young.”  (March 4)

I couldn’t disagree more.  If she had written about the need to limit the amount of time a politician could spend in the same position, I would certainly agree with that.

The older I get, the more I appreciate older people, and not because I am one myself.  Getting older made me realize why older people are important in a nation’s leadership. 

Every generation grows up with a new normal.  We have a generation now who are voting who have never known anything but intense scrutiny before boarding an airplane.  They never knew a time when gun violence was rare, when you could buy a gun at Sears or the local hardware store without a FOID card and a background check, when there were gun clubs in public high schools. 

They have never known a time when most middle-class jobs could comfortably support a family on one income.  They never knew a time when schools could reference God and the Bible and even have prayer in school.  They never knew a time when everything was made in our country.  Sure, you could always buy foreign products, but they were true foreign products, like French wine and Swiss chocolate.  And they always cost more, but nobody cared.   

They never knew a time when government assistance was rare and even embarrassing to get it.  When a federal deficit of a billion dollars was considered irresponsible.  They never knew a time when it was hard to choose between a Democrat and a Republican.  There were more similarities than differences. 

Yes, I see real and significant problems when politicians stay in office more than a term or two.  But age is not the issue.  That’s why parents are older than their kids.  The kids need the experience of their parents to teach them.  And that’s the same for a country.

There is a story in the Bible that stresses this point.  When King Solomon (the wisest person who ever lived, at least up to that time) died, his son took his place.  When faced with an important decision, he first consulted the wise men who worked with his father and then with those who had grown up with him.  He forsook the advice of the elders and followed the advice of his contemporaries, and the text emphasizes this, and it literally divided the nation into two nations, almost had a civil war, and contributed to their later destruction as a nation.

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