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, May 6, 2019

We are a nation of immigrants. So what exactly does that mean?


If you ever get into a discussion about immigration or read an article about it, you will soon encounter the expression:  We are a nation of immigrants.
 
The question has to be asked: Just what exactly does that mean?

To me, it can only mean one of three things. 

1)         We are a nation built on the premise that we invite everyone to come here, and our nation continually evolves as everyone from all over the world contributes their own unique perspectives to the whole. 

The problem with this is that you would expect something like this to be spelled out in our founding documents.  It’s an interesting idea, but where did it come from?  It’s a statement that goes to the heart of what America is, so you need to have some government founding document to support that.  There is nothing in the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, or the Declaration of Independence that gives any clue to such a concept.

2)         The second option is the idea that the only true Americans were the Indians who lived here prior to the arrival of the Europeans.  Anyone else who came here plus all their descendants are all immigrants.

OK, but this was an English colony for 150 years prior to the Revolution.  I don’t know how many people from around the world wanted to flock to an English colony.  Then the Founders went to war with England in order to form a new government.  Well, what exactly was this country that they went to war in order to be able to create?  Was it a nation where everyone would be encouraged to come here and bring their culture so we can create a culture that combines the best of all of them?

If it was, I would think it would say so somewhere.  So what do the founding documents actually say what our country is all about?  See the third option.

3)         The third option, which does explain the statement, is that our nation was unique among the nations, and it was attractive to millions of people who then wanted to come here.  They wanted what we had and knew that we welcomed new people.

But what exactly was it that we had?

What we had were unalienable rights.  And this came from the Bible and the moral code necessary for having a country where everyone had unalienable rights also came from the Bible.  You cannot have great freedom without great personal moral responsibility. 

So the freedom is what attracted the millions of people to come here, and when they came, we taught them the founding principles and the moral code.

We do neither today.  So frankly I would like to see a pause or a significant slowdown on immigration until we get our house in order. 


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