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, June 24, 2019

reparations - for slavery, or all the other injustices then, since, and now?


A writer in the Tribune argued today for reparations (June 24), but apparently not just for slavery, but for innumerable injustices that have occurred since and still are occurring today. 

So, while originally reparations were for slavery, and the descendants of slavery, now apparently all black people need to be recompensed.  Even if they moved here willingly from Africa 20 years ago.  No doubt they have experienced hurt and exclusion and discrimination.  After all, that is what America is all about. 

I haven’t heard any numbers yet as to what would be a just compensation, but it must be asked: what will change after these millions of checks are issued.

Will more blacks be hired at higher wages?  Will more blacks be accepted in colleges?  Will whites be more welcoming to blacks that move into their communities?  (Hint: no)

Will anything change?  And if not, will we be having this discussion again in 50 years?

A question I have to ask: do people want things to change, or do they just want money? 

If reparations were limited to the issue of slavery and the descendants of slavery, it would still be a tough sell.  We forget that only half the nation had slavery, and the other half fought a war with the first half to end it.  The cost of that war for both sides was enormous.  It has been suggested that the price paid for their freedom is reparations enough.

When you start expecting reparations for all the perceived injustices done to blacks over the years, those people familiar with government know that this will soon spread to all minorities, because they all are victims of oppression.   Minorities now compose around 40% of our country, and almost all of our 2-3 million new immigrants a year are minorities, so this would become a program that would overwhelm our federal spending and solve nothing.

I would like to offer a suggestion.

Major League Baseball for a long time did not have any black players.  Then, without any government programs involved, one team thought it would be a wise investment to sign a black player.  That went very well, and other teams did the same.  Now nobody cares what race a player is before signing him or negotiating a contract.  And all this without affirmative action, a government training program on discrimination, or discrimination lawsuits. 

You can blame white people or other people all you want for the problems in the black community, but truth be told, black neighborhoods, for example, are not considered safe neighborhoods.  True or false, that is the perception.  The only people who can change that are black people.  When black neighborhoods become safe neighborhoods, then more people will think of black people as safe people. 

You want other people to change first, and they think you should change first.  Since you cannot change other people, then you change what you can change.  Yourself.    

Government cannot make people like other people.  We used to teach our kids to love your neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, but people wiser than us ruled that we can’t have Bible teachings floating around in public, because people might follow them.  I think we were better off when we did.

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