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 17, 2019

When Rights Conflict


I have never been particularly vocal about the abortion issue.  Maybe that’s because it seems that that is the only public issue that Christians get involved with.  They have that pretty well covered, so I can think about a host of others.

But then I just realized how this pictures perfectly the underlying problem in our country. 

The right to an abortion is based on the 14th Amendment.  No need to look it up, because you won’t find anything there.  You’ll need to the read the Court’s ruling to see what they were thinking. 

But even if the 14th Amendment did support a right to an abortion, it is not an unalienable right.  Why do I say that?  Because it requires people to do things for other people, which is the exact opposite of an unalienable right. 

Our country was founded on the basis of unalienable rights given to people by God.  The Founders considered that a fact, but the courts would call that a religious opinion, and so our government and public school can’t talk about that anymore. 

But our government is quick to talk about rights.  The government doesn’t call them unalienable rights, but that’s good enough for most people.  An ever-expanding list of things that the government is now required to see that people have.  What’s not to like?

Most state and federal abortion laws have some kind of exemptions for people that do not want to participate in abortions due to religious reasons, but not all, and the number will diminish.  Why do I say that?

The states and federal government already require people who don’t believe in abortions to pay for them.  If as the courts ruled, money is speech, governments are already requiring pro-abortion speech from people who believe it is morally wrong.   And exemptions are exceptions, and nobody likes exceptions except when they are their own. 

However, the right to life is an unalienable right, which our government was instituted to secure, according to the Declaration of Independence. 

So the real question is: at what point should the government recognize the unalienable right of this developing child to live? 

And, frankly, that is a discussion that needs to take place apart from the discussion about a right to an abortion.  These are separate issues, and I would contend that unalienable rights are higher than government given rights. 

But don’t women have a right over their own bodies?  Of course they do.  And that right didn’t start only after they became pregnant. 

I’m not going to minimize the difficulty that many women experience when they find themselves unexpectedly expecting, but I am concerned that too many women minimize the significance of this creation of a new human being inside of them.  If you can’t raise it, give it up for adoption.  But don’t destroy it.

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