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

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

free speech and hate speech


An Islamic group recently complained at a news conference about “a culture … that exists in the political fabric in America today [that] . . . is problematic and poisonous.”  (Pritzker called on to crack down on political hate speech, July 23) 

The group insists that “people’s ideas and ideologies are fair game for debate, . . . but there’s no room . . .for attacks based on race or religion.”

There are three problems with these views.

1)         Our country has for some time now been defined by identity politics.  We must have Congressional districts and other political districts drawn to ensure a particular group gets a representative that ‘looks like them.’  This means that views and ideas apparently can be unique to a group of people.  Obviously, somebody who doesn’t look like them doesn’t understand them enough to represent them.  So, yes, sometimes ideas are associated with particular groups.  People today are too quick to assume that a disagreement on someone’s views is also an expression of hatred for a group of people.  Which leads to the second problem.

2)         People are associating disagreement with hatred.  Frankly, I think this has a lot to do with the Wizard behind the curtain who sees this as an effective way to stifle debate on a subject.  Yell ‘hate’, and everybody shuts up.  Certain people who get a public voice are quick to make the association, and people are intimidated from responding to this scheme.  You can make a lot of people afraid to express their opinions, and it’s working.

3)         It separates ideologies from religions, as if one has nothing to do with the other, and one is acceptable to criticize and one is not.

What is an ideology?  According to the Oxford Dictionary: a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.

And what is a religion?  It’s a lot more than simply one’s beliefs about God.  A religion encompasses all of life, what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is bad, what is true, what is false. 

Religions are definitely open to debate and criticism.  They deal with the biggest issues of life.  They need to be talked about.  Publicly.  A lot of people don’t know how to discuss controversial issues, but that shouldn’t stop it from happening.

One of the founding principles of our country is free speech.  Nobody says that means yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, but it does mean that if someone thinks you’re a jerk, they can say so.  That doesn’t promote good conversation or intelligent debate, but that’s part of the risk with free speech.





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