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

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

trying to understand the President


A reader (July 24) thought it was important to write a letter bashing the President.  It seems that letters that do that get prioritized for publishing.

I would like to defend the President against this reader’s complaints.

1)         Yes, Trump has been hard on John McCain.  This reader, like so many others, judge McCain’s life entirely on events that happened 50 years ago when he was in the military.  John McCain was in Washington for 35 years.  I believe he was a major factor in denying the President some things that he wanted, and he did so by being one of a very few Republicans who sided with Democrats against him.  It’s Trump’s comments that get publicized, while we know little about McCain’s side in their relationship.

2)         He praises dictators, because he wants to negotiate with them.  He’ll get far more if he comes to them with a smile than with threats. 

3)         He thinks Trump wants NATO disbanded.  Hey, NATO exists for the sake of Europe, not the United States, yet they want the US to carry the burden of protecting them.  By Trump saying NATO perhaps should be disbanded he is telling Europe to figure out what they really want and step up in taking care of themselves. 

4)         I read both Chicago newspapers and watch news on the mainstream media.  They all try to portray the President in a bad light any opportunity they get.  If I want to get a letter printed in the papers, bashing Trump will raise my odds considerably.  The President thinks the press is abusing its freedom by acting irresponsibly.  I agree.

5)         Attacking the judicial system?  Our government has three EQUAL branches of government.  The judicial branch believes it has more power over the other two.  Why should one unelected judge have more authority than the President of the United States?  It seems nowadays that a lot of judges are guided more by politics than justice or law.

6)         He doesn’t treat migrants as criminals.  Anyone who enters our country to live should be screened medically, vaccinated, and have a criminal background check before they are allowed to roam free in our country.  When our borders are flooded with 3 and 4 thousand new people every day, there’s no time to do all that or build luxury hotels.  You make do with what you have.  Criminals can’t just walk out, but the migrants are free to leave any time they want.

Frankly, I am tired of the newspapers and media continually bashing the President.  Go use your space and time in actually trying to solve our problems instead of just complaining about them.

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