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, August 7, 2019

white supremacy


This was written in response to an article in HuffPost about white supremacy.

The article equates white supremacy with white nationalism.  They’re not the same.  White supremacy says that white people are superior to other people. 

A white nationalist, and I admit there are probably varieties out there, says that when the United States was mostly white (90% when I was a kid), we did pretty good.  We were the richest nation in the world, we felt safe, and we had the best schools in the world.

Since 1965, our immigration system has focused almost entirely on bringing minorities into our country, about 2 million a year and that’s just those who came legally.  Now we are over 40% minority.

We are also now $22 trillion in debt, just at the federal level, we don’t feel safe, and our schools are average or mediocre on the world stage.

White people in general don’t hate blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims.  They do reject the government’s attempts to make this a black, Hispanic, Muslim country.

Mark Steyn is quoted very briefly.  I’ve read some of his books.  I would really like to see his quotes in context.  But he raises a good point.

If you read the Preamble to the Constitution, it says that our government exists to form a more perfect union and to insure domestic tranquility for We, the people.  Our government exists for the sake of the citizens of the United States.  It is to seek and promote their welfare first.  Just like you take care of your family before all the other kids on the block.  It doesn’t mean that you hate all the other kids, but your first responsibility is to your own family.  You wouldn’t give your kids’ college fund to provide housing for the homeless.  Is that bad?  Our government is more concerned about citizens of other countries than the citizens of its own.  That is wrong.

Lastly, your article quotes the SPLC as an authority on hate groups in our country.  I have read of a number of organizations that are definitely not hate groups that the SPLC thinks are.  It also says that there are 148 documented hate groups devoted to white supremacism, an increase of 50% since 2014.  Maybe each group has three members.  The left likes to charge people and groups with hate in an effort to stop them from talking.  It’s hard to defend yourself when the media generally takes the side of the accuser. 

Guess what?  In a free country, people are free to hate.  The only antidote to hate that I know of is Christianity that gives people a command and a reason to love other people.  Our country has officially turned its back on religion and declared itself a secular country, but secularism has no answer for hate or evil.  It can only make more laws and hire more police.

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