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, February 24, 2020

a letter to a daughter about God


A friend was telling us about her daughter who seems to have no interest in God.  She didn't know what to say to her.  I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this, and I have long learned to listen to things I hear in the middle of the night.  So I wrote down what I would say to my daughter in a situation like this, and then I sent it to her, hoping it might help her find the words.

Hi sweetie pie!

I am in the middle of an adventure, one like you will probably begin pretty soon yourself. 
There is nothing harder in the world, but nothing brings as much joy and pain at the same time.  You may have guessed that that adventure is having kids.

The very fact that people have children in the first place is one of the most irrefutable proofs for the existence of God, and one that at the same time makes you wonder why God made life like that in the first place.

I believe it proves God’s existence by a simple fact.  Evolution insists that originally all life was able to reproduce its kind by itself, like cells that divide in two.  And then, over the course of millions of years, we are to assume that independently of each other, maybe half of each species began to develop complementary reproductive systems that the body didn’t need, all by random mutations, over millions of years, and then one day this system was finished and the species then reverted to a new way of reproduction, the union of a male and a female.

And all this happened totally randomly.  No oversight.  No guidance.  Chance mutations over millions of years.  Scientists have since studied mutations and have found that they are uniformly harmful. 

Nope.  Human life was created by God, as well as all the others.

But then the original question.  Why would God design it like this?  Why did God design things like sex and families and little babies?  Why did God create childhood and adolescence before adulthood?  Why does it take, say, 20 years before these little new human beings can leave the nest and create their own nests?  What was God thinking?

Well, we have the answers.  Life, all of life, teaches us about higher things.  The fact that human beings eat teaches us that we become what we ingest.  Garbage in, garbage out.  Morally, physically, intellectually.

God created humans at the end of His creating the world.  He breathed into the dust of the ground that He had formed, and man became a living being, created in God’s image.  He put His life into humans to give them their life.

So what?  What does that mean?  We learn what it means when we have children, because that is exactly what happens there.  Two human beings unite, and a new one is formed, bearing images of both parents.

And something happens.  Those two human beings discover that they love this new life more than they ever thought they could love anything.  You should soon discover this when you have children of your own.

And why did God design life like this?  The biggest reason is to show us what His love for us is like.  God loves us at least as much as any parent loves their children.  Then God gives us two chances to get this right.  First, we receive this unconditional love from our parents, and then when we have kids of our own, we learn that we have this same kind of love ourselves for this new little person.

Hopefully you have seen the unconditional love that your dad and I have had for you all of your life. 
But as our kids bear our image and are the recipient of our undying, unconditional love, this is all but a picture of the love that God has for each of us.  We would never believe it otherwise, unless we had experienced a taste of it in our own lives.

God loves you at least as much as we do.  And you won’t really know how much that is until you have your own kids.  And what God wants from that love is a family, just like the one you have now, but seeing God as your heavenly Father.  Nothing has brought us as much joy as when our kids love us back. 

We have tried to teach you about God’s love, and frankly we feel like we have failed.  In explaining about God and what we call salvation, we have talked about things like sin, and Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, and going to church, and reading the Bible, which can all seem like doing chores and trying to please a demanding and unhappy God.
I’m sorry.  We are sorry. 

Everything your dad and I have done for you in your entire life has been prompted by our undying, unconditional love for you, and everything that you have learned about church and God and things like that need to be seen in the same way. 

The Bible is all the things that we have tried to teach you about life, what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong, what is important and what is not.  Church is your other family.  God’s other children getting together like we do as a family.  The pastor gives us a message from Papa God to help us.  Unlike in our regular lives, we are always children in God’s eyes who never outgrow our need for instruction and guidance.  At some point, though, we do need to grow to the point where we teach other people about God and His love for them.

God loves you, baby girl.  Even more than your mommy and daddy do.  And He wants you to love Him back. 

But there’s more. 

People have often complained about the world we live in, why God would make or allow one with so much that is wrong in it.  There is enough goodness in it to give us a sense and taste of goodness, and enough bad or evil in it to realize that something is seriously wrong with it.

People have often talked about the end of the world.  And they’re right.  The plan is to make a new one after this old one.  With all the bad stuff left out.  One of the things that involves is that all those people who don’t love God won’t be a part of it.  Why? 

Because God’s intention in creating people in the first place was to have a family where everyone loves and is loved.  In the world today, God is in the background.  In that new world, after the end of this one, God comes right out in the open, and everyone will see Him.  And those who don’t love Him, they just won’t be able to stand before Him.  Frankly, they will want to run and have nowhere to go.  You know how they say, don’t look directly into the sun.   Those who love God will be able to, and those who don’t will burn up like old newspapers.  Except that those old newspapers can never totally disappear.  They all have a part of God in them which can never be destroyed.

This life, all of life, is about God.  And, frankly, you just can’t do God half-heartedly or parttime.  It just doesn’t work that way.  It won’t work in your marriage, and it won’t work with God.  Marriage too is another picture of what life with God is meant to be like.  Marriage takes a complete commitment to your partner. 

When we omit God from our lives, we are the ones who lose.  Both now in this world and in the next.  I want you in my forever family.

love, 

mom




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