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

Thursday, April 23, 2020

Our Wishlist for the Future


We will be seeing more and more of these in coming days: calls for a “new, better normal.”
The most recent one I’ve seen is this one: “COVID-19 crisis should inspire us to create a new, better normal,” April 22.

Well, I’m inspired already.  I’m all for creating new, better normals.  I’ve been working on that for years.

The author of this article has a long list of things to change.  We need to get the conversation rolling.  It takes more space to discuss the changes than to simply name them, so we can’t discuss all of them in this short letter.

First in his list are racism and discrimination, which in his mind are the root causes of so many of our society’s ills.  Well, you can’t make people like other people, if that’s what he’s getting at.   The Bible teaches us to love our neighbors, but our society has pushed that aside in favor of secularism, which has nothing to offer in terms of promoting love and harmony.  It only teaches us to tolerate our neighbors, not actually care for them.  That takes religion.

He says that this racism and discrimination has caused disinvestment in inner city communities.  I don’t think that’s how investment works.  When people invest money, they are putting their money at risk to make more money.  If the risk is too high, they won’t take it.  If people aren’t investing in inner city communities, it’s not because of racism.  Unless you think they are overexaggerating the risk, because they are needlessly being fearful of people of color.  It’s not hard to find crime statistics by zip code.  I suspect that might have more to do with it.

And he wants us to “imagine a world where there’s plenty of incentive to work hard and even get rich, but there are some common sense measures in place to ensure that a tiny few can’t capture an obscene amount of the nation’s wealth while the majority of Americans struggle.”

Actually, we already have that.  The only things that hinder that dream are high taxes and excessive regulation.  Bill Gates making $50 billion does nothing to prevent someone else from doing that, except maybe in the computer field.  Wealth is not a zero-sum game.  There is no fixed amount of wealth such that if I have more, you have less.  Wealth can be created, like when you take raw materials and make something out of it. 

It’s good to imagine a better world.  The next step is to figure out the actual things we can do to change it.

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