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, May 25, 2020

So what exactly did they die for?


It’s Memorial Day as I write this.  We as a nation pause to honor those who died to secure our freedom.

I have to ask if we still know what freedom we are talking about when we do that.  Is it the freedom to vote, to have a democracy where we elect our leaders?  Is that all?

Did our Founders go to war with England, the world’s leading superpower, over the right to vote?
The Declaration of Independence had a long list of grievances against England, but the grievances were based on more than just the fact that we don’t like them.

Our country was founded on 5 beliefs as noted in that Declaration of Independence.

The first is that all men are created equal.  Some might laugh at that, because there was slavery at that time in the United States.  Their first thought, however, was that nobody had a divine or inherent right to rule over other people, like, say, King George. 

When it came to slavery, half the colonies were against it, and half were in favor of it.  They could have created two separate independent nations, but they decided to create one and figure out what to do about slavery later.  Turns out it took a civil war, but we ended it.

The second belief is that God gave unalienable rights to human beings.  These rights precede and supersede government, such that government did not give them and government cannot take them away.  As such, contrary to what we are commonly told, ours is not a secular nation.  A secular nation cannot give you unalienable rights, because in a secular country, there is no Higher Power than the government.  The government cannot give you rights that supersede it.

The third belief is that these rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  A lot of people believe that we violate that right to life by our support for abortion.  And the pursuit of happiness would call for a small and limited government, so that people have more freedom to pursue their interests, unhindered and unburdened with obtrusive government.

The fourth belief is that government exists to secure these rights.  As our country has shifted more toward secularism, we now see the government’s responsibility as to take care of us.

The fifth belief is that when government does not secure those rights, it is the right and duty of the people to alter the government or to abolish it altogether and make a new one. 

As a side note, the Second Amendment exists, because the Founders know what it took to establish this country in the first place.  They figured people might need to do it again sometime.

Posted by at