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

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

solving the gun violence problem in Chicago


I was eager to read the Times editorial (As violence skyrockets in city, Trump’s ‘police state strategy isn’t the solution, July 21) to see how the paper suggests we solve this problem.  After all, this is not a new problem.  We have all had years to think about it.

The paper proposes three steps to end all this senseless killing:

1)         The first step is to make it harder to get illegal guns.  It’s commonly understood that most of these senseless killings are at the hands of gang members in their dealings with illegal drugs.  Do you really think that those people who are able to ship, store, and distribute illegal drugs would have any problem obtaining illegal guns? 

2)         The second step is to spend more money to improve schools and provide more social services.  I have argued for decades about funding public schools through income taxes rather than through property taxes.  Even the newspapers won’t get behind that.   So where else will this money come from?

The paper suggests that money taken from the defense budget wouldn’t be missed and would be adequate for much of this.  The problem is that defense is one of the few things that our Constitution specifically states is a function of the federal government. 

Why is this the responsibility of the federal government anyway?   If Chicago and the state don’t do more, why should we expect the federal government to do it?

The federal government just borrowed trillions of dollars to provide some relief in this virus crisis. 

3)         The third step is to expand background checks to all gun sales.  Did we forget already that we are talking about illegal guns?  Do you think the people who deal with illegal guns are going to be deterred by the existence of another law?  We already have laws against killing people.  

So the answer to all the problems with gun violence is to spend more money and to make more laws? 

I submit that there are only two sure ways of ridding a society of gun violence:  You either need to change peoples’ hearts so they don’t want to kill other people, or you provide swift, certain, and significant punishment for those who flout the laws.

The first step can only be accomplished through religion, so we can’t talk about that publicly.  That leaves us with Trump’s solution of getting tough on the people who commit these crimes. 

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