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, August 17, 2020

a letter sent to a university that wants to fire a professor for things he said outside of his class


Re: academic excellence

Greetings!

I don’t think I had ever heard of the University of Central Florida until just a few days ago, when I heard that the University is trying to rid itself of a professor (Charles Negy) for things he said outside of a school context.  A psychology professor at that.

I see that psychology is your number one online bachelor’s degree program.

I am looking at the offensive tweets that the Professor tweeted, and it seems to me that the questions Dr. Negy raised are questions that are at the very heart of the field of psychology, and to dismiss them because some people are offended by them insults the entire work of psychology and dismisses even your school as a reputable source for psychological studies.

The first offending tweet I am reading questions the relationship of racism with achievement within that affected racial group.  Dr. Negy uses the example of Asian Americans (Far Eastern Asians) as a contrast. 

I have asked the question and I have questioned the common answers, whether crime is a necessary result of poverty, oppression, and / or discrimination.  Or is moral behavior independent of outward pressures but an expression of inward character?  Can poor people be moral?  Do only poor people steal, or steal more than other people?  Is crime in the black communities higher than in white communities, because . 
. . .  
Yes, because what?

That question goes to the very heart of psychology, and one that any burgeoning psychologist needs to answer. 

My wife and I were discussing yesterday about Jewish people.  From a related matter.  They have faced discrimination even outright hostility for 2,000 years, in country after country.  They don’t march and protest.  They just quietly achieve the highest standards of moral behavior and academic and business success.  Any reputable psychologist would want to understand why in the face of blatant, systemic, chronic racism and bias, one group has been able to shine, so to speak, and the other seems unable to shake off the past.

The second tweet from the professor addresses the issue of self-reflection.  The black community wants everybody to focus on a handful of black lives that were lost at the hands of police officers in a confrontation situation while ignoring the endemic of black on black violence that ravages their neighborhoods. 

Self-examination is at the heart of psychology, and any psychology student is urged to actively engage their own psyche to understand their motives, ideals, goals, hurts, and limitations.  An essential part of this is to be able to accept and assess the evaluations of others.  Dr. Negy sees the black community as unwilling to accept the necessary feedback of others.  The black community sees itself as damaged and needy, but only wants help on their terms. 

I think a psychologist’s insights here are crucial in solving some of our society’s major problems today.

Dr. Negy clearly has insights and courage that are essential in helping us make progress in solving and quelling the unrest which is racking our country. 

Frankly, the societal changes being foisted on our country by these activist groups I don’t see as solving anything or helping anybody.  We are no longer resolving issues by rational debate but with violence in our streets.  Like spoiled children who scream until they get their way, our society is letting the least experienced among us determine our future.

That is not the way a civilized world is supposed to function. 

To be honest here, dismissing Professor Negy, though ostensibly for unrelated hitherto unproblematic incidents of the long past, would in my mind irreparably damage the University’s credibility as a reliable, sure source of academic excellence, at least in but not limited to the area of psychology.

Best wishes,


Larry Craig

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