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

Friday, August 7, 2020

Imagine


Space travel and the ideas of UFOs and alien abduction have been around for a long time, though mostly in the realm of science fiction.  Recently, we sent a space ship to Mars in search for ancient life.

Imagine that Mars indeed is inhabited.  By a very advanced species of, well, Martians.  It seems they live under the ground in a climate-controlled system, because the surface of the planet is uninhabitable. 

Imagine that we sent a manned (sorry), we sent a ship of astronauts to explore the planet.

The Martians capture them and use them for manual labor, digging out more caverns in the planet for their expanding Martian population.  Many of them use them for personal use: amusement or menial tasks to make their own lives easier.

They soon realize that there are plenty more Earthlings where these came from, so they send their own ships to Earth to bring back more of them for the never-ending task of creating more inhabitable space .as well as their own personal use to make their own lives easier.

Some of the Martians, though, feel compassion for the Earthlings.  They see them mistreated and abused, and they see that underneath their strange appearance, they seem Martian in their ability to think and feel. 

So what could they possibly do to help them? 

They would buy them themselves.  As many as they could.  They would need to work, of course, to help pay for the cost of taking care of them, but at least they would now be treated as Martians.  They would be treated kindly and well taken care of.  They would teach them the Martian language and all the advance knowledge of their advanced civilization. 

Some of their Martian philosophers protested the whole thing, both the bringing of the Earthlings to Mars, taking them from their homeland, but also the using of them for forced labor as well even personally possessing them for their own private purposes. 

Others argued that it was the Martian thing to do.  If they just let them go free, other, less compassionate Martians, or the Martian government, would only take them themselves, and they would no longer be free.  Besides, how would an Earthling even get along in Martian society?  They don’t speak Martian and know nothing about life on Mars.  How would they survive?

No, they were able to protect them by keeping them out of the caverns and the hands of cruel, unfeeling Martians who would only abuse them.  Maybe someday all the Martians would recognize that these Earthlings should have been left alone.  As one great Martian teacher said, Do unto other Martians as you would have them do unto you.  Surely that would apply to Earthlings as well.

I think it would make a good book and maybe a series of movies.  People like stories of other worlds.  It can take their minds off the problems of this one.

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