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, August 4, 2020

So, Should We Kneel or Stand?


Now that the major professional sports are starting up again, we need to answer the question: should they kneel or should they stand?  Whether it’s for the National Anthem or just the American flag.  If you think everyone should stand, you will not like watching your favorite sport when they all kneel.  If they should kneel, then what do you think when a few of them stand?  It seems that those who are standing are standing for different issues than those who are kneeling.

If you are not a sports enthusiast, I think the question is still relevant, because you will not be able to escape the sounds, the sights, and the talk about what people are doing.

Imagine that you and your spouse had an argument.  The issue was an important one.  You both got angry, and the issue was not fully resolved.  Maybe you like to spend a lot of money on your hobby, and your spouse thinks you spend too much, and you don’t have enough money for other things that your spouse thinks are important.  You know that you both still disagree, and that the issue will come up again at some point in the future.

A few days later, you get a call from your spouse’s attorney, asking you to come in to give your side of the story.  The lawyer is a divorce lawyer.  Oh, no, your spouse isn’t asking for a divorce.  They just want to document the incident.  Why?  Well, you never know if at some point they might need it.

I would say that that spouse has just put a big crack in their marriage.  The first spouse will always feel on edge, afraid to be fully honest, afraid to talk about a certain thing again.  Or anything of importance.

I worked in a business for much of my life that would often write up employees for certain infractions.  The reasoning is that if they ever wanted to fire an employee, they would need to have several write-ups before they could do that.

I was the recipient of some of those writeups, and I resented them.  Why?  To me, it conveyed the message, yes, I want to fire you, but I can’t, so I’m doing this instead. 

Now I was a manager myself for a while, and I chose not to write up my employees.  I thought write-ups were counter-productive.  I wanted my employees to be happy on the job, not just content to do the bare minimum but who would eagerly do their best. 

Now let’s look at these protests.

They say that the issues are injustice, police brutality, social justice, and racism.

We are told that these problems have gone on too long.

If this were a marriage, this is a spouse going to the divorce lawyer.  The marriage is not working.  Or at least that’s the message.  Or is it?

When you express your grievances through the flag or the National Anthem, you are saying more than that we have some unresolved issues, some disagreements. 

The flag stands for the whole thing.  The whole country, the American experiment, as some call it, the whole idea of freedom and liberty for which our Founders went to war to establish.

Kneeling for the anthem means that the whole thing is broken.  The marriage is broken. 

The person kneeling may not see it that way.  They may see it as simply protesting that one thing, albeit a big thing.  But the message that that act conveys is far more, something far different.  Imagine you asked your spouse or your kids to do something, and they gave you the middle finger.  Are they just saying no, or are they saying a lot more than that?

True communication in the world requires that both parties understand the same words in the same way.

I have learned that if I’m discussing, say, democracy, we need first to agree on what we mean by the word democracy before we can discuss it, otherwise we can be talking about two different things.  Are we talking about a system where the majority rules on everything, or do we mean simply that we are a country that is supposed to have free and fair elections?

In the protests going on today in our country, the things they are trying to say are being said in ways that are conveying something else. 

When a person kneels for the flag or the National Anthem, in their heart they may say they are protesting a particular social cause, but the message they are conveying is that they despise the whole country.   The whole idea of America.  What it stands for.  No, that may not be their intention, but that’s the message that a lot of people are hearing.

You want to protest social injustice?  Don’t express disdain for the whole country and all it stands for.  It’s like telling your spouse you are sorry you married them whenever you have a disagreement.

The Bible says that a soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.  (Proverbs 15:1)  Kneeling for the flag and the anthem are harsh words that stir up anger.  You’re offending and angering the very people you will need to solve your problems.  You may achieve some changes that are superficial at best, but you’re not going to win the hearts and minds of those whose hearts and minds you disrespect.

But there is a bigger issue here beyond just conveying mixed messages.

At the same time that people are protesting certain problems in our country, there are others who actually do want to get rid of the whole thing.  And they are using these protests over particular grievances in their cause.  They want to get as many people as possible to focus on everything that is wrong in the country such that they will no longer think there is anything good about it, that there is nothing worth defending.

The protests started out as a protest over one incident of a police interaction that went bad.  Then it went to all police, and now it’s gone into things that happened hundreds of years ago.

You may have grievances about a lot of things in our country.  But the bigger question is whether you think the country is still basically a good one or if deep down, it’s a bad country. 

There are two overlapping narratives here, and we don’t know in individual cases what the message is.  When you kneel for the flag or the National Anthem, a lot of people are understanding the message that justice isn’t really the problem.  America is.  We don’t have justice, we have racism, not because we have problems in our country, but the problem IS the country.

Until we answer that question; whether the United States is a good country with problems, or a bad country that must be replaced, these protests will only lead to more unrest and conflict and won’t solve anything.


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