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

Thursday, February 18, 2021

what to do with problematic statues

The city of Chicago is wondering what to do with statues of people they find problematic, like some of our former Presidents.

They asked for public comments, so these are mine.

My biggest concern with the monument issue is that it is being driven by emotion rather than calm thinking.  The entire legislative process in our country is based on two houses of Congress.  If all we needed was the majority of opinion at any one time to drive our policymaking decisions, we would only need one chamber.  We have two, to slow down the process of change, so that there are fewer chances of making a less than optimal decision. 

I suspect that we are making too much of this issue.  Statues are not objects of worship.  They represent pieces of our history.  We have statues of Michael Jordan and Ernie Banks at some of our Chicago sports arena.  They are not honored for living perfect human lives but for being memorable athletes who millions of people enjoyed watching.  The statues are not nor are meant to be validations of their entire lives. 

The issue that got this whole thing going is slavery.

I have argued in other contexts that in a slave society, the kindest, most compassionate thing a person could do for the people being sold into slavery could be to acquire as many of them as possible.

Why?

You can’t send them back.  Are you going to send them back on the same boats that brought them over here?

There is no point in just freeing them.  Where would they go?  Somebody else would just enslave them again. 

But you could educate them, teach them a trade, and prepare them for the day they could live free.  And more than that, you could treat them kindly, which may not be the case anywhere else.

When we condemn people for the mere fact of slave ownership without knowing anything more about them, then I think we show our shortsightedness and failure to grasp history. 

I think there are elements in our society who want to obliterate any sense of pride in our country.  They want to make people unwilling to defend our nation and its ideals.  They want to fundamentally change our country in ways that you wouldn’t like if you could see them.

Yes, slavery was an evil practice, though it existed throughout history throughout the world.  I ask the question though: if it had not been for slavery, all their descendants today would still be living in Africa.  So what country in Africa today would they wish they were living in?  I submit that America, with any and all of its faults, is still the best place in the world to live today. 

In the Bible, God’s chosen people were led by God into Egypt where they were to become slaves.  God had His chosen servant, Joseph, sold into slavery so that God could use him for His purposes. 

No, America is not perfect, but I think it is unwise to constantly belittle our past, thinking that we are going to make our future better for it.

When we dismiss our past, we end up not seeing what good there is here, not knowing what our country is all about, and ultimately destroying the freest and most prosperous country ever to exist in the world.

 


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