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, March 16, 2021

Pope Francis and gay marriage

I am not a Roman Catholic, so I don’t look to the Pope for the answers to life’s biggest questions, nor do I regard him as my spiritual leader. 

But the Tribune printed a major article disputing a major ruling of the Pope, so it seems the Tribune considers this topic up for discussion.  (You’re wrong, Pope Francis, about gay couples, March 16)

Like most discussions, at least the ones where there is disagreement, what is important is clarity.  Clarity of definitions and sticking to the real issues.

First of all, the Pope’s ruling has nothing to do with who you love.  The Bible and the Church (all of them) recognize that loving people is the second most important thing you can do, after loving God.  Nobody is denying or discrediting love, wherever it is found.

What is sin in the eyes of the Church and the Bible is homosexual behavior.  God created two different sexes so that they have a complementary role in the life of the other.  The union of the two creates new life.  God could have had human beings create new life without the union of human beings, but He chose this way for profound reasons. 

What the Pope said that the Church could not bless is ‘homosexual marriage.’  I use the single quotes, because the Church believes the whole idea of calling it a marriage is a misuse of the word, a redefinition of the whole concept. 

Gay marriage advocates insist that we consider both forms of marriage as equal.  As a result, gay couples insist on being able to have children, knowing that at least one of that child’s natural parents will be removed from that child’s life.  Is that fair to the child? 

The Church believes that modern society has tried to bend immutable laws of life given by God to meet the fancies of a culture that no longer recognizes God.  The Church has been consistent on this issue for 2,000 years, and modern society wants it to think like it, as though we have reached the pinnacle of human understanding and wisdom. 

No, the Church believes that God had told us the rules of life, so we don’t spend our lives trying to figure them out only to reach the end of our lives and realizing that we had made a mistake.