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, April 1, 2021

We need to have a talk

For decades now, our politicians have been telling us that diversity is our strength, and now they are telling us that our nation is inherently and systemically racist.  This tells me that nobody ever really thought our nation was about diversity, because diversity only increases division and strife. 

At the same time all this is happening, we have removed from our society the one thing that can heal the gaps and bring people together, and that is religion.  Not just any religion, but the ones that teach their people that everybody is created in the image of God and that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. 

Everybody is getting all riled up about hate crimes and gun violence, and the only solutions that we are getting is to give people a lot of money, shame people for the slightest offenses, and try to limit some of the very rights for which our ancestors fought a war to gain. 

We need to get people to actually care for each other, and frankly you’re not going to get that without the help of religion.  And not just any one, like I said.

We keep focusing on our differences but not on the things that can unite us.  We are no longer simply Americans, but we are all parts of different groups competing for a piece in a shrinking pie and fighting for the respect of the other groups.

As a nation, we are not on stable ground, and we are moving in the wrong direction.

It seems everybody thinks the country, the government, owes them something, and the truth is there isn’t enough money in the world to give everybody everything they want, and it will only bring us down as a nation when we keep trying to do that.  It will eventually impoverish all of us. 

At the core of all this is that our country is separated by the beliefs in what our country is all about.  Some say our country is the greatest nation in the history of the world because of what we believe about freedom.  Others are saying that we are an inherently corrupt and evil nation that must be thoroughly overhauled, but then we are not told just exactly where they want to take us, what this will all look like in the end. 

We need to start talking to each other.  Real serious discussion.  About where we are going as a country and whether we are on the right path.  I have found that in having these kinds of discussions that you need to limit the conversation to one thing at a time and sticking with that one thing.   You may find that that initial topic is too broad.  Then you need to narrow it down.  You may find that there is far more to agree on than not.

But we need to get started on this now.  
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