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, October 12, 2021

Thoughts on Columbus Day

Now that Columbus Day is over, maybe the discussion and debates over its merits and appropriateness will subside for another year.

I think if Columbus Day is more about celebrating Italian Heritage than Columbus, maybe they should use Joe DiMaggio as their face rather than Columbus.  He’s far more popular and comes with less baggage.

I do think that those who object to Christopher Columbus miss the whole point of it.  It all comes down to whether you think the entire Western Hemisphere would have been better off if it had been left alone rather than settled by Europeans and if the world would have been better off as well.

Two separate questions.

As for the first, when Columbus sailed from Europe to the New World seeking knowledge and new trading routes, he didn’t pass any ships from the Americas traveling east seeking knowledge and new trading routes.  In fact, when he arrived, he didn’t find any merchant ships, harbors, or navies.

He found no major cities, roads, or infrastructure.  Correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t think he found so much as a written language or native literature.  When Columbus came to the New World, Europe had already had major universities for hundreds of years.  Libraries had been in existence in the Old World for at least several thousands of years.  I don’t think he found any when he arrived here. 

I venture to say that if Europeans had not settled in the Americas, life in the Americas today would not have advanced beyond what it was before they arrived.  Why would we think it would have?  What would have sparked a change?

You can decide if the peoples who lived here before Columbus benefitted by the arrival of Europeans or not.

This is not to say that great evils were not committed by Europeans in their dealing with indigenous populations.  And vice versa.  And among the indigenous peoples themselves.  It is called the human condition.  Europeans did not invent scalping, and scalping was not an Indian invention in response to European hostilities.  And it is common knowledge that the various Indian tribes did not live here in perfect harmony with each other.  They often warred with and enslaved other tribes.

The second question is whether the world benefitted by the arrival of Europeans in the New World.  Simply put, there would have been no United States of America if Europeans did not have a New World to move to.  Europe and everywhere else was ruled by kings, whatever name you might call them.  Emperors.  There was no ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’  It’s not a stretch to say that freedom was born in America. 

If Columbus didn’t ‘discover’ America, somebody else would have.  It’s not an accident of history that many of those who came to America came to escape persecution.  They came wanting freedom.  Yes, others came for economic opportunity, but the United States was founded more by those who wanted freedom than those who just wanted economic opportunity.

But jump forward to modern times to get the bigger picture.

The United States, despite all the criticism about a racist founding, historical systemic racism, and inherent racism today, is still the hope of millions of people who move here every year seeking a better life.

And if it has not been for the United States, the world today would be run by either fascists, Nazis, or communists.  Or all three.  There would be no free nations as we know them.  Blacks would still be living primarily in Africa.  You can ask them yourself where they would rather be living.

Columbus Day this year has been met by protests and marches calling for Indigenous Peoples Day.  Particularly as a replacement for Columbus Day. 

I believe this movement is more a movement to erase the memory of Christopher Columbus than a promotion of anything that will benefit indigenous people anywhere.

We in the United States take our history and our freedoms for granted.  And with that freedom came an incredible standard of living, even when we have people today trying very hard to ruin it.  And we take that standard of living for granted as well. 

We are indeed blessed to live in the country we do.  And if it wasn’t for Christopher Columbus and those who would have followed if he hadn’t first ventured out, we wouldn’t know what freedom is.  We do well to remember and honor those who risked all to sail to unknown places not knowing what they would find.

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