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, March 24, 2022

a sports story that should concern all of us

This doesn’t happen often, but sometimes there is a story in the sports section of the newspaper that should concern all of us.

The Ricketts family owns the Chicago Cubs baseball team, and they want to buy a professional soccer team in England.

Twelve years ago, papa Ricketts sent an email to a son that was critical of Islam. 

Now, because of this, he is considered a racist and the Ricketts family unqualified to buy this soccer team.

First off, this was a private email.  Unless he was planning a terrorist attack or a murder, it’s nobody’s business what he said to a family member in private.

But just what did he say?

Like I said, he made some critical comments about Islam.  It was the fact that he said critical comments that are the issue, not what those particular comments were.  Nobody is discussing whether his comments were true.  It was his willingness to actually say them that is the problem.

Ricketts is being branded a racist.  That is probably the worst thing a person can be today.

However, Islam is a religion.  One of the world’s largest. 

Islam is not a race or ethnicity. 

It is a religion.  It has nothing to do with race.  What, we can’t criticize religions anymore?

A religion is a set of beliefs.  It is a set of beliefs that describes an all-encompassing worldview down to the ideas of what is right and wrong, good and bad, true and false, the very rules of life.

There are sharp irreconcilable differences between all the major religions in the world.  They cannot all be true.  People have to decide what they believe in or what they don’t believe. 

This means that people need to discuss the various religions, weigh their claims and teachings.  That means that even Islam should be discussed and even criticized if need be.

Disagreement with a religion’s teaching is not ignorance, hatred, racism, bigotry, or intolerance.  And neither is expressing that disagreement.  Especially in America where freedom of speech is considered an inalienable right and necessary for a free society.  Everything is and should be open for discussion.

There is a trend today to shut off discussions and opinions by labelling even any comments questioning something as racist, bigoted, intolerant, etc.

I’m sorry, but that is wrong.  More and more, people in America are afraid to say what they think about a lot of things, because somebody might complain, and the cost for speaking can be very high.

It is important and necessary in a free society to be able to speak freely.  If that speech is limited by whether somebody, somewhere, might be offended by it, then freedom is gone.  The list of possible offenses will only grow, differing opinions will be labelled misinformation, and everyone will live in fear of doing or saying something that can jeopardize their lives or livelihood. 

We must not let that happen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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