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 29, 2022

Transgenderism and children

A Chicago newspaper recently published a full page column by Mona Charen who thinks that society needs to wait and give medical science a chance “to measure what is really going on and how best to respond” with this new thing in the world: transgenderism. 

We have always had homosexuality – people who engage in sexual activities with members of their same sex, and transvestitism – people who dress and generally act as though they were of the opposite sex.

Transgenderism required advancements in medical technology and expertise to exist. 

It also required the rise of postmodernism and identity politics.  Postmodernism is a philosophy that values personal experience over objective reality.  It questions whether we can actually know true objectivity, because we see through eyes tinted by biases, faulty knowledge, and our own experiences. 

Identity politics practically speaking probably originated in Marxism or communism.  It first focused on economic classes and saw society as a struggle between them.  Now society is composed of an ever-increasing number of identity groups competing for equal treatment and societal status.

This last such group now is transgenders.

Charen wants science to say more about transgenderism before society makes too many laws regarding it.

I would say that science has already spoken. 

There are two genders, and this is woven into a person’s DNA at the moment of conception.  We act as if we can remove certain exterior body parts, create or reform new ones, administer hormone treatments for the rest of a person’s life, and voila, what?

What exactly have we created?

A person’s sexual characteristics are an intrinsic part of a person’s internal body formation.  Scientists can scrape off skin cells from your arm and tell you what sex you are without having to even see you.

We are asking our children to experiment with sex at very young ages as it they understood what sex is all about.  Then we are asking them to decide at this young age what sex they want to be for the rest of their lives, long before they ever even thought about getting married and having children.

I’m sorry, but this is wrong. 

Children need to be taught and guided.  A big part of growing up is learning to accept who you are, and that includes the physical characteristics you were dealt – looks, height, general body frame, intelligence,        and sex.

We do them no favors when we suggest or encourage them to try to be the sex that they are not.

We are doing that, thanks to new federal guidelines on sex education asserting that there is no such thing as normative sex.

I think science has already spoken on this. 

What we call sex organs are known in science as reproductive organs.  And science will go so far as to say that their purpose is to reproduce the species.  And, so then, there is such a thing as normative sex.

And we should not be telling our children otherwise and urging them to experiment now so they can make an intelligent and informed decision what sex they want to be for the rest of their lives.

Transgender people are people.  As such, they are worthy of our utmost respect and kindness.  Transgenderism is a lie. 

Adults are free pretty much to do as you please, as long as you don’t hurt other people.  But please, don’t tell children that what they see in the mirror has no bearing on who they really are.  True maturity is accepting the person you were given and making a better you.  We should not be encouraging and allowing children to undergo hormonal and surgical treatments to try to create a new reality. 

This is why we separate human beings into children and adults.  Children don’t have the experience and the information to make permanent life-altering decisions, and adults need to stop letting children think that they can and need to.

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