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

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

the plight of the undocumented elderly

I fully sympathize with undocumented people who were hoping that they would one day become citizens.  (Undocumented elderly face meager protections, April 10)  They came here looking for a better life.  They want to be able to think that they can keep it.  The front-page Tribune article put a face on people we rarely think about.

So let’s think about them, and the whole big mess that is involved here.

Probably the biggest single reason why Congress fails to provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants is that the government refuses to secure the border.  A pathway to citizenship will only multiply the number of people who now enter the country illegally. 

Yes, human compassion dictates that we must help as many people as possible, but a country still needs to know who is coming into it and have the right of refusal. 

A country’s first responsibility is to the citizens of its own country and not the citizens of other countries.  Just like families take care of their own kids before the other kids on the block.  It doesn’t mean that they hate the other kids or will do nothing for them.  But no parent will take from the welfare of their own children and give it to others.  But many parents are willing, eager, and able to help far more people than just those of their own family.

Yes, we can assume that most of the people who come here illegally are hardworking, responsible people who just want a better life, but how many criminals either escaping the law in their old countries or those intent on committing crimes in their new one should we tolerate in the name of niceness?  Currently, we have no way of knowing who is coming into our country.  That is simply wrong.

Then too our country through its duly elected representatives has created a system of immigration laws.  But the media and many of our own elected leaders choose to ignore them.  And I don’t think that is wise.  That only breeds further resistance to and negligence of our laws. 

It is never good policy to suggest that we can choose which laws we should obey and which not. 

Yes, there have been bad laws.  But who is saying that our immigration laws are bad?  Yes, people are complaining that children brought here illegally by their parents have no path to citizenship, and I feel for them.  But should we encourage even more illegal immigration to remedy that?

Close the bleeping border.  Give every person who wants to live here a background check and medical exam, and Dreamers will soon get their dream.