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, June 8, 2022

The Whole Problem in a Nutshell

I mourn with the rest of the nation over this tragic event in Texas when so many of our children, and their teachers, were gunned down by a crazy man.  This should not be.  The little ones who bring us so much joy in our lives also bring us indescribable enduring grief when their lives end in ways they should not.

The response to this tragedy was immediate.  Do something, we cried to anyone who will listen.

On the one hand, our country is awash with guns, and, on the other, we have a problem with gun violence.

There is a problem here but not the one you’re thinking of.

This problem was aptly described in an address given by John Adams, our second President, in 1798: ‘Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

For more than 50 years now, our country, our leaders, our courts, have all been insisting that our country is a secular country, and that was what the Founders intended.  All religions are equal, and essentially equally irrelevant in public life, the public square, our public education.  And definitely public policy.

The truth is that our Founders never intended that the United States be a secular nation, where religion does not inform all that we do as a nation.

Our founding document is the Declaration of Independence, and it declares that God has endowed human beings with unalienable rights.

These are not the natural rights of the philosophers.  Those rights were not endowed by Someone else, a Supreme Being.

And this is not stated as a belief but a fact.  They didn’t just believe that God did this.  They said He did it.  Religion was not just something that people thought in their minds.  This here was an event that occurred in human history.  God created human beings and gave them unalienable rights.

And how did they know that He did this?

This is not a universal religious tenet.  Even some major religions do not believe in a right to life or to a right to the pursuit of happiness.  These are particular Christian beliefs.  Their source of information was the Bible.

For almost two hundred years, our public schools had the Bible and prayer as an essential part of public education.  Not every school, but we were able to read and talk about God in them, and many schools even had the Ten Commandments posted in them.  All this was not required, but they were not prohibited as they are today.

Now we teach our kids that human life is not sacred.  It is merely an accident of nature.  We kill millions of babies before they are even born.  Not the government, but their own mothers.  If their existence is inconvenient or unplanned, we just get rid of them.  We even have a right to do that.  And people are applauded for doing that.  Life is disposable.

We think God and religion are irrelevant and unimportant in our society and its people’s lives.

Religion used to provide a basic moral framework for life, giving us the rules by which we can live our lives.  But now there are no rules, only what you make yourself and the society you live in.  Everything that our parents may have told us about God, morals, life, rules is pretty much wrong. 

There is no Higher Power to direct your life.  Life is like standing before an open field where you can go in any direction you want.  There is no right or wrong per se.  Just be who you are, whatever that means.  There is no Higher Power to whom you can seek help, and no Higher Power to whom you are accountable for your actions.

Religion is merely the attempt of unenlightened primitive people in the past to try to explain things that science now does for us.  There is no ultimate meaning in life.  There is no purpose to any of it.  You live, you die, and that’s it.  And the universe doesn’t care.  About anything, including you.

No, not everybody falls into despair at this bleak picture of life, but how many need to before we realize we have a problem and that our society is broken?

Guns were always abundant and freely available in our country.  You could buy a gun from Sears or a hardware store like you were buying a screwdriver.  No background checks, no FOID cards, no waiting periods.  And people felt safe.  They were safe.

But our society has changed.

We are trying to live without God in a system that assumed that we would.

Some will say then, just change the system. 

But that would not simply mean a change in a few laws, but a change in the entire idea of what America is.  Rather than change America to be more like other nations, why not leave America the unique country it is and seek a home somewhere else more suited to the modern secular mindset? 

We have millions of people every year coming to our country.  Maybe it’s time we had a few million people looking for their ideal country to look for it somewhere else, and let us get back to what we were founded to be.

 

 

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