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

Friday, July 1, 2022

hypocrisy and the religious right

A Tribune reader had angry words for the religious right.  (Hypocrisy of religious right, July 1)  I would be described as one of those religious right people, but those aren’t the words I would use to describe myself. 

The writer asserts that the religious right believes in civil liberty for some people but not others.  Civil liberty for them but not for everybody.  He uses abortion as his prime example of this hypocrisy.  He also accuses the religious right of imposing “religious doctrine on the American people,” though he doesn’t tell us which ones they are imposing.

Were the Founders imposing their religious beliefs on Americans when they asserted that God gave unalienable rights to human beings?  Was that some church creed that they were quoting, or were they merely asserting what they considered an irrefutable fact?  They don’t say that they believed that God gave human beings unalienable rights, they said He did it.  It happened.  Historically.

Is crediting our unalienable rights to God an imposition of religion on the American people?  If there is a God, which our Founders certainly believed, you cannot put everything that God did or does or says in a box and say that we will live our lives as a nation without looking into that box and that box must remain out of sight and out of mind when we formulate the laws of our land. 

Civil liberty to this letter writer means that a woman has the right to kill her children before they are born.  Can we kill small animals in our basement if we want?  Can we view child pornography in the privacy of our own homes?  Can I use prohibited words in my own home and in private conversations?  Can I say hateful things in my own home or in private conversations?  You may say yes to some of these things, but you know that if those things ever became public, someone can lose their job and be publicly shamed.  Civil liberties never meant no limits on what we can do.  The Founders relied on people’s own sense of personal responsibility to do the right thing.

This issue with abortion is not personal autonomy, but what exactly is this thing that everybody wants to be able to kill?  And the country is greatly divided on this.  Nobody is trying to force anything on women.  Like when the Secret Service blocks an intersection to allow the President’s motorcade to pass, they are not trying to restrict your right to travel.  They are only thinking about the safe passage of the President.  The question is whether that baby has a right to life independent of what other people think about it.

Our country is founded on a belief in the right to life.  That baby is alive with its own DNA.  It is not a part of the mother.  It is a separate human being.  I’m sorry that evolution or God had to involve women in the process of creating new life. 

The Supreme Court merely said that a hundred or two hundred years ago when our country added certain Amendments to the Constitution, they didn’t have abortion in mind, so it wouldn’t be right for people today to apply what they said back then to this situation.  Let the legislatures decide what to do with it, and we can add however many Amendments to the Constitution as we want. 

 

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