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

Monday, September 26, 2022

Jesus and government policies

Years ago, it was commonly asked, What would Jesus do?  There were even bracelets with four little cubes on them with the letters – WWJD.  (what would Jesus do?)

The Church in America is divided over the fact that we have millions of people walking into our country looking for a better life.  Does this mean that our government should just take care of them? 

They are not legal immigrants whom we have vetted, and whom we have some idea how they will assimilate into our country.  Most do not speak our language.

Our government is $31 trillion in debt.  There are millions more refugees around the world, and billions of people less well off than any American. 

If you are a Christian, how much debt are you going into in order to feed, clothe, and care for needy people? 

Jesus did mention a few times about people selling their possessions and giving to the poor.  And the early Church did that for a while.  But the Bible also frowns upon being in debt. 

But actually the bigger problem is that we have no idea who is coming into our country.  We have apprehended known terrorists. 

Did Jesus mean that we should open our country up to anybody in the world who can get here, and we will take care of them? 

The fact is that the border situation is entirely out of control.  People can be bringing in deadly transmittable diseases.  There could be enemy agents seeking to wreak terror and havoc throughout our country. 

With all the government benefits that we are providing for them, any poor person can come here and be better off than they were at home, and they wouldn’t even have to work for it.

The job of our elected leaders is to take care of the American people above those of other countries.  Like your family takes care of your own children before you take care of the other kids on the block.  That doesn’t mean that you hate all the other kids.  You just hope your neighbors are taking care of their own kids. 

The role of our government is, among other things, 1) to form a more perfect Union.  We are more divided than at any time in our history, and the government is responsible for that.  At least they are doing nothing to slow that down.  2)  ensure domestic tranquility.  Our government is fomenting hate and division as it tries to indoctrinate our children to despise our country and by constantly focusing on race and all the bad things in our past so that we lose sight of all that is good in our country.  3) promote the general welfare.  This doesn’t mean giving people money; it means promoting policies that create jobs and help the people prosper, like not spending our public money irresponsibly. 

Our government is putting the needs and wants of the citizens of other countries over that of its own.  Our refugee program has gone far beyond people fleeing mortal danger but extends now to pretty much anybody wanting a better life.  And our government provides any person coming here with much better living conditions than if they had stayed in their own country, so two million people have come this year alone.

In the old days, people came here for the freedom and opportunities.  Now they come because we will take care of them.

The American people are the most generous people in the world.  We just don’t like our government borrowing money it won’t pay back, so we are now paying a trillion dollars a year just in interest.

We don’t like our government not thinking about the safety of our country by just letting the border stand wide open.  Everybody has doors on their houses.  With locks.  Many have fences around their property.  Not only are we letting whoever wants to to come in, but we will put them up in nice hotels at other people’s expense.  The government has no money but what it takes from other people.  That is not compassion.  That is irresponsible, reckless spending.

Compassion is when you give to others out of your own possessions and money.  It is not compassion to take somebody else’s credit cards and just doling it out so lavishly that you are drawing more crowds who want the same things.

 

 

 

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