“The separation of church and state” (TSCS)

Why would we intellectually defend a position that has no objective point of reference?

How can we be “good” citizens for the future of our country and at the same time truly appreciate this meaning?

If you are intrigued by these two questions then please consider what I have to say.  I have no degree I’m just a concerned citizen with an idea.

Have you noticed how by appearance Progressive and Socialist ideologies make up much of the liberal thinking of the Democratic Party?  Well that’s what I see.

Do they promote a humanist position which seems to be assisted by the whip of “The separation of church and state” (TSCS)?

In the hands of self-serving individuals could TSCS be applied to create an unfair advantage under the cover of “secular” governance which could lead to National Socialism as a worldview?

How can a person correct a worldview in the arena of ideas when secular humanism has established TSCS over other worldviews?

Democrats and liberals use of TSCS has the tool which forms a bias, a religious apartheid that selfishly promotes one set of ideas over another.  Creating a false narrative to which anyone outside the camp is expected to position from.  This arbitrary position then has the power to exclude convictions merely by choice on their own morale perspective and the use of TSCS.
Most importantly these worldviews all have aspects of religion and that includes this idea of a secular state that can lead to National Socialism which F.A. Voigt characterized both Marxism and National Socialism as secular religions.   A.J.P. Taylor for example characterize it as “a great secular religion….the Communist Manifesto must be counted as a holy book in the same class as the Bible”.  Sen. Pat Robert is quoted by the Washington Times saying “… we have to change course because our country is headed for national socialism. That’s not right. It’s changing our culture. It’s changing what we’re all about.”

Yet Christians in the United States find themselves marginalize when subjective worldviews such as socialism are brought into the public arena…and truth be told the guide which informs us is far better, time tested to the values which founded the country.   Having no way to justify their convictions and making us disregard our own.

In closing, this is not a call for a state religion but a call to reason and equality of how a person gains knowledge and the re-education of how to employ these gifts.  Because the case could and should be made that socialism, part of the ideology of the Democratic Party has become, under the cover of secularism, the mechanism to a current state religion.

Because the founding fathers may not have had in mind the idea to purge religion from the minds of Americans which seems to be what the seculars would want you to believe but to intellectually exercise this knowledge, to self-discipline, that from these principles flow not an establishment of a state religion that favors a denominational institution but how to agree with the creator in civic and private life.

Our educational leadership and the forming of ideas

“Secularism is the principle of the separation of government institutions and persons mandated to represent the state from religious institutions and religious dignitaries. One manifestation of secularism is asserting the right to be free from religious rule and teachings, or, in a state declared to be neutral on matters of belief, from the imposition by government of religion or religious practices upon its people.“

“…on the eve of World War II, F. A. Voigt characterized both Marxism and National Socialism as secular religions, akin at a fundamental level in their authoritarianism and messianic beliefs – as well as in their eschatological view of human History. Both, he considered, were waging religious war against the liberal enquiring mind of the European heritage.”

Modern day secularism assumes a façade of impartiality, cloaked in its own bias of “morale justice” while all along claiming moral relativism.  Calling for fairness yet arbitrarily applying their own agenda and denying any other world view the opportunity of their own convictions under the guise of separation of church and state.  Religions may not be able to remain on the fringes.   The original concept of secularism may have been a beneficial idea but it has a flaw.  God.  He never created us to be neutral.

There is such a thing as “bad” and “good” and without these definitions as a way to intellectually attempt to work through these ideas we are left with absurdity.  Outside of truth these concepts then become a fantasy of ideas, a socially and politically engineered arena, regardless of good intentions or what does or does not work.  Yes we may be free of religions but a great majority of people have been disenfranchised from the arena because the people who are guaranteed the free exercise of religion are not free to exercise their ideas within government.

Secularism has become the poster child of something completely out of the concept it was created to explain.  It is now a religion embedded in world governments’.  It’s part socialism and part greed.   It is its own deity, not some so called antiquated concept of a spirit residing in some unknown plane but they have assumed that as a personal blessing.

Point; in the USA secular progressives have taken the phrase and the position of superiority under the guise of impartiality afforded it.  The secular view of socialism has now asserted itself over the other world views, as if unbiased, when claiming separation of Church and State.  But what exactly is going on?  Secularism now has developed via public education and has come to roost with loosely held ideas and morals that only they can satisfy appealing to the vanity and greed found in all people.  Creating an advantage over any other worldviews not hold the moral compass of prosperity.

Secularism embraces the idea of change, demonizing religion under the guise of separation of church and state, providing terms like choice, social justice etc. but it has no more the ability to answer life’s questions than any other religion or worldview.  In its current form our leadership is nothing more than a hodgepodge of ideas pragmatically fitted together to manufacture an acceptable religion for the people void of a truth but a religion none the less.

The spiritual blindnes

Secularism, as with any other world view, informs itself by a set of taught ideas with morals and an applied world view. Just as Christians or Muslims do – you also have the Secular. Yet the cruel fact is, just in the USA alone, 56 million infants have been aborted, lives that don’t have that choice. The spiritual blindness is truly epic in proportion. The magnitude of the intellectual eclipse when contrasting the WWII Holocaust and this is breathtaking. For some reason we are told THEY were wrong but yet both were legal and both were a convenient final solution i.e. pragmatism. So if Seculars have their view of life and Muslims do too who’s to say who is wrong? I CAN because I know outside of truth there is no other so yes abortion is absolutely wrong. So ask yourself is there an absolute truth or is it all just a matter of opinion?

Presuppositional Evangelism

I love truth!

theidolbabbler.com

Genesis 1:1
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

The Bible is presuppositional. It presupposes or assumes that the reader knows that God exists, and it does this because the reader knows that God exists. Scripture never attempts to prove the existence of God. It always treats us as though we are in the know regarding God being there. Paul makes this abundantly clear:

Romans 1:19-20
“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

And why is man without excuse? 

Because man knows God by default:

Romans 1:21-22
“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks…

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How I Almost Became a False Teacher

http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/how-i-almost-became-a-false-teacher

 

What does a false teacher in the church look like?

Some of them are easy to spot. Health-and-wealth, prosperity preachers hardly require any effort at all. Those who ignore or sneeringly distort the Bible also are fairly obvious.

But what if they look like me? What if they attend church regularly, read the Bible, encourage their children to participate in Sunday School and Wednesday evening services, lead family devotions, pray, support missionaries, volunteer? What if, by most visible accounts, they are healthy Christians?

The problem is: that isn’t the whole picture.

When disability entered our family I realized that most people, including most pastors, did not understand this life. I was no longer part of the normal group — the average church member.

The Search for Answers

It touched every area of my life, including my understanding of who God is. I looked for this issue in the Bible and thought hard about it. But I didn’t just read the Bible, I scoured memoirs, scholarly journals, testimonials, history, academic textbooks.

I responded to the strong temptation to look for somebody else — somebody with experience with disability — to provide the theological answers to the questions I had about the Bible and disability. Some of those voices made sense to me.

One such voice was a well-known blind theologian dealing directly at some of the hardest passages in the New Testament. His writing was clear and organized. He was seriously engaging the Bible. He knew and understood the history of the church on this topic. His argumentation was tight, and his experience with the subject was relevant. His emotional appeals gelled with his rationale. He was no prosperity charlatan trying to get rich off his followers. It was a serious look at God’s word and its impact on his life as a man living with blindness.

And he was wrong.

Needing a Rock

I was drawn in — almost. Unspoken, but hovering over his entire argument was the assumption that we have the authority to judge God’s word. He wrote like God himself is on trial. In this case, he used his own experience as a man living with a disability to confidently make assertions that are not supported by the Bible.

I saw others drawn in, not specifically to this man’s argument, but to the assumption that disability offers a special insight into God and his word that is superior to what God actually gave us.

I found less careful writers on this subject who made absurd assertions about biblical passages. They did so in peer-reviewed journals without actually explaining how they came to their conclusions. Disability was being used as a weapon against God’s word. And there was a certain attraction to it. I was on the verge of swallowing it whole and becoming a false teacher like that myself.

But in all that literature, I was unable to find a firm rock upon which to stand.

How Love Won

When confronted with emotionally exhausting and challenging issues like disability, even the most theologically solid leaders in the church may be tempted to explain God away, to make him other than who he is.

Younger pastors should realize that God will bring issues into your churches of which you have no experience and of which there are few resources from a God-centered perspective. Disability is one of those issues. What families like mine need from you, more than anything, is that you remember Jesus alone is the source of your hope. The greatest help you can provide is to keep us in the Bible and show us your own affections for God and his word, even when the passages are hard to understand. Show us your passion to submit to God’s revelation gladly.

When you are saturated in the Bible, that subtle, non-biblical voice someone like me may inadvertently bring into your church will be felt. When felt, you can move up next to it, seek to understand it, and respond to it in loving ways, with wisdom that God will provide. Your God-centered leadership can guide such a false-teacher-in-training away from that which would kill him and others. Maybe you’ll have to endure some harsh and unkind words in response. Or maybe God will use your firm, gentle, courageous engagement to turn a false teacher into a passionate lover of God and his word.

That is what God gave me in my leaders. Even as I was reading an argument about God and disability that was carefully crafted, intelligent, coherent, and strongly appealing to my sinful desire to be wiser than God and his word, it was the writer’s lack of affection for God and his word that gave me serious pause. My pastors did not talk like this about God or his word. They gave me a different example, a better way.

No pastor can specifically prepare every member for every circumstance he or she will face. But every God-centered, Bible-saturated, Spirit-filled pastor can show what affection for God and his word looks like. In fact, you must, if you really care about your people.

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More on disability from Desiring God:

• Works of God Conference on Disability (six messages)

• Disability and the Sovereign Goodness of God (ebook from John Piper)

• Michael S. Beates, Disability and the Gospel: How God Uses Our Brokenness to Display His Grace (Crossway, 2012)

John Knight is Director of Donor Partnerships at Desiring God. He is married to Dianne and together they parent their four children: Paul, Hannah, Daniel, and Johnny. Paul lives with multiple disabilities including blindness, autism, cognitive impairments and a seizure disorder. John blogs on issues of disability, the Bible, and the church at The Works of God.

Speakers’ rights safe in Tate

Speakers’ rights safe in Tate

I read an article in the “Red & Black” it’s a University of Georgia campus online paper and in particular a video included within the piece which I wanted to comment on.

The video attempts to present an argument, religious views aside, between a Christian Evangelist Todd Friel from Wretched and Najla Basim Abdulelah, President of the Muslim Student Association.   In this very candid video Todd removes the perceived religious tone when he appeals to Najla’s sense of reasoning.   Let me try to explain.

Todd Friel acknowledges even applauds the possibility of being wrong for the sake of the argument.  He takes the position that essentially the two world views hold to exclusive truth claims but he acknowledges that logically both cannot be true.  One view has to be wrong.  He tries to appeal to her reasoning and logic but sadly Najla resorts to insults with comments like “stupid” and “crazy” since apparently free speech can have its intellectual limits.

The article seems to favorably present her argument but I find it ironic in light of the absolute claims leveled at him when she appeals to the crowd that Todd is “… everything that is bad in this world” and the paper’s leadership finds no pause to side in this hasty generalization when we can safely say she does not know everything.  So when he justly confronts her by asking “are you judging me?”  In my opinion her answer is the essence of Todd’s exercise.

“The Law of non-contradiction is one of the basic laws in classical logic. It states that something cannot be both true and not true at the same time when dealing with the same context.”

This could have been an opportunity to promote honest discussion and logic, which is needed, but it does appears we have a clear break on the side of subjective political correctness. The article could have applauded the merits of a logical argument or why contradictions even in religion do matter.

To me these types of problems and inconsistencies are best explained in light of the prevailing world view and influence of secularism.  This point of view, of there being no truth does have its rub. How can “Speakers rights” be safe when you don’t know what to keep them safe from? Who gets to determine the position?  Is it just pragmatism? If there are no absolute truths then is that absolutely true?   The saddest part of today’s creeping secularism is how its acceptance is adopted unwittingly and reason is abandoned.

When it comes to faith, to the secular, it’s just about pragmatism…except on discussions of evolution, life, euthanasia, taxes, marriage, politics and our personal freedoms to own property or guns but of course there is a separation of church and state.   How convenient for freedom of speech.

Tears in Heaven

This will be my first blog post and hopefully short and meaningful.  This week I’ve been humming an old Eric Clapton song that just came to mind.  Not sure what triggered it but here I am.

Now some of you may not know this but I’m outside the US. I’m actually in Brussels working as an Army civilian. I don’t play the radio much, at least not to listen to current pop music and besides when I travel back and forth from work it’s on my motorcycle which has no radio.  But one afternoon I started to think about the history behind this song and what the words meant. It formed an idea of something that I’ve wanted to do.  So you could say it’s a part of the bigger picture and the catalyst for my first blog post. So let’s see how it goes.

Have you heard the song “Tears in Heaven” written by Eric Clapton and Will Jennings its written to the pain Eric Clapton felt following the death of his 4 year old son, Conor. The little guy fell from a New York city apartment window 20 March 1991. Clapton was visibly distraught for months afterwards.

I hear in his words this deep emotion, a whole lifetime condensed to captured a longing as he recites the first line “Would you know my name If I saw you in heaven?” Wow! What a question to ask. Why is he asking this…Conor would you know me? In a sense I have no idea the depth of pain that could generate such a candid statement even though I may know it makes sense.

In the last verse Clapton says “I must be strong and carry on, ‘Cause I know I don’t belong Here in heaven.” Why would he say that? Why would he begin with this element of hope asking if he would be known, by name, his own son and then disqualify himself?

The only place to answer these types of question is from the bible. Found in the book of Romans, a truth, hard but authoritative to qualify the concept of good.  It says “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven” but why?  Well it’s because people know truth, a truth that can only come from God but people chose to “suppress the truth” so “what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.” Romans 1:18

Now why would he disqualify himself? A loving father the loss of a child all he has left is the hope of rest, a good place, a safe place for his son. Where truth and justice are supreme a place where there are no more tears. But then there’s that reminder of conscience that voice of conviction affirmed of in scripture that Heaven is good but I am not.

The Christian faith is not something isolated to four walls on a Sunday morning or some accession of philosophy. The God of the bible is not about opinions or personal interpretations. He is about life, we are either dead in sin or made alive in Christ. Those who are graced to call Heaven their home are like a burning stick snatched out of the fire.

I hope what time I have to express my faith along with future post will convey more of this meaningful and thought provoking faith we call Christianity.  So I thank God today for this opportunity, the people I will hear from and the truth of the Good News.