4 comments

• Jake Musselman says:

  May 12, 2009 at 3:11 pm

  Oh yeah. I’ve got some opinions about this. But I don’t want to predispose you to what leaving an answer to agree or not leaving an answer to disagree. But I will try to post them later.

  Come Wednesday at 7:00 PM and you will definitely hear them.
• Jamie says:

  May 12, 2009 at 4:36 pm

  To be honest i don’t really get into politics, its not that i don’t know anything about them, it is that i choose not to speak my mind. usually when someone asks my views on certain things they only ask to start arguments and bash me for what i have to say, which i find interesting. there is this guy that i know at school, and him and i have completely different views on life, he lives off of logic and theory and i live based on faith. in knowing how i think he will bring up issues about abortion, creationism, evolution, logic, theory, and faith. most of the time he only wants to hear what i have to say for about three sentences then degrades me. i think people in general get to heated and are far to passionate (sometimes not for the good) and hot-headedness seems to always get in the way when we ask someone’s views. opinions are opinions, if you didn’t want to know then don’t ask!
  so, if someone is going to ask someone how they think, then apparently they should actually listen and take it into consideration.
  my grandfather used to tell me “there are two things you never talk about in public: politics and religion” which is so true because one never know whose toes might be stepped on.
  how much you want to know about politics and what going on in the world is up to the individual person, if you want to burry your head in the sand then go ahead, but when a discussion comes up about politics and you don’t know anything about the subject, then please keep your mouth shut.
• Jake Musselman says:

  May 12, 2009 at 5:28 pm

  I think you are right about hot-headedness getting in the way. It gets in the way of meaningful conversation, debate, and relationship. And meaningful change comes from those things.
• Brian says:

  May 13, 2009 at 7:47 pm

  I think it’s important not to allow a political disagreement to get in the way of relationship. It’s also important not to make political disagreements into something they are not: there are Christians that I disagree with politically, and there are non-Christians that I largely agree with. Christianity does not require a specific political ideology. Winning someone over to my political views is never and should never be the most important thing.

  That said, laws exist largely to enforce morality. Politics, insomuch as it is the primary means of shaping government and laws, ultimately comes down to establishing an agreed-upon system of right and wrong. That’s an important thing for a Christian to take part in.

  I think a key to that is making sure to differentiate absolute moral right and wrong from my convictions. For instance, it’s pretty clear that murder (in the legal sense — leaving out things like war and self-defense) is an absolute wrong that should be illegal. However, the temperance movement was largely Christian-led. Prohibition was not about absolute moral right and wrong, but legislating a conviction. I wouldn’t want someone else’s convictions forced on me, so it’s just as wrong to force mine on someone else. (Not so morality, without a agreed upon standard of morality, chaos would ensue — the theoretical basis in the study of ethics for the existence of government, Hobbes’ “State of Nature” should be enough to convince anyone of that).

  I generally will not pursue, in a political discussion, a viewpoint that I can’t articulate in terms that are separate from Christianity. It’s not that I would deny holding the viewpoint, but, in a political context, I won’t say that something should be so because it’s in the Bible. I can’t make that argument, because I would oppose someone suggesting we pass legislation in order to codify commands in the Koran, for instance. Instead, while all of my viewpoints are certainly influenced by my worldview (and therefore, ultimately Christian), my political views have a basis in logic or science as much as possible. The beliefs that I hold purely on faith are beliefs that, in general, fall outside the political sphere.

  At the same time, our political system is undeniably based on Christian principles. English common law can be referenced in court rulings to this day, and much of it is essentially taken from the Bible. That forms a valid basis, in my mind, for things like the Ten Commandments in courthouses. Demanding that they be removed isn’t a matter of keeping Christianity from interfering with government, it’s a matter of hiding from the truth in the name of not offending.