Same Faith - Different Philosophy
Many like to use logic and science to argue the non-existence of God. I argue that God exists by paradox and intuition. Many of the things people consider anti-Christian I think are more consistent with Christianity than the former.
I am a born again Christian but almost every other view I have is contrary to what most Christians believe in America. There is more than one way to live life and still be a Bible believing Christian.
American Issues
The political situation in America today is like that of the Native or Indigenous Americans and European Americans during the first hundred years of our country. The two ways are not reconciliable and are not going to be resolved because they are fundamentally different ways of seeing things.
It may end in very different ways but no one is going to accept coexistence with the other group and no one is going to change their point of view. Why we have political debates anymore is beyond me.
I think America is starting to find itself with similar problems as the rest of the world. Maybe America is beginning to actually have a history long enough to be worth studying. I am very uncomfortable with either group.
Some powerful people have tried to tie together America and Christianity for its entire history. But most its ideas are not from the Bible. Do you know there is no reference to America in any form in the Bible? The only possible explanations are that America is the evil empire of the devil (Mystery Babylon), the unpopulated areas that people flee to when the evil empire takes over, or it simply does not exist in any meaningful form at the end of times.
Neither capitalism nor democracy are talked about in any form. God seems to care a lot about social justice and the poor and marginalized. God wants to rule us directly but only if we first desire to do so. Jesus Christ did not use the government or the military to implement any of His ideas and did not advocate us doing so either. He did not advocate overthrowing the government but did not endorse it either.
Religion and Politics
Christianity is inherently apolitical in nature as its focus is on God, itself, and the people who are not saved yet. It is concerned with the individual and with the afterlife primarily. One of Jesus disciples was an anarchist and another a government official. Most of them were average people.
Throughout the Bible, God usually chooses someone unqualified to lead as it brings glory to God not people. Never did the early church get involved in any political activities. The downfall of ancient Israel was that the people wanted to be ruled by other people instead of by God.
When later Christians got involved in politics this made it possible for the Arabs to expand out of Saudi Arabia, it was a major factor in the persecution and eventual genocide of Middle Eastern Christians, it divided the Western Church into Catholic and Protestant which lead to modern atheism, and it made the Soviet Union and communism in general possible.
Yes politics and belief systems intertwine, but the ends never justify the means and politics by its very nature always works this way. Politics is about compromising your principles and only those who will do anything to win will win. Essentially politics is about the rich and powerful exploiting the weak and powerless. Good comes about spiritually as it comes from God.
One of the things that really confuses me about the religious right today is this opposition to tolerance and their wanting everyone to follow religious laws even if they do not believe in that religion. Salvation according to the Bible only occurs when people accept Christ as Lord and Savior of their own free will. As much as Christians should follow the rules of the Bible it is not going to save someone by just following Biblical rules.
This is also ironic for Protestants to oppose social change as that was the basis for the Protestant movement itself or to desire to merge religion and government together as that is why Protestants separated from the Catholic church. It comes down to different people having different moral systems. Many people just assume if people don't agree with their belief system that the person has no morals.
International Issues
Furthermore so many people lamenting the major changes in the world today are the same group of people who supported the same changes in the winning of both the Cold War and World War II. If you think you can fight the future and resist ever changing technology or social values you can see China as an obvious example.
The reason why China became communist and rejected their culture completely and modeled their entire society after Japan and Russia was because they were very weak and humiliated. This situation came about because they did not invest in more firepower and change socially like what was happening in Europe.
Ironically, in spite of all the distinctions being exaggerated, Russia is now much like the religious right in its thinking now. Many people cannot accept that the cold war has come and gone and this is not the world system now.
America has a persecution complex and feels it needs to run the whole world and have everyone think like them in order to feel safe. For a country that was never invaded and almost impossible to invade and having the most effective military on the planet, it is hard to think of this attitude as anything other than paranoia.
Many today respond to this line of thinking as you are just pretending to care about other people for status or that you do not understand how the world works to think this way. I understand very well how the world works as I attended public schools through college and served enlisted in the US military straight out of high school. Most of the people I am close with do not share most of my political or religious views so it does not give me any more friends supporting social justice.
I also make the same accusations to the religious right. When the religious right adopts more than one social cause that improves things for the world maybe then they can say they are not just pretending to care. And the only way this is immature to think the way I do is if you see things so negatively about other people that you adopt a defeatist worldview and give up on making the world better.
The big reason I do not want to have my country take part in this kind of evil is that it is currently being done in my name making me partly responsible for it. I have suffered enough in my lifetime to want to do something to reduce the suffering in the world or at least not be an active contributor to it. There is a lot of evil in the world, but concentrating the power and wealth even more is not an improvement. We should not give up on treating the rich the same as the poor just because it is hard.