TR 667 - On Religion, Politics, & Spiritual Solutions to a Host of Societal Woes

Let’s continue…

Yesterday, in TR 666 - Trump's Plan to Eradicate anti-Christian Bias has Direct Ties to Religious Corruption, I called out Trump’s spiritual advisor, Paula White, for her direct ties to gross religious corruption—and as expected, I lost subscribers because of it.

So be it.

Also in that report, I made the effort to stimulate critical thinking regarding how one might perceive the government’s role in promoting religion, specifically by providing examples of what might feel like “foreign” religious practices such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. I pointed out that though adherents of each faith worship God in their own different ways, each group (Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims) also has a strong contingency that supports Donald Trump and America First policies.

I was emphasizing that just because these people believe differently, does not make them our enemies. Many of them are, in fact, our political allies—and in this fight-to-the-death for the American Republic, we really do need all the allies we can get.

With that in mind, it is commonly said that there are no more divisive issues than politics and religion. Much of our culture has long considered these two topics to be taboo in polite conversation. This is no accident, I believe, as neglecting these subjects in “polite conversation” allows for deep, natural divisions to fester.

Left unchecked, these deep, natural divisions will naturally lead to the death of our Union. United we stand, divided we fall, as you well know.

Thus, all at once, the need arises to address these deep, natural divisions head-on, and deal with the taboo topics that so many people are too timid to talk about.

To do so, we need to make plain two intertwined vectors of thought. The first vector is that of faith, belief, and religious practice. The second, is that of faith, belief, and political practice. The common threads should be obvious to all.

The power of faith and belief are well documented in scientific literature. As alluded to yesterday, the benefits of having faith and believing in God (or a higher power) are numerous, ranging from an increased sense of well-being, to greater psychological resilience against stress and a measurably greater ability to heal injury and disease.

This is miraculous to me. It’s like magic. It’s divine. Though scientists, using the empirical scientific method, have proven conclusively that this correlation exists, they still have a very poor understanding of why faith and belief have such a profound impact on the physical, mental, and spiritual health of human beings.

Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that we were designed that way?

If one were to reject the notion of Intelligent Design, or reject the belief that we have been created in the image of God, and instead intentionally stick to raw evolutionary explanations, logic will again lead to the same conclusion.

The positive impact of faith and belief clearly exists in objective reality, undeniably, and the mechanisms of this phenomenon are still shrouded in mystery.

Personally, I chalk this mystery up to the Eternal Enigma, to that which exceeds the mind’s ability to comprehend—but that’s just me.

It’s true that there are many things we can know, that we cannot explain, right? For example, one need not understand exactly how a microwave internally functions, to push the button and pop some popcorn.

This is an apt analogy to faith.

One need not understand how the universe, multiverse, or cosmos functions—pick your preferred label for the Sum of Everything that is—to grasp the very real benefits of spiritual practice. Faith, prayer, worship. These have an