Finally, many Americans, in fact, concurrently worship or respect both (1) image of God as Father and the (2) images of the framers of the constitution as Founding Fathers of a Nation—i.e. a Nation called to be a “beacon on the hill” for other states.
LETTER FROM JOHN, THE APOSTLE
Many parts of the Bible focus on right living. The focus is never on living a mediocre life or on settings low goals for oneself, one’s family, one’s peoples or one’s nation.
A similar perspective would certainly guilt for a so-called Christian environment within the United States of America or within a so-called Christian Europe in the 21st Century.
It is this concerns for the failure of a society to promote good living, i.e. high standards of living out a good and wise life, that have led American Christian groups and coalitions to become fairly active politically in recent years.
For example, many Christian parents think it “just plain wrong to allow explicit sex on TV, cable, satellite and internet so that their children and other children in the nation can have easy access to it”. These Christian parents (and Islamic or Jewish parents) are concerned with raising their kids to live out life in what they belive is reflective of their heritages view on living out a wise and good life.
This is why so many have become actively campaigning against what they consider bad parenting across the U.S. However, this “bad parenting” orientation sadly mislabeled simply as “liberal” or “humanist”. This leads to abuses politically whereby, rather than keeping the issue focused on ideas of good local- and national parenting of young minds, political manipulators end up leading the Christian activists into the realm of cultural wars.
In short, the large and powerful political and media-savvy religious leaders can sa sort out internal dissensions among concerned progressive Christians by dividing and conquering progressive Christian leadership around the USA.
I John 1:1-15 in the Bible is a famous passage from about 1900 years ago. In it the author, the last remaining apostle of Jesus Christ, attacks similar sorts of bad thinking and the lack of good living in his own (Apostle John’s) day. In other words, the problem of bad thinking & bad living predate our modern age by millennia.
John, an aging man by this time, noted that many Christian peoples were too unconcerned about wise living.
These Christian peoples felt that that after being saved (or baptized) by their Lord, they could simply go ahead and sin—knowing or believing that in the end they are to be saved by “grace’.
By the way, “Grace” is not nearly such a strong focus in either Islam nor Judaism as it is in Christianity. Nevertheless, these other Ibrahamic faiths do consistently focus on right- and wise living from differing but related perspectives.
In John 1:1-15, the author, Apostle John, focuses on “wise living and walking in the Light”.
By “the Light”, John is referring to “God, the Father”.
Elsewhere, God is also equated to love, i.e. “God is Love.”
These foci of John and the New Testament also include the main point that men refrain any longer from walk in “Darkness”. John indicates that if one is not in the Light, one is in Darkness. Throughout both the older and newer books in the Bible, Christians are told to repent and turn away from unwise living. This “unright living” is known as “sin”.
