where religion and politics meet

Everybody has a worldview. A worldview is what you believe about life: what is true, what is false, what is right, what is wrong, what are the rules, are there any rules, what is the meaning of life, what is important, what is not.

If a worldview includes a god/God, it is called a religion. If a bunch of people have the same religion, they give it a name.

Nations have worldviews too, a prevailing way of looking at life that directs government policies and laws and that contributes significantly to the culture. Politics is the outworking of that worldview in public life.

We are being told today that the United States is and has always been a secular nation, which is practical atheism.

But our country could not have been founded as a secular nation, because a secular country could not guarantee freedom of religion. Secular values would be higher than religious ones, and they would supersede them when there was a conflict. Secularism sees religion only as your personal preferences, like your taste in food, music, or movies. It does not see religion, any religion, as being true.

But even more basic, our country was founded on the belief that God gave unalienable rights to human beings. But what God, and how did the Founders know that He had? Islam, for example, does not believe in unalienable rights. It was the God of the Bible that gave unalienable rights, and it was the Bible that informed the Founders of that. The courts would call that a religious opinion; the Founders would call that a fact.

Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’ have the United States of America.

A secular nation cannot give or even recognize unalienable rights, because there is no higher power in a secular nation than the government.

Unalienable rights are the basis for the American concept of freedom and liberty. Freedom and liberty require a high moral code that restrains bad behavior among its people; otherwise the government will need to make countless laws and spend increasingly larger amounts of money on law enforcement.

God, prayer, the Bible, and the Ten Commandments were always important parts of our public life, including our public schools, until 1963, when the court called supreme ruled them unconstitutional, almost 200 years after our nation’s founding.

As a secular nation, the government now becomes responsible to take care of its people. It no longer talks about unalienable rights, because then they would have to talk about God, so it creates its own rights. Government-given rights are things that the government is required to provide for its people, which creates an enormous expense which is why our federal government is now $22 trillion in debt.

Our country also did not envision a multitude of different religions co-existing in one place, because the people, and the government, would then be divided on the basic questions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our Constitution, which we fought a war to be able to enact, states, among other things, that our government exists for us to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It could not do this unless it had a clear vision of what it considers to be true, a vision shared with the vast majority of the people in this country.

I want to engage the government, the culture, and the people who live here to see life again from a Christian perspective and to show how secularism is both inadequate and just plain wrong.

Because religion deals with things like God, much of its contents is not subject to the scientific method, though the reasons why one chooses to believe in God or a particular religion certainly demand serious investigation, critical thinking, and a hunger for what is true.

Science and education used to be valuable tools in the search for truth, but science has chosen to answer the foundational questions of life without accepting the possibility of any supernatural causes, and education generally no longer considers the search to be necessary, possible, or worthwhile.

poligion: 1) the proper synthesis of religion and politics 2) the realization, belief, or position that politics and religion cannot be separated or compartmentalized, that a person’s religion invariably affects one’s political decisions and that political decisions invariably stem from one’s worldview, which is what a religion is.

If you are new to this site, I would encourage you to browse through the older articles. They deal with a lot of the more basic issues. Many of the newer articles are shorter responses to particular problems.

Visit my other websites theimportanceofhealing blogspot.com where I talk about healing and my book of the same name and LarrysBibleStudies.blogspot.com where I am posting all my other Bible studies. Follow this link to my videos on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb-RztuRKdCEQzgbhp52dCw

If you want to contact me, email is best: lacraig1@sbcglobal.net

Thank you.

Larry Craig

Thursday, January 30, 2014

If not Obamacare, then what?

If not Obamacare, then what?

It’s easy to criticize, and Obamacare has made criticizing even easier.  Yet there are a lot of people who actually like it, believe it is doing some serious good, and who don’t see a better plan out there.  They need to know exactly what is wrong with Obamacare and what is a better way to do insurance.
The first step in improving health insurance/care is not to have a plan.  That is to say, the worse thing we can do is have a 2,800 page bill that we “have to pass it so we can know what’s in it.” 
The general routine in Congress for dealing with an issue is to combine the issue with as many similar and dissimilar issues as possible.  The perceived goal is to make the bill as long as possible.  That way fewer people will read the bill, and many parts of the bill will be voted on without the courtesy of discussing or debating them.  In fact, many of the parts of this bill (and all these long bills) would not pass on their own, but being safely tucked within a much larger all-encompassing bill that is touted as solving the first issue, it may get votes from people who don’t want to vote against a ‘good’ bill just for some ‘smaller’ matters they disagree with.
So in this first step, you don’t want a large all-encompassing bill.  Take the issues one by one, debate them, solicit public input, and then vote on them when you get it right.
Which leads to the second step in improving health insurance/care.  If you recall the passing of Obamacare, Congressmen were given waivers from Obamacare for their states or districts in return for their votes.  So votes were bought from people who would not be affected by the bill.  Then the vote was taken in the middle of the night with great haste, knowing that people might have second thoughts or the public might catch on to what was happening. 
This was a bill that was forced on the American people.  And the only way that this doesn’t happen again is to break down complex issues into simple ones and discuss and vote on them separately rather than on 2,000 pages of rules and regulations that no one knows all that is in there.  Any time you see legislators in a hurry to pass a bill, be sure that this bill contains things that most people won’t like. 
If that’s the case, you might wonder why politicians aren’t afraid of backlash.  That’s because the general political strategy is to buy off segments of the population with legislation that offers some significant benefit to this particular group.  Doesn’t matter what it costs, how it will be paid for, or how it affects everything else.  These segments will vote for their own benefits, and the sum total of these segments gives them the majority they need to win elections.
So the second step in improving health insurance/care is not to rush through so-called ‘needed’ legislation.
Which leads us to the third problem with Obamacare.  The selling point here is supposed to be affordability.  Well, the only people who will find this plan more affordable are those for whom the government will provide subsidies to help pay for it.  So this is the segment that the politicians are trying to buy off.  Those who get cheaper health insurance will vote for these politicians.  Those whose rates will go up may or may not vote for them depending on what other benefits these politicians have given them.
Our country is $17 trillion in debt.  We will be $20 trillion in debt if/when Obama finishes his term in office, and we are creating another large mass of people dependent on the government for their basic necessities of life.  At some point very soon, this entire economy could collapse.
There are two other problems with OC that is making it more unaffordable for everybody.  The government is dictating the terms of the insurance contracts, telling companies and people what coverage they have to have and how much the insurance companies will pay for it.  The government essentially is forcing people to get more coverage than they need, but they are also removing personal incentives that in the past enabled people to get lower rates. 
So older people are paying for maternity coverage, and healthy people, as in non-smokers, are paying the same rates as smokers.
Ok, so now what do we do?  The goal, of course, is the best health care at the cheapest prices and the widest availability. 
There is a move today to separate medical insurance from employment, but I believe that is a mistake.  Group plans are always cheaper than individual plans, and generally there are no restrictions on getting the insurance. 
However, our country has lost millions of good paying fulltime jobs due to government policies sending them all overseas, but this can be reversed.  We tax our own companies with some of the highest corporate taxes in the world, then we allow foreign companies that we can’t tax free access to sell their goods here.  So our companies move overseas where they don’t have to pay these taxes to sell their stuff here.  But if we eliminate the corporate tax here or tax foreign products when they come into our country, this would easily create millions of decent paying jobs that could/would offer group health insurance.

We also need incentives for people to choose healthier lifestyles, like lower rates if you exercise, get regular checkups, etc., and people need the option to choose exactly what coverage they want.  These don’t require the government to do anything but to stop micromanaging people’s lives.  
Posted by at