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

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Health Care Reform Solution


Health Care Reform Solution

            I would like to offer my suggestions on how we can best resolve the health care crisis in our country. 

            There are two basic problems to health care: the cost and the availability. 

The best way to reduce costs without compromising the quality of coverage and to maximize the availability of coverage without government insurance is the use of group coverage in place of individual coverage.  

I propose the creation at every insurance company of virtual groups, based on occupations, as reported on one’s annual income taxes.  These virtual groups would include all occupations including typically self-employed ones as entrepreneur, home business, writer, inventor, small business owner, homemaker, and sales.  Unique occupations can be grouped with the closest similar group by mutual agreement with the insurance companies.  So there would no longer be ‘individual’ medical insurance policies, unless, of course, say, a wealthy person wanted to create a unique policy with customized options.

COBRA would continue indefinitely, but an unemployed person would be able to switch to a lower costing plan at any insurance company for that group.  I worked most of my career in the meat business with an excellent union insurance plan.  If I found that COBRA costs to continue this coverage was prohibitive, I could change to other plans at the same or different insurance companies for people in the meat industry.

Health plans have long been a part of a company’s employee benefits, and this should continue.  For two reasons.  As a nation, we want to encourage people to work.  And, secondly, it keeps employers informed of the true cost of living and helps to insure that working people have livable wages.

Employers need to be encouraged (i.e. need incentives) to provide health insurance, and this is best done through tax breaks.  Our society benefits as a whole when all of it has medical insurance, so the tax breaks would be cost effective.  Perhaps a dollar for dollar tax reduction for all employer contributions or even slightly higher to cover the actual costs of implementing and administering the plans.

Why Not a Government Alternative Plan?

It has been proposed that the government offer an alternative plan to compete with private plans.  The problem with this is that the government does not have to work with true costs and true income.  The government has long refused to work within a budget.  So any prices it would offer for an insurance plan would be arbitrary and not true competition. 

Why Not a Single Payer Option?

This is not good for the same reason that our country abolished monopolies a hundred years ago.  It’s competition that spurs efficiency and innovation.  A government program is the least efficient way of doing anything.  Creating a new right of universal health insurance creates also huge disincentives for the work force.  We want as a nation to encourage our people to find meaningful work, and tying health insurance to that might be the best way to do that.

Thank you.

Larry Craig