poligion: Letter Re: immigration

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

Letter Re: immigration

Monday, March 27, 2006

Greetings!

This immigration issue that you are discussing now is of great interest and concern to me. I would like to offer my thoughts and suggestions:

Yes, the United States was built by immigrants, but in the past they came here with the intention of becoming citizens. And not this joint citizenship, where they still have a commitment to their original land. They believed in the melting pot and not in the salad bowl. If an immigrant, legal or otherwise, wanted to become a citizen, I would encourage them to do so.

I would then allow them to have a two year temporary visa to prepare for citizenship. The test would be in English, and they could not have a dual citizenship. There is a potential here for fraud, and we need safeguards. We need a full commitment to our country.

We need to have a look at our immigration policies. Why are these illegals unable or unwilling to go the legal route? Maybe we will need to limit immigration from some other countries for a while. I suggest we can start with some Middle Eastern countries.

Those who have no interest in becoming citizens and are illegal are just that, illegal. Employers who knowingly hire them should be prosecuted.

It is said often that they take the jobs that no one else will take. That may be the case in some situations. What I have seen far too often is the downgrading of good jobs because of the availability of illegals who will work for little and will receive little or no benefits. This, with outsourcing, has played a major role in the diminution of the middle class in our country. Except for maybe migrant agricultural workers, I don’t think they are the answer to our problems but the source.

We can still issue temporary visas to migrant workers, if we need a lot of workers quickly. But the key word is temporary. If they have no interest in becoming citizens, then they have to go back when they are done.

My wife works for a doctor. She has complained to me for years about immigrants who come here and get all kinds of taxpayer funded health care for free, and we couldn’t even get health insurance for ourselves for a while. What we couldn’t afford, they got for free. And they didn’t even seem appreciative. So many acted like they expected it. So many of them were milking the system. She could tell you stories.

Immigration is a privilege, not a right. We need people in our country who want to be Americans first. My grandparents were immigrants from Germany and England, but they became citizens. And the United States was their country. I call myself an American, not a German.

These people who are demonstrating, what are they? Are they Mexicans? Or are they Americans? Are they Guatemalan, or are they American? Are they Pakistani, or are they American? If they are not American, then they need to be here legally. If they want to become Americans, then they need to renounce their allegiance to the land of their birth and commit themselves to the United States of America.

I can be lenient to an illegal who really wants to become a citizen. But if they don’t want to, then they need to go back home.

Thank you

Larry Craig