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

So what is so bad about Obamacare?

So what is so bad about Obamacare?

In the early days of our nation, churches were everywhere, and they had hundreds of organizations for every conceivable social problem in the country.  You can read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, written by a French man in the 1830s.  It’s long, wordy, but worth it.

But starting in the early 20th century and rapidly increasing as our government and the public square became more secular, government has been expanding in an effort to solve every problem that existed among the people.  The solutions all involve creating a government program and spending a lot of money on it. 

If the Affordable Care Act makes any insurance affordable, it is because the government is either pricing insurance below what a private insurer can offer, or it is because the government is subsidizing the cost for the person buying it.

So what is so bad about Obamacare?

1)         At a time of record deficits and unsustainable federal debt, the government is committing itself to giving increasing billions of dollars a year to people to give them health insurance.  Our government has no concern about the effects of deficit spending and overall debt on our country.  Those in our government who do care are not effectively presenting the case to the American people what the problems are, and the media are not helping. 

Very simply put for now, our economy can (will) collapse and the recession of 2008 will be like the good old days.  The depression of the 1930s won’t look so bad either.

2)         The government is working to drive out the private enterprise of health insurance to replace it with government run government controlled health insurance.  The government is offering health insurance in direct competition with private insurers, but the government doesn’t have to make a profit, so they can offer anything they want.  Slowly and surely they will eventually get all the business, and more and more of the economy will be government run and controlled. 

Why it that so bad?  They will be taking more and more of your money, so unless you are one of those really rich people who will always make a lot of money or you work for the government where they take good care of their own, your standard of living will go down and down and down.

3)         The government is creating another way in which people will be dependent on the government for their subsistence.  1 in 7 Americans are now dependent on the government for food (stamps).  Student loans used to be run by banks; now people are dependent on the government to be able to go to college.  American freedom assumed people would take care of themselves, and America achieved the highest level of prosperity the world has ever seen (maybe the era of King Solomon excepted).  Now America’s prosperity is slowly fading into the distant past.

4)         The goal, intentionally or otherwise, is to reduce the number of people working to support more and more people who are either not working or who are barely subsisting by working in order to make everyone more equal.  Except, of course, there will always be the very rich, people who are able to take advantage of whatever obstacles the life or the government can throw before them and profit from them.  And then there are those in public service, the people employed by the government for the noble task of taking care of the rest of us, who are rewarded handsomely for their efforts.  The median income of those people who live in the Washington DC area is well above the national average.  And when you consider that DC itself has a growing lower class (:read: poor minorities), that figure takes on another meaning.

5)         For much of the modern era, when medical care exponentially improved, and medical insurance became a staple of American life, insurance was linked with employment, and family insurance was linked to fulltime employment.

But now that families are essentially being denigrated as being unnecessary and stifling to personal fulfillment, coincidentally(?) more and more work is becoming parttime, and companies are dropping their insurance coverage, which Obamacare is accelerating. 

Apart from employer sponsored health insurance, insurance was unaffordable for most people.  But many people would say that encouraging people to work fulltime is a good thing.  But now the government will make all that unnecessary as it can do what nobody else can: make anything more affordable by making other people pay for it.


I hear so many people saying that Obamacare is the law of the land, and there is nothing we can do about it.  Laws are changed and overturned almost every day.  This is one law 2,000 pages long that can and should be eliminated as soon as possible, before too many people get addicted to the government goody bag again.