poligion: The Qualities of a Leader: 2. Charisma

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 11, 2014

The Qualities of a Leader: 2. Charisma

The Qualities of a Leader:

2. Charisma

I have yet to find the man,

however exalted his station, who did not

do better work and put forth greater effort under a

spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism.

-- Charles Schwab, Industrialist

In other words, no matter who you are, you will work better in an atmosphere of acceptance and appreciation rather than in an atmosphere of criticism and constraint. At Whole Foods, we encourage expressions of appreciation, but this is done for extraordinary acts that deserve special recognition. There are probably 80% or more of our workforce who may never get a word of appreciation. Everyday, when I leave for the night, I take the time to say “Good night” to everyone on my team and I say “Thank you.”

I worked for a place one time where my boss was the owner. He was also probably one of the smartest and best meat cutters I have ever worked with. He had very high expectations and wanted everything done in a certain way. I never made so many mistakes in my life. I was embarrassed. I would go home tired, feeling like I had wasted a day of my life. After about two months, I made a bigger mistake and he fired me. Within a week I was a manager at another meat market and doing very well.

What was the difference? In the one case, I was living under the expectations of another, where every job had to be done in a certain way in a certain time and I was watched pretty much the whole time I was doing it. In the other case, I was given the freedom to make many of my own decisions, freedom to work according to my personality.

To get my people doing the best they can do, they have to want to. If I just give them a bunch of rules to follow, I may very well suck the life out of them as they keep all these rules in their minds and keep from breaking any of them.

Maxwell uses the word ‘charisma’ to describe that quality that draws people to oneself. And this is what leaders need to inspire people to follow them and to do their best. Some people are born with great personalities, but he says we can cultivate many of the qualities that leaders need.

1. Look for the good in your people. Celebrate it, encourage it, use it.

2. Share of yourself with your people.

3. Give them hope.

The guy I worked for had high standards, and I like to think that I have high standards too. The difference is that I know it may take some time for my people to reach those standards, and my people know that I will be with them in that journey.