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

Friday, July 11, 2014

How to Fix the Debt and Spending Problem in Washington

How to Fix the Debt and Spending Problem in Washington

a paper sent to the Republican Party in DC for a contest
750 word limit 

I recently read the Federalist Papers, those papers written to explain and defend the Constitution prior to its ratification.  It clearly states that the House controls the purse. All spending bills have to originate in the House.   If we have a spending and debt problem, it is the fault of the House and only the House. 
The House is afraid to cut spending.  They are totally unable to explain to the American people why the debt and deficit spending is a problem.  It has gone on for so long that their cries are like the boy who cried wolf.  Why is the House finally waking up now?
If you actually want to fix the spending and debt problem, the first thing you have to do is to educate the American public.  The only way you are going to be able to get their attention is to state now that there is no other business more important than this, and you will not consider any other legislation until this is resolved, barring a declaration of war or something of that magnitude. 
You have to declare now that there will be no more debt limit increases.  Do not wait until three weeks before the deadline.
Now that you have the nation’s attention, you need to explain to them how all this affects the economy and them personally.  Do not talk about their children’s debt.  This means nothing.
What you need to explain:
1)         All money given to the government is money out of your pocket, and there is no benefit to the economy.  If I spend all my money on myself or if I give some of it to you to spend, it is still the same amount of money being spent.
2)         When the government spends more than it takes in, the value of the money in your pocket decreases when the government prints more money to pay for these expenses.
3)         When other countries lend us money, it puts our economy at risk and gives other countries too much control over our economy and policies. 
4)         When too many people rely on the government for money, for anything, it is just money from other people’s pockets and everybody is living on less money.  Everybody will do better if more people are working than less.
5)         All this increased spending has put so much pressure on the government for money that it taxes our companies at the highest corporate tax rate in the world.  So millions of our jobs have gone overseas, and the burden of paying for everything falls on fewer and fewer people.  Jobs will not return to our country until our taxes are low and our culture supports that so that this concept doesn’t change back and forth with different administrations. 
6)         The dollar is the world’s reserve currency.  If we lose that status, our economy could collapse a lot worse than it did in 2008.  It is our debt and only that which would cause that change, and other nations are already working on doing that.
7)         The more money you give to the government, the less you have to spend on yourself.  Even if you don’t pay federal taxes (the 47%), you still pay Medicare and Social Security and all kinds of state and local taxes which are all part of the same problem, dependency on government rather than being able to take care of yourself.  The more people rely on the government to take care of them, the less money everybody will have for themselves.
8)         Buying things with borrowed money always costs more than paying in cash.  Our government buys almost everything with borrowed money, which means we are wasting a lot of our (your) money.
9)         The debt is all money that we owe to people, many of them are in foreign countries.  If we had to pay our debt, our economy would collapse.  Our economy is based on everybody (government and people) buying things on credit.  At some point, the credit can stop and you have to pay your bills.  That can happen easily when so much of our debt is held by foreign countries.  When we move the debt around within our own country, it just takes from the value of the dollar in your pocket. 
You need to talk like this is about the best interests of our people and our country and not any political advantage.  People are tired of politics and all the BS.  Do what’s right.


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