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, December 16, 2014

answers to a survey on government issues

I.                    Political landscape
  1. There is no need to list these in order of priority.  One of the big mistakes that Congress makes, or better call it problems with Congress, is that it tries to deal with problems only with comprehensive bills that are too large to read, discuss, or debate.  It ends up that a lot of things get passed which are not good and that would never pass on its own. 
All of these things are important, very important.  And they don’t require a 1,000 page bill to correct.
  1. The best insurance has always been employer provided group plans.  We sent millions of good paying jobs overseas through free trade agreements.   Free trade was a mistake.  Countries should make their own stuff.  Imports are for people who want Swiss chocolate or French wine or Persian rugs.  Imports should not be American companies sending their products back to the States. 
  2. Taxes are too high.  The reason is that the government spends too much money.  The government spends too much money because it got rid of our jobs, but also because it has taken on the responsibilities that people use to be responsible for themselves, which all started when we secularized our country.
  3. It’s not just spending across the board that should be eliminated.  The government does things it shouldn’t even be doing in the first place, like a federal Department of Education.  We used to have the best schools in the world before we had one.  Now they are only mediocre.  That department should be eliminated.  We have departments making laws that only Congress should be making.  All these departments that keep making regulations need to be dismantled. 
But our problems all started when we let the Supreme Court tell us that the government cannot aid any religion and we have come to believe that anything related to the government cannot mention God in any way.  That’s like removing the rudder and the anchor off of a ship and letting it float around as it is pushed by the wind and the waves.  That’s the cause of 90% of the problems we are facing as a nation today.
  1. Borders must be secured immediately.  Every country should know who is coming into it.  And have the right to refuse anyone.  Children born here of illegal parents should not be considered US citizens.  Children born to tourists and foreign diplomats are not automatically citizens.  Why should children of someone who is in the country illegally be considered a citizen?  That only encourages more people to try to come here illegally.
The policy of reuniting families is not a good policy. The main reason we need or want immigration is to bring in workers to pay for our aging population.  When they bring in their families, then we have the same demographics of what we already have, and it strains our system financially.
  1. Restore our military so it can fight a two front war.  But we need to start declaring wars again, and then fight to win them quickly.  We need to let the world know that we won’t target civilians, but if we are at war, civilians need to know that if they are too close to the enemy, they are at risk.  So tell whoever to stop counting civilian casualties.  Blame the enemy who hides behind women and children, because they have no value on life.  We are not going to jeopardize the lives of our soldiers by allowing our enemies any advantages.
  2. As for the economy, we are taxed to death.  I don’t want to pay one penny more to any government for anything.  I am tired of being robbed by people who are supposed to represent me.
II.                  Policy issues
  1. Pro-life.  We need to value our children and our homes.  Read my article on How Christianity Prospers a Nation, Part 3, Families and children at poligion1.blogspot.com
  2. Same-sex marriage is not constitutional.  It is not even a marriage.  Marriage only exists as a vehicle for raising the children that occur when people have sex.  If children occurred any other way or if we didn’t need children, there never would have been a thing called marriage in the first place.
By recognizing a thing called same-sex marriage, we are diminishing the role of natural parents in the lives of our children, which is leading us to the time when the government wants to raise our children.  That way it can be sure of raising up a people who appreciate it for all it wants to be.  See the article mentioned above.
  1. Guns are a fundamental right.  They are number two on the list of the Bill of Rights.  Read the McGuffey Readers, which were the basic school books in our schools for well over 100 years.  Even children used to have access to guns and were taught how to use them.  Our problem is that we have lost respect of human life, because humans are now seen as accidents of nature, smart monkeys, or grown up babies who happened not to be aborted.
  2. The NSA is out of control as well as our entire federal government.  The government wants to take care of us like we are its children, and it is its responsibility to do so.  That is not what freedom is all about.  As long as that is the role that the government sees for itself, it will keep growing like a cancer until it engulfs everything and takes all of our money.
7,8. I see the one single foundational issue for the next generation is the Church-State issue.  It defines who we are as a nation.  When God and Christianity were removed from the core of our nation, it’s like we are making it all up as we go along.  We have no moral guidance. 
Christian morality gave us love thy neighbor, compassion, helping people in need, mercy, kindness, forgiveness, giving, sacrifice, honesty, integrity, hard work, responsibility, respect,  courage, self-control, discipline, humility, trust, honesty, integrity, loyalty, faithfulness, hard work, responsibility, courage, patience, saving yourself for marriage, not  having children out of wedlock, and working through hard marriages rather than breaking up a family.
We have replaced all this with tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.  And a growing behemoth of a government to make sure that everything is equal, fair, and diverse.  As in everything mediocre, poor, and dependent on the government.
I have a website poligion1.blogspot.com where I have written extensively on these same issues.  I hope you can go there often and read what I have written.



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