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

Thursday, December 11, 2014

letter to my Senator

Senator Kirk: 
Thank you for sending me a survey on what I think are important issues for Congress to focus on.  I sent the survey back, but I would like to explain my answers.  Talking about reforming or strengthening something means different things to different people.
I have written extensively on many of these topics, and my articles are on my blog poligion1.blogspot.com.  Many of them I have already sent to you in the past.
1)         Creating jobs and boosting the economy
One of the worst things that the Senate has ever done is to pass free trade agreements.  All they have done is to send millions of good jobs overseas.  Taxes on imports have been a major source of our government’s income for most of our history. 
I believe a country should make its own stuff.  If somebody wants Swiss chocolate or French wine or a Persian rug, they can buy it and the products were taxed before entering our country.  But we should not have American countries making stuff overseas and then sending it back here.  That is not what we should mean by imports. 
The single most important way of creating jobs is to bring our companies back to the states.  The single best way to boost the economy is to reduce government spending.
2)         Reforming our tax code
The single most important way to reform the tax code is to reduce taxes.  I would support a plan where everybody paid a flat rate of, say, 10% of their income for federal taxes, no deductions, no exemptions. 
3)         Defending our country
Romney summed it up the best:  We need to be able to fight a two front war.  Obama wants only a one front war.
I would like to see Congress declare wars again and then use all our resources to fight it and end it quickly.
4)         Strengthening our schools
We used to have the best schools in the world and now they are mediocre.  Homeschooled children do better than public school children.  So what do we need?
We don’t need a Department of Education.  Why do we need 50,000 federal employees?  That is 1,000 for every state in the country.  Eliminate the DOE and 90% of the administration of our schools.  Let the teachers teach and parents have more say.  Don’t’ force everybody into the same mold, like this Common Core.  And stop this boycott of everything religious/God in schools.  That is not what the First Amendment is all about.  (Read my articles.) 
5)         Reforming our immigration system
As someone in Congress already said, what’s the point of changing the laws if we don’t enforce the ones we already have?  How do we know the new laws will be enforced? Will the President pick and choose which parts he will enforce?
Children of illegal immigrants should not be considered US citizens.  The 14th Amendment doesn’t grant citizenship to children of foreign diplomats or tourists and didn’t give citizenship to Indians.  The text has the qualifying statement “under the jurisdiction thereof.”  Illegals are not under our jurisdiction.  This practice only ensures that more and more people will try to enter our country illegally.
We need to install that e-verify system to check the legal status of job applicants.  Employers who knowingly hire illegals should be fined heavily enough to make them stop.  And there should be increased penalties (or at least enforce existing laws) for using false identification or Social Security numbers.  These three matters will eliminate the need for deportations.
6)         Improving our Country’s Healthcare
The best health insurance has always been employer-provided group plans.  We need to bring back our companies and stop making laws that encourage employers to hire only part timers, like Obamacare. 
We also need to stop requiring insurance plans to cover things that people don’t want or need.  That only increases the cost of insurance.  A person should be able to get insurance for as few things as they want.
7)         Other
Bills should not be 800 pages long.  They should not be comprehensive.  That just means that nobody is reading them, most of them are not discussed yet alone debated, and there is a lot of junk in there that would never pass on its own.  This has to stop. 
Bills should not be rushed through for a vote.  They should deal with as few topics as possible.  They should be posted online so they can be read at least three days to a week before the vote.

Thank you.







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