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 23, 2014

Questions from my Senator Part 3 strengthening our schools

Mark,
Strengthening our schools is one of the most important things we can do, but I don’t think we are asking the right questions or focusing on the right ways to make things better.
As for your questions:
Would you support increasing the length of the school year if it would improve the effectiveness of American schools?
Yes, but that would take a large spending increase.  Property taxes are out of control, and the states don’t have any more money to give to schools.  If I didn’t have two kids in the area and a job that I need for my medical insurance, we would have moved long ago out of our state to somewhere where taxes were more reasonable.
Do you believe charter schools are an effective way to improve our education system?
Yes, but we shouldn’t overlook supporting private schools as well.  We are told that we can’t give public money to private schools, but it is wrong to expect parents to pay twice for their children’s education, once through high property taxes for public schools and secondly through tuition and other costs for the school of their choice.
Public education is like the government collecting the food and clothing budget of everybody in the country and then using the money to buy gift cards to Walmart for everybody.  You could still shop somewhere else if you wanted to, but few people can afford to pay twice for the same things.
Do you believe it should be the role of the federal government to forgive student loan debt?
No, but for a different reason.  The federal government shouldn’t be in the student loan business in the first place.  That’s not a role that the Constitution gives to the federal government, and the government is trying to do too many things, and it is costing us far more than it should and what the private sector would.

We need to ask the question:  We used to have the best schools in the world, and now they are mediocre.  Why?  What has changed?
One big change is that we now have a federal Department of Education that has 50,000 employees.  That’s 1,000 employees for every state in the country.  I heard on the radio of a recent book that noted that our student population has increased in our country by about 10% in the last 50 years, and our school paid staffs have increased over 150%.  My numbers may be slightly off. 
Homeschooled children consistently do better than public school students, and their parents aren’t even trained teachers.  I saw recently a test given to 8th grade students in 1895.  Most high school seniors today would have a hard time passing it. 
There are a lot of factors that contribute to this, but as for schools themselves, I would say that every school district has a school board and teachers, and that is all we really need.  Get the federal government out of the school business, and let teachers teach.  We would save so much money we could give every student a free computer and hire a lot more teachers.

Thanks again for asking.


Larry
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