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, December 26, 2014

Questions from my Senator part 5 reforming our tax code


Hi Mark
Happy New Year!
As per your questions:
Do you support simplifying our burdensome tax code to encourage small business growth?
You answered your own question by calling the tax code burdensome.  The tax code, like the entire federal government, has become burdensome with the constant addition of new regulations.  The Constitution vests all legislative authority in Congress, but government agencies add thousands of new laws (regulations) every year, and, yes, they are all burdensome and (almost?) all should be eliminated.
All taxes limit economic growth, and it isn’t just the small businesses we should be thinking about.  Any tax cuts leave more money in people’s pockets to spend, save, and invest as they will, and all these will lead to economic growth. 
But you can’t address taxes without addressing government spending, because just reducing taxes could cause higher deficits and debt, as least for a while, which will result in the Fed increasing the money supply and devaluing whatever money we still have. 
The government has lost all sense of fiscal responsibility.  It spends millions, billions, and trillions of dollars without any concept of how much money that is.  It’s not their money, and they don’t care.  They use their spending to win voters and don’t care about the long term consequences. 
But back to your question.  There are really two issues here:  simplifying the tax code and reducing taxes.  A simpler tax code, by itself, may only save a small amount of money as it involves only the cost of preparing the taxes.  A simpler tax code is often talked about as being revenue neutral, but what’s the point of that, unless you don’t like tax lawyers?
But the government spends too much money on almost everything, and that raises the need for more tax money.  So the government needs to do both: reduce spending by a lot and reduce taxes by a lot as well.
Do you support closing corporate tax loopholes to keep business and jobs in the United States?
Businesses and jobs need to be kept in the United States.  They want to leave primarily because the corporate tax rates here are too high.  And they are high, because the government has become greedy, because it spends too much money.  Closing these ‘loopholes’ may keep more businesses and jobs here, but they won’t be as profitable, so we won’t be making full use of that potential.
The greatest single thing probably that our government has done to ruin the economy here is the free trade agreements.  They basically allowed our companies to move overseas and then send everything back here. This almost singlehandedly wiped out the middle class in our country.
Do you support decreasing income taxes as a way to stimulate the economy and provide relief to families?
Yes, reducing income taxes will stimulate the economy and provide relief to families, and I support that wholeheartedly.  But if the government doesn’t reduce its spending, this economic boost not only will be short-lived, and it will end up costing us all more in the long run.

The government keeps trying to figure out ways to stimulate this and relieve that, and that’s not its job.  It has taken on responsibilities the Constitution doesn’t give it, all in the name of trying to help people, though the real reason is to get their votes.  The government is the drain on the economy.  The government is taking away our freedoms bit by bit.  Someone has called it death by a thousand pinpricks.  

Larry
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