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

The 2016 Presidential Campaign


The 2016 Presidential campaign is officially underway.  It started in August 2014 after one white policeman shot and killed one black man who did not have a gun and under circumstances still unclear to the general public after 4 months.   This event, and another similar event later in New York, are cited as proof that our nation is deeply flawed and racist at our core. 
No candidates have announced yet, but it doesn’t matter.  Political elections have become just as much about parties as personalities.  Consequently, Presidential campaigns need a theme.  Barring a major crisis, like another 9/11 carried out by ISIS terrorists who crossed over into our country through our southern border, the themes of the Democratic Presidential campaign will be social justice, equality, fairness, and racism.  And if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee, and I believe she will be, the theme will also include women (the glass ceiling, the war on women, women’s rights, and women’s equality).
As this will be expressed: We have had our first minority President, and it is time, long past time, that we had a woman President.  Our country has been run by men from the beginning, and look where we are: a divided country, full of hatred, as evidenced by our rampant discrimination against minorities and women; inequality, as evidenced by huge wage discrepancies in our country and lack of opportunity for women and minorities (read: blacks and Hispanics); and the war on women.  No woman should have to choose between having a career and having a child.  She has a right to reach her full potential and equal pay, so every woman should have the right to universal daycare, universal pre-Kindergarten, and pre-school and after school programs paid for or subsidized by the government   We need to open up all fields to women on an equal basis, and the office of President will help to lead the way.
 
Our country has gone through a long process of normalizing behaviors that have worked to destroy what we call the traditional family, including but not limited to single parent families, two parent working families, and gay marriage, which have broken the link between two natural parents actually raising a child to just the need for adults to tend to them and a government to educate them from the earliest ages through high school and many colleges, so the Democrats will push for more government involvement in the raising of children as part of their program to ‘help’ women.[1]
There are many issues the Republicans believe the current administration is failing at, but there is nothing that has the public attention right now like the two police events.  All other issues, like Ebola, immigration, the borders, the economy, jobs, energy, Federal Reserve policies, labor force participation, tax reform, tax cuts, Social Security reform, Obamacare, $18 trillion debt, deficits, value of the dollar, spending, the IRS, the NSA, gun control, defense spending, ISIS, Ukraine, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel, have lost their urgency due to lack of major media attention.  Plus the Congress has had so much time off, they have been out of much of the mainstream news.
The Republicans now have majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time since President Obama took office, and they will have to show the country what ideas and kinds of legislation they will offer.  One big difference we should see is the size of the bills.  For far too long, major bills have been known for their size as well as their substance: 800 pages on immigration to well over 2,000 pages as in Obamacare.
The reasons for this are many.  When a bill is really long, nobody can read the whole thing.  Most of the bill will never even be discussed let alone debated.  But they have to vote on the whole thing in one vote.  So a lot of things will get passed that would never pass on their own.  And that’s exactly the way they want it.
More and more Republicans are seeing the inherent dishonesty and deception of this practice.  This is why the Republican House did not pass the Senate’s 800 page comprehensive immigration bill. Too big to just vote yes or no on.  Take it apart and let’s vote on the pieces separately. 
Lost in the media blackout of anything positive about the Republican Party is the fact that the do-nothing House of Representatives passed over 350 bills last year which the Senate under a Democratic majority never even considered.  Many of these bills were bipartisan and even unanimous.

The success of the Republican Party at this point will depend on just what bills they can offer the President to sign and whether the public will know what bills the President will veto, why, and then who the public agrees with more.  If the Republicans can show the American people that they can produce simple commonsense ideas that will benefit our nation, it almost won’t matter who they nominate. 
So the Republican candidates are waiting until their party has some successes with their new majority in Washington, and the Democrats [read: Hillary Clinton] are waiting as long as they can so they can keep the focus of the public on the issues that they want.  Right now the focus of the country is on race.  This is right where they would like to keep it for as long as possible. 



[1] I talked more extensively about this in my article How Christianity Prospers a Nation Part 3 posted on my blogsite poligion1.blogspot.com.
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