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

Sunday, February 15, 2015

gay marriage debate

‘Gay marriage’ is a major political and social issue today, and like possibly all political and social issues, how the issue is framed can or will determine the outcome of the debate.  The media, politicians, and activists emphasize that this is an issue of equality, fairness, and human rights. 

But this is not about equality, fairness, human rights, or gay rights.  It is about the rights of children, the right of a child to have and be raised by its biological father and mother.  Children often grow up today in single parent homes or with adoptive parents, but nobody has been calling that equal to the biological two parent family.

But with ‘gay marriage,’ society will remove a biological parent from a child’s life and call this new family equal or just as good as the two biological parent family.  What gives society or any person the right to say for an unborn child that this child does not need or have a right to one of its natural parents?  And we are supposed to call this good, right, just, equal, and fair? I’m sorry, but it’s not.


With ‘gay marriage’ we are saying as a society that parents don’t really matter.  We can remove one from a child’s life, and we are supposed to say that the child’s life is as good or better than if it had both of its natural parents.  Nobody has that right.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

When a President Lies


We hear now that the President lied about his views on ‘gay marriage’ during his Presidential campaign.  It was feared that he could not have won if he didn’t.

We found out earlier  after the Affordable Care Act was passed, that he lied about that as well in his efforts to get it passed. In fact, he lied about it over and over again. 

And yet the public and the press seem to take this with yawning indifference, attributing this to politicians being politicians, promising us the moon to win our votes, but nobody really expecting them to deliver on those promises.

Yet just this week Brian Williams, a TV news personality was suspended for six months without pay for lying, I mean misreporting, about a personal event that happened over ten years ago.   I would think we would hold the leader of the free world to a higher standard, or at least the same standard as any other person whose position is based on trust.

I want to know what else he might be lying about.  Might some lies have graver consequences than these already past? 

What if he is lying about his determination that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon?  After all, all nations are equal, right; all nations are exceptional.  Why should only non-Muslim nations have the bomb?  Isn’t it only fair that at least one Muslim nation has it?  Better that all nations be more equal in fact than that some nations have power to bully over others.

What if he is lying about his pledge to degrade and destroy ISIS?   What if his talk is just bluster to appease the angry American masses?  We have had over 2,000 airstrikes against ISIS but less than 10,000 of them have been killed.  These are not numbers that we expect from airstrikes.  News reports say that 20,000 foreign fighters have joined ISIS in recent months.  So after all our bombing ISIS now has more soldiers than before we started bombing them.  

What if all of his speeches are half-truths, exaggerations, misrepresentations, overselling, political hyperbole, things we used to just call lying, just so he can sell us an America which is a shadow of our past; where the new normal is average, where in the past we used to lead the world in everything.   Now we just blend in so as not to look better than anyone else.


We are told that all politicians lie.  Get used to it.  I say, lie to me all you want. But as soon as I find out you are lying to me, I will never trust you again. President Obama has lied to us over and over again.  I can never trust him again.  I would impeach him.  I can’t have a President that I can’t trust.  I wish everybody else would see things the same way.

Sunday, February 1, 2015

short thoughts on various topics

The Herald printed a long rambling letter (January 31) touching on all kinds of things, but things that need to be answered.

Universal health care is a tradeoff between prosperity and security.  We are already so far in debt, this would push us over the cliff.


These are responses to a long rambling letter to the Daily Herald (January 31) that the paper must have liked, because they printed it.  Each thought corresponds to a point made in that letter.  

The Affordable Care Act will add another trillion dollars to our federal debt in a few years.  People aren’t paying enough attention to our debt, but they should.

Before, those with health insurance were paying for the uninsured through higher premiums and medical costs.  Now they are paying for the newly insured by paying toward their insurance premiums. 

More people are in poverty because the government encourages dependence on it and makes it harder for companies to do business.  They also sent millions of good jobs overseas under the name of Fair Trade.

The Bush recession was caused by Democrats who kept pushing banks to give mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them.

The layoffs were caused by government panic, declaring a crisis that made people react the way they do in a crisis. 

The national debt is not on a downward trend.  We would have had to have a budget surplus to do that.  The debt continues to grow with no end in sight.  The downward trend refers to the deficit which is only down because of the massive deficits we ran for Obamas’s first 5 years in office.

Unemployment is down primarily because the government doesn’t count people who have stopped looking for work.  And that number is at an all-time high.

The Democrats took the House and the Senate in 2007.  They deserve more credit for our problems than Bush.  Bush is not the brightest bulb in the room, but Democrats don’t know how to handle money.

The Founders considered being an “armed” nation an advantage over being unarmed.  Guns are a protection against government.  Read history. 

An assault rifle is simply a semi-automatic rifle.  Ask the shop owners from the Los Angeles riots if they really needed one.

There are many examples of self-defense appearing all the time where a semi—automatic weapon was a real help.  You won’t see too many of these on the network news.

Most or all mass gun shooting occur in gun free zones.  The Colorado shooter went to the one theater that was gun free rather than the other five theaters showing the same movie.

Tearing out pages in biology books can only refer to objections against evolution being taught as fact.  Anyone who still believes it is hasn’t been keeping up with the science, only the parts that supported his preferred beliefs.

Religion is a person’s worldview that includes a belief in God.  To exclude God from school or government is practical atheism.  If there is a God, it is utter foolishness to leave Him out of school or government.

The value of religion is not diminished by the fact that there are so many.  I can’t think of anything more important than figuring out which one is right.  If none, I need to know that.  If one is true, you better find out which one it is.  And you don’t think people in school should ask those questions?  When will they ever have the time and the setting for discussing and debating these issues?

Don’t’ give up on religion because you think it’s too hard to figure out.  Anything worthwhile takes effort.  The truth about God may take a lot of effort.  You don’t think that’s important?


more on the question of whether the United States is or was a Christian nation

Those who want to prove that the United States is not and was not intended to be a Christian nation often cite The Treaty of Tripoli.  This was a treaty with the Muslim nations bordering the western Mediterranean Sea in the late 1700s.  Tripoli later declared war on the United States shortly after this treaty was ratified.

The one sentence in this treaty that is offered as proof of this reads: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion, . . . it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

Muslim nations along the Mediterranean were seizing merchant ships for ransom.  They were particularly focused on the Christian nations as retribution for past grievances going back even hundreds of years.  This had been going on for a while, and at that time our leaders had resigned themselves to simply paying the ransom, hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Under Jefferson’s Presidency, we finally sent our navy there and ended this nonsense.

In making this treaty, our government wanted to assure these countries that we did not and would not in the future use religion as a pretext for hostilities between the countries.  When you consider the parties to this treaty, you can understand better the wording of this treaty. 

The Christian religion or the Bible do not teach or describe a representative government.  The only government in the Bible with instructions as to how it should work was a theocracy, where God directly ruled the nation.  Some instructions were also given for the time when the people would choose to have a king over them.  But there is nothing in the Bible or any Church teaching that showed what a Republic should look like or how it would work, unlike the Muslim nations where the Koran was the guide for their government. 

However, the United States government, while not based on the Christian religion is certainly dependent on it.  How?  A limited government, as the Federalist Papers described and explained our government, requires a citizenry self-motivated for good.  As John Adams put it:  “. . . we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

When people vote for their leaders, they soon learn that they can vote themselves money and benefits. When given the choice, people often find they would rather have the government take care of them than taking care of themselves.

Political leaders are tempted to use their power for personal gain, especially getting and staying in office by promising and providing goodies for people.

A limited government needs a moral, independent, and caring citizenry. 

A moral people doesn’t need or want an ever expanding government to keep making more rules, regulations, and laws that require more police and courts and prisons to keep everybody in line, safe, and compliant.

An independent people doesn’t need or want government assistance, financial or otherwise, people who believe in hard work and self-reliance.

And a caring people willingly and eagerly seeks to provide for the needs of others, eliminating the need for government programs, and since these are all at the grass roots level, eliminating waste and fraud.  Christians are taught to love their neighbors and not merely to tolerate (put up with, ignore) them.  There used to be hundreds of Christian societies devoted to every kind of social problem in the land, all run without public money.

People who try so hard to defend and promote a secular country want to remove the very things that made our country great in the first place.  The only alternative is a government that keeps taking more and more money from those who have it to support more and more people who have become dependent on it.  And as Margaret Thatcher said: it doesn’t work, because “you always run out of other people’s money.”