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 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?


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