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, March 24, 2015

Talk show host response and mine on how to fix America

Larry,
Thanks for the email. I actually believe that one of the best ways to get good people to run is if we were to have term limits.  I also think that immediate transparency regarding contributions would be most helpful.  Too often the incumbent enjoys too many spoils and has a vested interested in winning at all cost!

My response:


Term limits can remove all the rotten, corrupt, and subversive elements in our government, but it also removes everybody else as well.  It took William Wilberforce 30 years to end slavery in England.  It’s a bit like gun control.  Some people misuse guns, so let’s take them away from everybody.

It would still keep the two party system, which means that the Tea Party still has to run as Republicans, and independents won’t run, because they only split the vote and the party/candidate that nobody wants wins with less than a majority vote.

Transparency is helpful, but we read all the time of certain large contributions made to certain politicians.  We know who made them, and so what?  Are you going to ban them from contributing?  Good candidates also get contributions.  Some conservative business owners got hell and boycotts from some activists, because they didn’t like the cause that was contributed to.  So it works both ways.  Besides, the incumbents have the Party backing, which is usually enough to win anyway.


Thursday, March 19, 2015

The one thing that could do the most good for our country: a letter to a radio show host

I have been thinking about some of the simplest and most important ways to fix our country.  I have thought of several, but there is one I want to bring to your attention, because you are in the best position to do something about it.

The greatest single hindrance to getting good people in government is that most elections don’t require a majority of votes to win.  If there are three candidates, a person can win with as little as     34 % of the vote.  This is wrong, and everybody would agree it is wrong, but they just don’t connect the dots to see it when it happens.

This practice makes people very reluctant to vote for a third party candidates, because they are afraid of splitting the vote and then someone who the fewest people want wins the election.  This is why Tea Party and Libertarian candidates are running in Republican primaries.  But even there, if there are more than two candidates, someone can win with less than 50 % of the votes, and people are still often afraid to vote their consciences.

If elections required winners to have more than 50 % of the vote, more people would be running, we would have more choices, and more people would vote their consciences. 

The only problem with this is that politicians won’t change this, unless the people demand it.  And that would take a grassroots movement that needs someone to lead the charge.  I can’t think of better people to do this than radio talk show hosts who are also bestselling authors. 


I hope you agree and take up the cause.