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, April 21, 2015

common sense immigration policies

The Sun-Times printed a commentary (April 20) telling the Republicans they need a compassionate plan on immigration.  Compassion is good, but that doesn’t mean you have to give away the store to show it.

The writer insists that birthright citizenship has always been American policy, though it took the 14th Amendment to make it clear that should also have applied to blacks.  Not quite.  The country has never given citizenship to children born of tourists or diplomats and didn’t even give citizenship to American Indians until 1924. Why would anyone think that this was ever given to children of people who are in our country illegally, especially when this is one of the main reasons we have illegal immigration? 

Frankly, I am all for immigration.  I was surprised to read how many people came to our country around the turn of the 20th century.  But there were some important differences.

There were no government assistance programs then.   However, there were jobs.  When a country makes all of its own stuff, then as the population grows, industry grows with it, and there is always opportunities to make things and to meet the needs of the people.  But we sent millions of our jobs overseas, so we no longer have an economic system that can sustain continual population growth.  To try to build our economy on exports for our jobs makes us dependent on and hostage to the conditions in other countries to provide the jobs we need to sustain our own people.

Our country is trillions of dollars in debt, propped up by low interest rates manufactured by the Federal Reserve.  This creates an artificial economy that can burst at any time.  We can’t afford to support millions of people with public money.

We have been told that we must learn to live with millions of illegal immigrants, because it is impossible to deport them all.  We didn’t bring them here, so we don’t need to send them back.  They are here because they can either find work or have enough government assistance to make it preferable to returning home.  I think we already have laws about hiring illegal workers, but nobody wants to enforce our laws anymore.

But is there any way we can help to make them legal?  I really don’t have a problem with that.  I do have a problem with a blanket program that just pronounces certain people legal.  When all those people came to our country in the past, they met with someone face to face.  I don’t know how long these encounters lasted, but I also know our country had the right of refusal due to disease or other reasons.

Is this impractical for 11 million people to meet face to face with a government official?   Well, problems only get bigger when they are not dealt with right the first time.  I have no problem with any person who is here illegally to come to an immigration center and gain immediate legal status for himself, considering, of course, that he was accepted.  Until such time, they would, of course, still be illegal.  And I see a smooth path to citizenship for children born here to illegal immigrants: a test and an oath of loyalty.  They would need not begin a new waiting period longer than the time they have already been here.

I could accept a program where a person could apply through their employer.  Of course, their employment is already illegal, but if they applied through their company, I could forgive that.  But any employee who hadn’t done this would still be subject to deportation and the company fined.

Republicans have been blamed for failing to pass immigration reform.  No, they are not the problem.  They just don’t want to try to fix everything in one comprehensive bill.  That only means that most of the problems don’t get discussed, and you don’t even know all that is in there until the bill is passed.  Tackle the problem one piece at a time.  Some people don’t like that, because they won’t or can’t get everything they want if people actually talked about those things.
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