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, May 12, 2015

A Letter to the Republican Presidential Candidates

As I write this, six people have announced their decision to run for President in the Republican Party.  I am sending this letter to them, but also to the other 11 people who have been mentioned as possible candidates.

I think it is a good thing to have a lot of people run for the office.  I am glad that nobody has talked about being an independent or a third party candidate, because our system is not set up for an third (party) candidate.  That would require a runoff in every state where someone didn’t receive a majority vote, otherwise a third party would just split the vote of one party and essentially hand the election to the other party.  And I don’t think anybody has runoffs in the Presidential election.

Unfortunately, I don’t’ believe our current system is suited for this many primary candidates either.  And I sent a letter to the Republican National Committee with that same thought.  I asked the question: what would they, and the public and the media, think if, say, Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz won every primary with 35% of the vote, and everybody else was in single digits?  Would they assume that the Party had reached a consensus or that we had a clear winner?

I said that would be far from the case.  It would mean that 2/3 of the Republican voters did not want Cruz or Bush as their first choice.  More importantly, it could mean that 2/3 of the Republican voters didn’t want either of them at all.  But we wouldn’t know that. 

We want people to vote for who they believe will be the best candidate and not who they believe will be the ultimate candidate.   With so many candidates, this will only prolong the selection process, and under our current system many good candidates will drop out because they have run out of money rather than because they couldn’t or shouldn’t win.  The size of a candidate’s war chest is not sign of their general popularity or overall suitableness for the office, but generally only shows the decisions of certain large donors.

So what should we do?

I believe there is only one way that we can get the candidate with the most support, and that is through polling, but not the way polling is done now.  Polling is not an infallible system, so we need as many as we can get, but they still must do it differently. 

There will be primary elections over a period of 5 months, but voting only gives a person one choice, and we need to know their second and third choices as well.  Also, people will be dropping out, but for the wrong reason, as I just noted.  We need a new system, but all the candidates need to be on board.

A poll should not ask who we want for President.  It should ask for every person on the list that we could support for President.  The primary season is five months long.  If there are 15 candidates running for President, then every month the three candidates with the lowest poll numbers should drop out.  This is the only way we will find out which candidate really has the most support.

By the time June comes around, we should be down to the last two or three candidates.  Unfortunately, again, we will have primaries in June, and these June primary voters should not decide who the winner will be.  You need the broadest based poll of all Republican voters, and the winner must have a majority of the votes.  No one should win with, say, 40% of a three-way vote, or poll.  In the case of a three-way race, the one with the lowest total should remove themselves, and a runoff needs to take place.

I believe this is the only way we will know and have the best candidate for President from the Republican Party.  Without these changes, I don’t believe that will happen.  But you have to be the ones who see that this does happen. 

Under our current system, many of you will not have a chance, but you should.  Many of you will quit due to lack of funds, but you still could have been a viable or even the best candidate.  You have to demand and expect these changes, otherwise the efforts, time, and money of most of you will be wasted.  I hope that does not happen, but I believe this is the only way that it won’t. 

I wish you all well.


Thank you.
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