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

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Choosing the Right Republican Presidential Candidate: A Note to the Republican National Committee


We all want our favorite candidate to win, but how can we be sure we have the best candidate?

As of today, we have 6 announced candidates.  I can think of at least three more with varying likelihood they will also announce.  That would  make nine.

Let’s say, for example, that Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz wins every primary with 35% of the vote and everybody else is in single digits.  Does that mean we have a clear winner?  I hope you don’t conclude that.

There are two different conclusions we should draw from this.  One is that two-thirds of the people did not want Bush or Cruz as their first choice.  They may not even want them at all.  And there are so many good people running that it is hard to choose between them.

Am I saying that our current system is flawed?  Actually, yes.  It may work well when you only have two candidates, but not with nine.  You want people to vote their consciences, but there are too many choices.  You will also be letting the size of one’s campaign contributions have too great of an impact, because the race probably wouldn’t produce a majority candidate with that many in the race for that long, and those with the least money will drop out, not the least wanted candidates.

So what do we do?

The primary season is five months longs.  Every month in that season we should winnow out two candidates who clearly are way below the others.  If three of the bottom four are tightly clustered together, then eliminate just one.  The next month you could eliminate three, if there are three way at the bottom. 

It is important that by June 2016, there are only 2 candidates left.  Then and only then can we know which candidate a majority of the Republican voters wants. 

But wait.  How do we decide which candidates are clearly at the bottom?  You can’t do it by the primary vote of that state, because one state is too small of a representation of the whole nation, just like you wouldn’t want the voters in the June primaries to make the final choice.

You would need to have bi-weekly or monthly polls of all the candidates.  Can you trust a poll?  Maybe not just one, but I am sure there will be many.  The candidates would need to or should agree to pull out of the race if after each month they are at or near the bottom.  Or the polls would need to just omit the very lowest candidates each month.  Only as the candidates with the least support are no longer considered will we know who the majority of the people will coalesce around.

If the Republicans don’t get a candidate that a majority of the Party supports, their chances in November 2016 will greatly diminish, and I don’t think our current system will do that.


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