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

Monday, June 29, 2015

Why I Think Climate Change is a Lot of Hot Air, and Why This Issue Matters


The issue of climate change is quickly becoming one of those issues where any discussion of it is immediately cut off, because the matter is considered to have been settled.  That is a possibility, but anyone who has taken Politics 101 knows that the quickest way to silence the opposition and prevent a debate is to act as if the issue has already been settled, and there is nothing really to discuss.  If some people didn’t get the memo, that just shows how little they know.

I question the claims of climate change for a number of reasons.  The first two reasons come from my graduate studies.  My work was not in the physical sciences, but there are certain common features in most or all fields of higher learning that are relevant here.

My first reason comes from the fact that science, like almost all intellectual disciplines, values the latest research and findings over that of the past.  You wouldn’t teach a class on chemistry with a textbook written in 1940.  You wouldn’t even want one from 2012. 

Scientists today can measure the temperature anywhere on the planet at any time and derive an average global temperature.  They could not do this prior to the age of satellites.  In fact, prior to the use of satellites, the concept of deriving an average global temperature was wishful thinking.  Global temperatures would need to be taken almost simultaneously in order to derive an average, and this was impossible before the use of satellites.

I have no doubt that if this issue had contrary political implications, all pre-satellite global temperature data would be deemed inconclusive.  And this matter of political implications is the second reason I question climate change.   

For many questions posed to researchers in any field, there are usually not enough facts to fill in all the blanks, and the presuppositions of the researcher generally provide the framework with which to interpret the facts. 

Facts can answer simple questions, like what was the high temperature in Chicago on July 1, 2014, but they are like dots on a sheet of paper.  How they are connected to form what picture depends on the person viewing the dots.   

The prevailing narrative in Western civilization right now is political correctness.  This was birthed in secularism, and other expressions of this worldview include environmentalism and globalization. 

Environmentalism is about a lot more than recycling and getting emissions tests for your car.  The planet has become an object of reverence, and most industry is now seen as harming the planet and reflecting human disregard for it. 

Globalization is political correctness on a worldwide scale.  It isn’t just about free trade, but it says in part that all nations are equal, one culture is as good as another, and rich nations became rich at the expense of the poorer ones.  There shouldn’t be rich nations and poor nations.  It’s not fair.  The wealth should be distributed, as though wealth were either an accident or the result of greed and exploitation.  The United Nations wants rich nations to share their wealth with the poorer nations, because the richer nations are primarily at fault for climate change. 

Unfortunately, we no longer have rich nations, except maybe Germany.  All the other Western nations are essentially broke from keeping up with all the other politically correct mandates.

Since most scientists who worry about global temperatures rely on government funding for their livelihoods, and the government is known to use that funding to discourage dissenting views, and the government has shown itself to be untrustworthy more often than not, and for the other two reasons I noted, I don’t trust the hysteria that is now common with regard to the climate.

In fact, I have learned to beware, be very afraid, whenever the government says these is a crisis that we have to act upon immediately.  That is a sure sign that the government will ask for a huge spending bill that will reward their donors and further bankrupt our country.  And their haste in doing this is meant to keep anyone from finding out all the ways they are going to screw us, even those who will be voting on it.