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, August 4, 2015

answers to a questionnaire from Dr. Ben Carson on his Presidential campaign

Dr. Carson
Thank you for asking for my input.  I always have plenty to share.

I wrote once before about the need for a new way to rank candidates.  There are a lot of good people who would make good Presidents.  When we are only asked which ONE we want, too many people only get single digits.  If you were to ask, which candidates you can support, then everybody could get double digits and a number of them should be over the critical 50 % mark.  This is how we should winnow the field and how we should find our final candidate.  Nobody is talking about this. I hope you can, otherwise I think we won’t get our best person, and many candidates will drop out who really shouldn’t.

You asked two specific questions.  I gave my answers, but I think it is important to explain why I gave the answers I did.

Most important issue: [He offered five choices.]

Islamic terrorism is real and will not go away any time soon.  Our response has been tepid and timid at best.  Even if there were another 9/11 in our country, that would still be far from the most important thing for us to think about as a nation.  A big part of dealing with future threats to our country has to do with your second option: Border security and immigration reform.
Border security and immigration reform.  Our immigration system is broken in many ways, and “immigration reform” has become a tagline for changes that are not improvements.  This issue is very, very important but still number 2 on your list.  But briefly, immigration reform must include the following:
1)         Secure the border.  This must be done first without any concessions with a promise of getting to it later.  A country has a right and an obligation to know every person who enters our country and also has the right to refuse anyone as well.
2)         Birthright citizenship is wrong.  We don’t give automatic citizenship to children of diplomats or tourists, and we certainly shouldn’t give it to children of illegal immigrants.  We didn’t even give it to the American Indian without a special act of Congress in 1924.  It’s only a magnet for further illegal immigration.
3)         We need to end family reunification, or at least greatly limit it: spouse, minor children, parents.  We don’t have enough jobs for our own people, and we certainly don’t have the money to support people who don’t work.
4)         No drivers licenses, state IDs, voting, or jobs for illegals.  We have e-verify system; use it.
5)         I have no problem with any person here illegally walking into an immigration office and applying for legal status.  Subject, of course, to the traditional criteria and subject to refusal.  Sick people I believe were refused until they were healthy.  A person who did not have an employable skill I believe was also rejected.  Criminals were also rejected.  They would have the same path to citizenship as any other legal immigrant.
What I believe is a huge mistake and one that they will try to foist on the American people is a blanket program, where we don’t know who is here, where we legalize millions of people all at once.  Just plain wrong, and stupid. 
Won’t our immigration offices be flooded with people?  Of course, but that is what happens when you ignore a problem for 50 years.
Jobs and the economy
This is easily the top issue of these five.  Yes, immigrants built our country, but we had jobs for them.  Now we don’t have jobs for anybody.  We have unsustainable debt at every level of government basically because we don’t have enough jobs for people.   We sent them overseas.  And then we are killing jobs over here because of concerns over climate change.  [See my articles on globalization and climate change on my blogsite poligion1.blogspot. com. for expansion of these ideas.]
The fewer jobs we have, the more dependency on the government we incur, as well as more debt.  The ship is sinking.
The national debt        The debt can easily bury us a nation, sooner than we think.  The biggest single antidote for that for now is bringing the jobs back.
Defunding Planned Parenthood          Important but too much emphasis on this and you will be marginalized as having your priorities in the wrong place.  If you can frame the issue into one of valuing human life and show how we are showing a lack of it in the rest of society, you can have a case.  Can you link the high rate of shootings in Chicago with a general devaluing of human life in our society?
What part of my background is most important for me to address?
None of your previous experience will help you here directly.  You will meet people who will quickly point out to you that you have no relevant experience here.  I’ve heard you respond to this already where you note what experienced politicians have already given us, and we can’t take too much more of it.  If you can be specific here, it would help.  Specific examples of lies, deception, abuse of power, abuse of the public trust, uncontrolled and unsustainable debt, more government control over people’s lives.
The fact that you were a neurosurgeon means that you are not stupid, and your rise from poverty shows that people are not trapped in their circumstances and that government programs are not the answers.
I wish you well.

Larry Craig


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