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 11, 2015

Three Things We Need to Learn from Donald Trump - Now


Whether you like Donald Trump or not, he has certainly sparked a lot of conversation, much of which has long been needed.  But there are three conversations that we are not having that we need to have and very soon, because nobody is stepping back and looking at the bigger picture.

1)         Donald Trump is getting a lot of attention, because he is holding a commanding lead in the polls for the Republican nomination for President.  Except for one thing.  If he is getting 20 % of the votes, that could mean that 80 % of the voters don’t want him at all.  But nobody is asking.

I think most Republican voters like a number of candidates, but they are only asked to pick one.  That spreads the vote out to paper thin.  Somebody needs to ask them which candidates they like.  I like about 8 of them. 

You want the candidate with the broadest support, and nobody is trying to find out who that is.  We might find then that Donald Trump has 20% of the Republican voters, and Ben Carson could have 90% of Republican voters supporting him.  But if we don’t start asking the right questions, a lot of the Republican candidates will drop out for lack of money, but not because they couldn’t have been the best candidate.

2)         Donald Trump has been threatening to run as an independent if he doesn’t win the Republican nomination.  I understand this is meant to be leverage, to keep the Republican leadership from not being fair to him.  Of course, everyone knows that if he were to run as an independent, this would essentially give the Presidential election to the other party. 

And that’s precisely the problem.  In most of the elections that take place in our country today, if there are more than two people running, someone can win the election with far less than a majority of the votes.  That is absurd and just plain wrong. 

The good thing is that Donald Trump’s threat could be the impetus for politicians to finally correct this.  The Republicans know they will probably lose the election if Trump were to run as an independent, but if they could get the states to have runoffs, that could change everything.  More and more elections now are having for various positions, but none for the Presidential election.  Not only does this mean that we are getting more choices for the various positions, but people are voting their consciences as well. 

In elections with third party candidates, many people will not vote for that candidate, because they know they are usually giving the election to the person furthest from their own views.  But with a runoff, people will vote for the person they want the most, and even if that person loses, their vote is not wasted, because they can then vote for that person they would have voted for before.

3)         Donald Trump is a very blunt outspoken person.  Certainly this is his personality, and he would be this way under any circumstance.  But there is something else at play here.  He is financing his own Presidential run.  He doesn’t have to raise any money.  He doesn’t have to ask anybody for money.  He doesn’t have to worry about saying the right things to get the right people to turn over their money. 

When candidates need enormous amounts of money to mount a campaign, they are always very careful of what and how they say things, so they can get the most money.  How can they not become beholden to large donors which then compromises their ability to conduct themselves honestly when in office?

But candidates do need enormous amounts of money, and this is how candidates can be bought. 
But this doesn’t have to be this way. 

I blame the media here, print and television mainly.  They can be quick to criticize politicians for things they do wrong, but they are negligent when it comes to helping us get good ones. 

At the end of the political process, they will give comparative analyses of the final candidates, but they do almost nothing prior to that while the nation is trying to figure out who those final candidates should be.  They wait until a candidate does or says something embarrassing and then they won’t let it go, but they feel no responsibility to giving the candidates any meaningful exposure prior to that.  They feel it is not their job, where they are the only ones who could help curb the influence of big money on politicians.

I suppose we could publicly finance all political campaigns, but the last thing we need is another government program spending money it doesn’t have.  The media could do the job quite well if it had any sense of moral and patriotic responsibility.

A case in point here: Donald Trump is getting massive amounts of media exposure over a comment he made about a newscaster.  I can think of dozens of questions I would rather Trump deal with than what he meant by his comment.  What are his plans for bringing jobs back, for example?  Why aren’t they asking that?


Like him or not, Donald Trump’s appearance on the political stage right now can transform American politics if we only ask the right questions and do the things that his candidacy is essentially begging us to do.
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