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

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

European migrant crisis

It has been said as good political advice to never let a crisis go to waste.  Forward thinking politicians can create crises by postponing actions, commonly called kicking the can down the road. 

When the crisis emerges full-blown, we are told we must take immediate and drastic measures to deal with it or the problem will swallow us up whole, like the trillion dollar bailout of 2008.  (Just spend it.  Doesn’t matter how.) 

The immigration problem in our country, including the current migrant crisis in Europe, is the latest example. 

We have always been a nation of immigrants, but for most of our history, we knew who was coming into our country.  They met face to face with immigration authorities, and we had the right to refuse entry for any of a number of reasons, including disease, illiteracy, morals, lack of work skills, or criminal activity.  Now we are being asked to deal with millions of immigrants as a whole, where we have no idea who we would be granting legal status to.

In Europe, close to a million migrants, some from almost 3,000 miles away, by air, have suddenly appeared seeking to enter.  Nobody is asking how they got there or why.  How many countries did they have to go through to get there?  Did they just walk through them all?  How did they survive?  Why didn’t they just stay in any of these other countries, most of which are already Muslim countries?

I have read that ISIS is making a lot of money transporting refugees.  Do you think maybe that some radicals might see this as a unique and favorable opportunity to get into Europe to carry out their acts of terror?  Isn’t this what ISIS has already said it wants to do?  Now we are being asked to just take in hundreds of thousands of people where we have no idea who they are.

Of course, many or most of them are just ordinary people just trying to survive.  And just how many terrorists does it take to blow up buildings and randomly kill people?  And, of course, there are millions more waiting in their home countries to see how this all works out before they make the same trip. 

Most of these European countries are already in deep debt and don’t have enough jobs for their own people.  They want more younger people to pay toward their aging population, since they are not having enough children anymore.  But since they are not just taking in young educated workers, they will incur huge societal costs to support, care for, and educate them, which they can ill afford.


On a side note, when there are crazies trying to take over a country or otherwise causing millions of its people to flee the country, the countries that can expect to clean up the mess by absorbing all these refuges have a right to intervene in that country militarily to stop the crazies and keep all of these people in their own homes.
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