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, October 29, 2015

A letter to Ben Carson

Dr. Carson

I wish you well.

I received a letter from your campaign that included a space that asked if I had any “thoughts, ideas, concerns” I wanted to share with you.  I do.   There are two matters that are on my mind a lot. 

1)         Issues

There are many issues that are very important right now in our country yet two keep jumping to the top of any lists of priorities that I make.  This by no means diminishes the importance of the others, but these are the icebergs that are sinking the ship.  The rest won’t matter if the ship sinks.

These two issues are also the ones that Donald Trump talks the most about and are probably why he is doing so well in the polls.  On the first issue, immigration, Marco Rubio is also saying a lot of the right things, but there is more.

Our government is intent on bringing into our country as many people as possible.  In most cases, it seems these people will require government assistance for a very long time.  There is no regard for job skills, English skills, or how they can either contribute to or fit into our country.  It is thought by many that the reasoning for this policy is to increase the number of government dependents to increase the voting base for Democrats.

I see part of it also as an intentional diluting of the religious character of our country.  They tout freedom of religion when it is a religion new to our country and unlike our nation’s heritage.  This is a part of the globalist, politically correct, relativistic philosophy that says all religions are equal, all cultures are equal, all nations are equal.  So any thought of the United States being exceptional, great, Christian, a world leader is based on a false, out-moded, obsolete values system and worldview.

We no longer know what made America what it is.  We are teaching our kids in our public schools that America is a deeply flawed nation, and the government wants to correct this by flooding it with third world peoples so that eventually all the nations will be equal.  Equally poor and oppressed, but at least equal. 

When all these new children attend our schools, they aren’t taught anymore those things that are uniquely American.  They are not becoming American, but we are slowly changing into a different nation from the one we grew up in.  Lower expectations; lower achievements; lower standard of living; lower level of community, trust, and cohesion.  Those of us who believe that the United States was and can still be a great nation feel powerless to stop this onslaught on our country.

We are a nation of immigrants, but we are being asked to accept millions of people without even knowing who they are.  In the past, we had a right of refusal.  I have a government textbook from 1949 that says that immigrants were refused admittance for a number of reasons, including illiteracy, certain illnesses, mental capacity, likelihood of becoming publicly dependent, physical defects affecting their ability to work, and many other.

We don’t even have enough jobs for our own people, and all these new people will only add to those dependent on the government, meaning, everybody else; and these will all vote for those who promise to keep the money coming.

Donald Trump is the only candidate who is showing the passion and urgency to fix this.  Rubio is also very strong on this, but Trump conveys better the disgust that many of us feel in the face of this abuse of power.

The second issue is jobs.  Jobs are the number one way to deal with the debt, the deficit, the standard of living, the number of people on government assistance, lowering taxes, saving Social Security and Medicare, and probably a lot of other things.  Trump is the only one talking about bringing the jobs back.

One of my biggest disappointments with the Republican Party is their almost universal support for free trade.  Taxes on imports almost paid for our entire federal budget for more than the first half of our nation’s history.  We didn’t even have an income tax until 1916. 

When we made all of our own stuff, our nation prospered.  As the population increased, so did the jobs, because the demand increased as well.

When the jobs left, so did our prosperity.  I wrote several articles on free trade on my blog: poligion1.blogspot.com.  I am trying to be brief here.  But to try to build a nation’s prosperity on exports is tying our prosperity to the prosperity of the other nations.  They have to prosper first before we will, and when they falter, we falter with them.  The globalist’s dream.

Everybody knows that Trump will deal with immigration and jobs.  We are not so sure about the others.  Rubio will do something about immigration.  But only those two show the urgency and pluck to actually do something about it and do enough.

2)         A Presidential team

The Republican field of candidates, including those who already dropped out, include some the best and most motivated people we have to fight for our nation’s survival and prosperity.  If I became President, I would hire Trump to build my wall, and I would try to find a major role for as many of these candidates as I could in my administration. 

If you look at them, each of them probably has a passion or an area of expertise that sets them apart from the others.  I would identify them and as early as possible let it be known how I would use these other people in my administration. 

I could support a lot of these candidates, and choosing between them is difficult.  I think I give Trump a slight edge, in spite of some shortcomings, because of his passion and plans for immigration and jobs.  I think a candidate who early on expresses his desire to incorporate as many of these candidates as possible in his administration will gain a lot of support from the public as well as from the other candidates.

Thank you.


Larry Craig
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