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, November 24, 2015

Compassion for refugees: a response to a Facebook post

The United States is $19,000,000,000,000 in debt.  It plans to house, clothe, feed, provide medical insurance for, and further subsidize thousands of people for about 5 years.  If you were broke, would you borrow thousands of dollars that you could never pay back to feed homeless people?

The House of Representatives passed a bill overwhelmingly to stop taking in more refugees until they were assured that they were screened better.  There is a very good chance there are people among them who want to kill large numbers of our people like in Paris.  Would you open your house to homeless people when the police were warning everybody that a lot of criminals were posing as homeless people to gain access to people’s homes?

The House controls federal spending, but if the President rejects what the House offers, the government could shut down.  The House could fund everything in the world but this one program, the President could then refuse the whole thing.  This is wrong, but we have gotten so screwed up, it could happen.  So then the government would shut down, and whose fault would it be?

The President would blame those crazy Tea Party extremists in the House who are putting partisan politics over the welfare of the country, and the media would buy that and tell everybody that the Republican Party is run by a bunch of crazies who oppose everything the President wants, partly because he is black and they oppose everything he has ever done.  But also because there are a bunch of extremists that everybody needs to be aware of and get rid of.

As I said in my article, there are 55,000,000 refugees in the world today.  That doesn’t count all the people who are just dirt poor and who may just be dying early from starvation and disease.  So what’s the best way to help them?

Our country used to be the richest nation in the world.  After WW2, we began foreign aid programs to help people all over the world.  When our nation lost its Christian roots due to supreme court decisions, the country gradually adopted socialistic policies to replace the role of the church, and the country went into debt fast, and we now have more debt than any country in the world.  All this lowers the standard of living for everybody who lives here, and the economy could collapse impoverishing millions.

There are people who are using the ruse of helping people to keep borrowing and spending money to bring the downfall of our way of life.  A lot of people would contend that the best way to help people who are poor is to show them how to get rich.  Why did the United States become rich yet other nations much older than ours continued to stay poor?  They weren’t doing the things that we were doing.


But refugees?  What about all the Christian refugees who being driven out of Muslim countries and slaughtered if they stay?  Why aren’t we helping them?  They assimilate quite well in our society.  Muslims generally don’t, as evidenced by what is happening now all throughout Europe.  Take some time to watch the videos on youtube.  We are having a lot of people who came over years ago who are joining ISIS or other terror groups.  The Boston bombers were refugees who came over as children.  Muslim thinking doesn’t usually align very well in Western civilization.  There are exceptions of course, but we are inviting a hose of serious problems that we don’t need.  We could help millions of people who would pose almost no problems but we choose to help the ones with the highest risk.  Why?
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