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

Friday, May 6, 2016

A Case for Donald Trump

The Herald (May 6) printed a reader’s case why he believes Donald Trump should not be our next President.  I feel compelled to vote for Donald Trump.  Everybody had his list of important issues by which he judges a candidate.  For me there are 5 issues that are the iceberg sinking the ship.  And if the ship sinks, nothing else is going to matter.  In each case, Donald Trump is either the only one who understands the problem, has the right solution to fix the problem, or is the only one I believe will actually do what is needed to fix the problem.
The first issue is jobs.  I believe the loss of jobs is probably the biggest reason for our country’s staggering debt.  It combines the loss of tax revenue with an increase in government spending for assistance programs. 
The jobs didn’t leave because of cheaper labor somewhere.  There has always been cheaper labor somewhere else.  They didn’t leave because of high taxes.  The high taxes came afterwards to help make up for the lost tax revenue.  The jobs left because we stopped taxing imports.
Taxes on imports used to pay for almost our entire federal budget.  We didn’t even have an income tax until 1913.  Yes, taxes on imports will raise the cost of foreign goods, but they will make possible a reduction in income taxes and will bring jobs back here.  Trump is the only one who believes in taxing imports.
The second issue is immigration, and Trump is the only person who you can believe will secure the border.  Congress has promised this since Reagan in 1986 with nothing getting done. 
Trump is the only person who challenges birthright citizenship.  We don’t give citizenship to children born to people here on vacation or to foreign workers, so why should we give it to children of people in our country illegally?  The American Indian didn’t even get this privilege.  That required an act of Congress.  With birthright citizenship, it is becoming almost impossible to deport families of people who have children born here. 
The third issue is Muslims.  The world is experiencing incredible violence and instability, whether in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, or Asia.  And, frankly, it is entirely due to Muslims.  Will America be any different?  You only need to watch the hundreds of videos coming out of Europe to know that it is only matter of time.  They just need to become a higher percentage of the population.  Trump is the only person who actually sees a problem here.
The fourth issue is the court called supreme.  This court has assumed a role in forming policies far beyond the role given to it by the Constitution.  In this case just about any of the Republican candidates would do, but those who are concerned about future court appointments need to be concerned about which political party makes the nomination.  So if Trump is the candidate, you can’t stay home and not vote if you don’t like him.  That just gives the job to the other party.
The last issue is the business as usual in Washington.  The entire political system in Washington is broken.  We need a lot of non-politicians running things there, who might, for example, replace a thousand-page bill with maybe a dozen 3 page bills, which they can actually read and debate.

Anybody but Trump will just give us more of the same.
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