poligion: June 2016

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, June 28, 2016

Dear Mr. Trump

I believe you need me to be a part of your Presidential team.

I do a lot of political writing, and I have identified 5 issues so far that I call the iceberg sinking the ship. If the ship sinks, nothing else is going to matter.

These issues are jobs, immigration, Muslims, being a non-politician, and the Supreme Court. There are other issues that I will be working on that are really important, though I don’t see them as yet being as important as these first five.

On the first three of these issues, you have been the only person who has proposed the solutions that you have. You have the right answers, but you are not convincing people who don’t already agree with you that they are the right answers. I am not even sure you understand completely why some of your positions are right, and necessary, because you have been shifting in your position on Muslims.

There may be enough angry and frustrated Americans now to be able to elect you in November. But you will need a supermajority to win, because there will be a lot of voter fraud that will swing a close election.

You don’t want to have come this far without ensuring a win, and there is too much opposition to your positions from people who should already have been supporting you.

You need to explain why taxing imports is right, necessary, and good, even though every Republican disagrees with you. You need to explain why birthright citizenship is misapplied, damaging to our country, and must be stopped immediately. You were right in your ban on all Muslims entering our country, but you didn’t make the case forcefully enough, and you have even backed off of it under the constant pressure of the media and those who disagree with you.

You were right the first time to ban all Muslims, but making it only temporary suggests perhaps that you think there could be safe Muslim immigration.

I believe you need me to help make the case why your ideas are the right and best ones for our country. You can’t just hope you have enough people who already agree with you. The ones who don’t agree with you will try to stop you and only make your candidacy seem more controversial than it need be. You need to convince those who don’t agree, and if you can’t convince them, by showing them that you have really good reasons for what you do, you can soften their opposition so that they won’t fight so hard against your ideas, both before and after the election.

I post my articles on my blog poligion1.blogspot.com. You can read everything I have written so far. Frankly, I see and write about things that I don’t see and hear about anywhere else. I could recommend somebody else for the job, but I don’t know anybody else who can offer what I do.

I wish you the best. Frankly, I am just hoping you get this letter.

Sincerely,

Larry Craig

solution to the Illinois school funding issue

I have the answer to the school funding problem in Illinois. I have written about this for years, but I am afraid to suggest it now. I am afraid that only some of my suggestions will be taken, and a lot of things will be worse than they are now. I think I am more afraid of what will happen without my proposals.

1) Start by separating school funding from the general budget.

2) Establish a base line amount of funding for each student to expect a quality education, say, $6,000 a year.

3) Raise this money by a state income tax separate from the state income tax we already have. The current state income tax should be reduced accordingly. The amount to be raised by this income tax can be easily calculated, multiplying the number of students by the established per student amount.

4) This money will be paid to each school district based on enrollment.

5) What a person pays in this school state income tax should be deducted from his property taxes. If a person rents his home, this should be deducted from his rent, prorated over the course of the year.

6) School districts will still be allowed to raise additional school funding through property taxes as now.

7) What a person pays toward private school tuition and fees should be deducted from what he would owe in this state education income tax.

8) The State Constitution must be amended to allow responsible changes to the state’s pension plans.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

But I Don’t Like Either One!

Think about this for a second.

We have 330 million people in our country, and we have to choose between only two people for President. One is a woman under criminal investigation by the FBI; the other is somebody who has never been in a political office before, and a lot of people wonder if they can and should trust him.

Does anybody see a problem here? Or better yet. Is this really the best that we can do?

Do you know what?

The solution is easy as pie.

There is only one thing that we need to change about our elections that will fix all this.

Require candidates to get a majority of the vote before they can be declared the winner.

Now if we have three candidates running in the same election, a person can win with as little as 34% of the vote. Not only is that undemocratic, it's stupid.

But wait. We had 17 Republican candidates running and Donald Trump easily won over all of them.

Actually no.

You need to ask how many states did he win with over 50% of the vote. If he won 40% of the vote in a state, that could mean that 60% of the people didn't want him at all.

When you have 17 candidates running, you shouldn’t ask people to choose one. You ask people who they can support. I could have been happy with any of about 8 of them.

The Republicans should have allowed people to vote for as many candidates as they like. That way you combine who people like with who they don’t like. You would have gotten a far different result than what you got now. And I say that as a Trump supporter.

Under this new scenario, we don’t have to have Socialists running as Democrats, and Tea Party people running as Republicans, and Trump wouldn’t even have to bother running with a party at all.

Well, too late now. Why didn’t I say something about this a lot sooner?

Actually I did. Several times. But why would anybody listen to me?

But the election is still 5 months away. There is plenty of time to change this if people want to.

This might actually be the best chance we will ever have to change this. There is enough anger and frustration out there over the two choices, and particularly over the fact that a third party candidate can’t win and will only ensure a victory for the person fewest people want.

Anybody listening?