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, August 9, 2016

The Most Important Issues of the 2016 Presidential Race Part 4

I have identified 5 issues in this 2016 Presidential race that I call the iceberg sinking the ship.  If the ship sinks, nothing else is going to matter. 

The first three issues were issues of policy, and the issues were that of jobs, immigration, and Muslims.  These last two issues are different. 

The fourth issue has to do with whether a non-politician is automatically unqualified to be President, because politics is a field that requires prior political experience, just like a teacher would go to school to learn both how to teach and the material to be taught, and a tradesman would serve an apprenticeship before being fully prepared for work in that trade.

There is a problem with that supposition:

The political system is broken, and professional politicians seem unable to even see the problems, let alone be expected to fix the problems, especially since they are the ones who created the problems.
What are the problems?
1)         It is very common for politicians to amass great wealth while in public office, and this continues often long after they leave office, as long they remain in some way connected to public service or public policy.  This can only be interpreted as politicians are easily corrupted to serving their personal interests over that of the public’s, and the current public political system is conducive to major abuse.
2)         Voting for our representatives seems to be rigged in some way.  Representatives are elected to only two year terms, because this way they are supposed to be held accountable to their constituents.  They could be easily voted out of office.  The fact is that most representatives are able to stay in office until they decide to leave, which can only be interpreted as they are able to game the system, either through the gerrymandering of their districts, legal obstacles they have created to shackle or otherwise hinder potential opponents, the use of public money to buy votes through legislation, or the accumulation of money for campaigning made easier by their political office.
3)         Politicians control the spending of enormous amounts of money, and this has shown to be highly profitable for them.  And it’s all legal.  Their spending is very beneficial to a lot of people, companies, and nations, and somehow these are able to reward them for their help. 
4)         Politicians are unable to curb their spending, such that the federal government and many state and city governments have amassed debt levels that cannot be repaid, but no worry in that they have no intention of getting out of debt. 

Much of this debt is fueled by pension systems that are incredibly generous and should have been seen as unsustainable as soon as they were passed.  Another huge portion of this debt is caused by the government assuming responsibility for people’s welfare.  This discourages or disincentivizes  personal initiative and responsibility, thus pushing for more government spending.
5)         Politicians use their law-making power to benefit themselves over the public interest.  This can be done in several ways. 

Politicians use public money to buy votes by providing benefits to people, like subsidizing their medical insurance.  The government can’t pay all of its own bills as it is, but we’ll just borrow or print money to pay for people’s health insurance.  The politician who votes to end this program will face the wrath of however many millions the government has been able to give this program to.

Another way politicians use their law-making power for their own benefit is by writing legislation that is as long as possible.  The goal here is to see that as few people as possible read the bill, to make it too long to discuss let alone debate the provisions of the bill, and to ensure that nobody knows everything that is in the bill.  Politicians are then able to add all kinds of things to the bill that ultimately comes back to benefit them.

The bill will contain a lot of things that would never pass on their own, but since they have been added to an important bill that ‘has’ to pass, it gets passed and becomes law.  The public doesn’t benefit, but the politician does, either directly or indirectly.
6)         Politicians have shown their inability to run the country by pushing it to the brink of bankruptcy, causing millions of people to depend on the government for their food and housing, taking the best schools in the world and making them mediocre, flooding the country with immigrants many of whom we are providing for at public expense when we already have the highest number of people out of the workforce in 40 years and we are borrowing money to do this.

By what measure can we say that politicians have done a good job?  Or to put it another way, divide our nation’s history into two periods, say, pre-1965 and post-1965.  I am hard pressed to think of any ways that our government has improved our lives since then.  Yes, there has been a massive increase in public programs and public spending, but what has been made better? 

We have more welfare, but fewer good jobs.  More integration and affirmative action, but still the same poverty.   
7)         But lastly and most importantly, politicians see all this as normal, as the way of doing business.  My response to this is: Are they nuts?  The difference between a bank robber and a politician is that a politician doesn’t have to wear a mask. 

I can imagine someone like Donald Trump getting a thousand-page bill spending half a trillion dollars and laughing his head off and giving it back to them with the remark, “You’re kidding, right?”  

Congressional bills should be short enough for everyone to read them and debate them.  If you can’t read a bill and don’t debate the bill, you certainly shouldn’t be voting on it. 

Bills should deal with as few issues as possible so that you are not voting for things you don’t want to get the things you do.  They call this compromising, but ultimately it means that you have two bills that can’t pass on their own merits, so they combine them into one, and they both pass.  We can do without that kind of compromises.

There are those who contend that Donald Trump is eminently unqualified for the office of President, because he has not held any public office.  I see this as a rare advantage, particularly if you see the matters I mentioned as problems, and you want somebody with half a chance of fixing them. 

We don’t need any more of the same old thing. 

It’s not experience that is the important thing in running for political office, but your vision for the country, your vision for how the country is supposed to run, work, and thrive. 

There is a fifth issue in this Presidential race that is of paramount importance: the Supreme Court. 

The next President could actually nominate quite a few Supreme Court justices. 

There are two very different political philosophies in our country today, particularly as it relates to our Constitution.  One tries to understand what the Founders of our nation were intending by what they wrote, and the other tries to see how what is written there can be construed to justify modern politically correct ideas.  They still want to use the words of the Constitution, but they don’t see anything particularly valuable about how our country did things in the past or what the Constitution originally intended or referred to in its various parts.  They believe they can improve on what was there.  The first philosophy believes that we regress as a nation as we move away from the Founders’ principles of government. 
Supreme Court justices sit for life.  The laws, the executive orders, and a lot of stupid things that Presidents do can be undone by a later President.  The Supreme Court cannot.  Immigration we have already mentioned in a previous article is something else that cannot be undone.

The next President can shape the Supreme Court for generations to come.  And the Supreme Court can shape our country for generations to come.  Doesn’t matter what the people want or what their representatives vote for.  The Supreme Court, even one person on the court, can change everything to a far different direction than the country had been heading in.  One case, nine judges, one swing vote, and hundreds of years of precedent and tradition can be overruled.

We have two major party candidates running for President right now.  Barring any rare, strange events, one of them will be the next President.  It does no good to say that you don’t like either one.  On this one issue alone, one should be able to make a clear choice for President. 

There are dozens of important issues facing our nation.  It is hard to find even one candidate who anyone can agree with on everything. 
I have identified 5 issues that I believe are easily the most important in this election.  In each case, only one candidate even closely fulfills what is needed to address these issues, and on all five, it is the same person.  Is he a perfect candidate?  Hardly.  Is he the right candidate?  In this election, there is no question.  Is not voting an acceptable option?  No, because your inaction will not stop events from happening, your inaction may cause others to do nothing as well, and your actions could prompt others to action. 


Learn about the issues, talk about the issues, and then do one of the most important things you can do about the issues.  Vote.