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

Sunday, September 18, 2016

affordable housing is subsidized housing.

An organization wants to build some affordable housing in my town.  I am not happy with this.  I wrote a letter to the person who is head of this organization.  I enclose the letter below.  This letter is important, because the issues go beyond one building in one town.

Dear Mr. :

I am a long-time resident of  *****, and I would like to express my firm, deep, and complete opposition to this plan. 

There are basically three problems I have with this project.

1)         I immediately respond negatively when people use euphemisms or politically correct terms to try to hide the reality of an issue.  Affordable housing means subsidized housing, which means that other people are paying for this. 

You accept Section 8 housing vouchers, which means that our government, which has no idea how to manage money, is using other people’s money, including mine, in ways that most people would probably oppose if they knew how they were spending it.  Our country is almost $20 trillion in debt with no intention of cutting back. 

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a series of articles on these housing subsidies, and it revealed that these vouchers can run as high as several thousand dollars a month.  I’m sorry.   I have great sympathy for poor people, but our government has created a lot of these problems and spends our money foolishly trying to make the best of what it screwed up. 

Spending money in this way only masks the deep seated problems and prevents anyone from trying to solve those.  I am taxed-up and don’t want to pay a penny more in taxes, regardless of how worthy the cause appears to be.  As long as our government continues spending money it doesn’t have trying to solve everybody’s problems, it will only keep wanting more of my money.  Enough.

2)         We moved to ***** from Chicago to get away from its congestion and high crime.  Our political and community leaders keep trying to bring Chicago to us.  They think that those who come here will benefit from a new environment, but they forget basic science.  If you mix two compounds or liquids together, both are changed.  If one is more toxic, it becomes less toxic.  If one is more innocuous, it become less so, absorbing the other’s toxins. 

So it works both ways.  Those who move here from, say, crime ridden areas still have contacts and friends who will continue to maintain relationships.  So crime tends to follow.

***** is primarily single family homes.  People invest more in their homes than in rental units, especially when they don’t have to pay full value for them and are living above their means in the first place.  If they can’t afford to pay their rents, how can they afford to keep their places up?

3)         I reject the social engineering ideas that a lot of people are pushing in our society today.  I could talk long and hard about all that is involved here, but basically it involves either government or people who want to in some way bring change to the lives of people who are neither asking or looking for it, and who will contend they would rather not have it in the first place.  And when it happens, many of them simply move somewhere else. 

So a project like this is not simply what is done for certain needy people, but what it does for those who are already here.  Life in ****** is expensive.  We have thought many times about moving because of that, but we have kids who live in the area.  If these people can’t afford their rents, then they sure can’t afford their taxes.  Which other people, like myself, will have to make up.  And what else won’t they be able to afford that other people will end up paying for?  School fees?  Utility bills? 

I am not against compassion and helping people.   But compassion and charity involve people who voluntarily give their rime and resources to someone else.  But government merely takes money from some people and gives it to another, and that is too easily abused and wasted. 

I want to be kind, but I wish your organization would just go away.

Thank you.


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