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

Saturday, September 15, 2018

Three Reasons Why Illinois Should Not Elect J.B. Pritzker as Governor

1          He will raise your taxes. 

He says he won’t, but he wants to change the tax stricture in a way that will make it easier to raise taxes in the future, and they WILL be raised.   That’s what Democrats do.

When everybody pays the same rate, then politicians have to answer to all the voters for any tax increases.  But when there are different rates for different people, like J. B. Pritzker wants, since people only care about their own rates, politicians never face all the voters on any particular tax hike. So, they feel they are safe from the voters when they want to raise them.  People will always vote for tax hikes on other people

He says he won’t raise taxes on the middle class.  It’s only for the rich.  That’s what they said when they first started the federal income tax.  How did that work out?

Democrats always want to spend more money than they have, so if Pritzker doesn’t raise taxes himself, he will have put in place a system that will to make it easier for the next Democratic governor to raise them.

With Illinois’ debt problem, tax increases are inevitable if you don’t cut spending.  And Democrats have no intention or desire to cut spending.  Ever.  On anything

2.         J.B. Pritzker has never said anything about the debt crisis in Illinois.  He either doesn’t have an answer, doesn’t think there is a problem, doesn’t want the public to think about it, thinks the public won’t notice, or just wants to be governor so bad that he doesn’t want to say or do anything that might be considered risky.

He only talks about new programs, more things to spend money on that we don’t have and have to borrow money to pay for.

3.         You need someone who is not a Democrat as governor to act as a counterbalance to the Democrats.

The Democrats have buried Illinois in a mountain of insurmountable debt.  It’s hard to get exact numbers, but $200 billion is a good guess.  They will never cut spending, and they are always, always, looking for more ways to get more of your money. 

We spend a billion dollars a year just for interest on that debt. A billion dollars.  What a waste of your money!

The state is bankrupt, but it cannot legally file for bankruptcy.  The Democrats don’t care how much debt we have.  They will only keep adding to it and let your kids and grandkids face the consequences.

Thursday, September 6, 2018

Democrats and immature voters - a letter sent to a newspaper


I find it interesting that Democrats are spending so much on getting young people to vote (Sept. 6: $30M spent to energize young voters).  Seems they see that as a sure Democratic vote. 

Yet at the same time, though nobody I think has made a formal investigation here, I would bet that it is Democrats mainly who are pushing for all the raising of the legal ages for smoking, drinking, and buying guns.

The same people who are not smart enough to make personal choices about things that affect them the most are at the same time seen as wise enough to make the right decisions for our country. 

We lowered the age for voting, because we were drafting 18 year olds to fight in a war that we weren’t trying to win.

We no longer have a draft, and even Democrats, by their actions, are supporting the idea that we should raise the voting age back to at least 21.  The legal age for voting should never be lower than the recognized age for full adulthood.

What is a Human Right? or, What is the Difference between rights given by God and rights given by man?


Can you name all your human rights?

It’s hard.  I know.  The list keeps growing.

And that should make you very suspicious.

And what makes the task all the more difficult is that the idea of a human right has changed as well.  Things that had never been thought of as a right before have now become rights.  And that should also make you very suspicious.

Something is changing, and we need to know who is doing the changing and why.

Our country is based on the idea of human rights.  They were unique among the nations of the world, but now not so much.   Yes, some nations copied us, but lately we have been copying other nations.  That too should make you suspicious.

And what is even more suspicious is that rights that had existed from the founding of our country are now being called into question, and demands are being made to limit, restrict, and even abolish them. 

And things that were never considered to be rights, in fact they were often found to be morally wrong and offensive, are now given full right status with the full legal backing of the government.

The genius of our country is that God gave unalienable rights to people, rights that precede and supersede government.  Government did not give them, and government cannot take them away. 

The Founders debated whether to put a list of them into the Constitution.  They were concerned that people might think that these rights came from the government.  They were concerned too that people might think that these were the only rights God had given them, and they were concerned that people might think that the government had the power to limit, change, or revoke them.

It is important too to ask how they came to believe that God had given them rights, and what God were they talking about.  Every nation at that time believed in a god of some sort, but they were the only ones who believed in these unalienable human rights. 

The short answer is that they believed in the God of the Bible and that the Bible showed humans His plans for how life is to be lived. 

Somewhere between our founding and today, with the help of the court called supreme, the idea took hold that our nation, as in our government and our public life, must be neutral toward all religions.  It must not favor one over another.  All are equal.

In practice, this came to mean that government and public life must be conducted apart from religion, as if there were no such thing as religion.  Religion came to be seen as people’s personal views, like their preferences in books or movies or food.  But no religion was seen as being true, as in describing how life really is.

But all this cannot be true, if our nation’s founding was based on one particular religion, namely, Christianity.   If that religion is not true in a sense different from how any other religion might be considered true, then our country was founded on a myth, a lie, a false belief, and as such it has no basis in reality.

Along with this neutrality toward any or all religion, it was concluded that our nation was intended to be and always was a secular nation.  God had no place in our government or our public life.  Religion was entirely a private matter best kept to oneself.

Prior to this time, the Ten Commandments formed the moral values of our country.  But as a secular country, there was no pre-made moral system to resort to.  A new one had to be made up as they went along, from the ground up.

So if our rights don’t come from God, then they must come from the government.  This is what is commonly known as a perfect storm. 

People in government like to stay in government.  One reason is that they get to make the rules, including the ones that affect them.  Who else gets to do that? 

Another reason is that government has access to seemingly unlimited amounts of money.  You can get very rich being an elected official in our federal government.  And one of the best ways to get elected is by what you offer the people who can vote for you. 

And, of course, the government has no money of its own, only what it gets from the people who pay taxes.  Which leads to the point about the meaning of rights being changed.

The rights that our Founders listed in the Bill of Rights all have to do with individual freedoms, things that people could do without government interference, restriction, or supervision.  People were, well, free.  The government was created, added, to help keep it that way.  Other countries often liked to impose their will on other nations, so a national government was the best way to defend our nation from them.

There were also rights that protected people from the government, like the right to a jury or legal defense.

When God, and Christianity, were part of the fabric of our country, people didn’t look to the government to solve every problem or to meet every need.  But now that God has been removed from public life and government, problems arise, and there is nobody else to look to for help but the government. 

When the government starts giving out, or recognizing, new rights, they will generally fall into two categories.

The first category is the establishment of a new moral standard that supersedes the old one and compels everyone to follow the new one.

The First Amendment guaranteed the free exercise of religion.  It couldn’t do that unless religion was consistent with the moral values of our country.  This shows that our country was a Christian nation, because some well-known religions of that time burned widows alive with their dead husbands or constantly waged war on those who did not practice their religion.

Two recent examples today are abortion and gay marriage.  Obviously if you don’t believe in abortion, you don’t have to have one.  But you do have to subsidize those who do. 

The Founders would have found that highly offensive, and so do a very large number of people today.  The idea of freedom of conscience, which is how the Founders often referred to this right of free exercise of religion, is trampled on as people are forced to have their money spent on something they find abhorrent. 

It’s true that God, or evolution if you prefer, gave incredible responsibility to mothers by this whole pregnancy, birth, and very intense raising process, but our society used to value the life and birth of every child, and it used to be common to be able to raise a large family on one income.  Now that has been made difficult for many families due to inflation and the loss of millions of good paying jobs due to other government policies.

Gay marriage is another example.  It was touted before it became a right as simply letting people love who they want.  Nothing else would change.  But you can’t believe what people say about the long-term effects of new things. 

Now people of conscience are being forced to give up their businesses and their jobs if they do not enthusiastically embrace something that was unknown throughout all of human history until a few years ago.  Your freedom of conscience and religion mean nothing to the government if their new secular values differ from the old religious ones.

The second category of rights that government gives is that it requires the compliance of everybody else to meet the rights of other people.

Again, this has two forms. 

One is the right to be protected from the free speech of other people.  The Founders would have highly objected to this.  If you read a lot in the early writings of our country, you will see that much of what was said, particularly about public figures, was very crude and often far from the truth.

But more particularly these new rights put the burden of deciding what speech is acceptable on the hearer rather than the speaker.  And the government, the media, and the public will use every means they have to shame, shut down, or prosecute violators of this policy.  And because the hearers now determine the validity of the speech, free speech is being highly restricted, a large part because people are afraid to speak freely.  Free speech has now become very costly.

This is simply wrong.  But it is the natural result when a government establishes a new moral order (secularism) over a country’s original moral order (religious, or Christian).

The other form of government rights requires other people to pay for them.  If a person has a right to low cost medical insurance, for example, then everybody else, at least those who pay taxes, is paying toward it.  If a person has a right, not a full right yet, to own a home, everybody else has to pay to make that possible, often in indirect ways like shifting tax or loan costs. 

What happens is that, in a secular world where God has no place, rights are viewed collectively instead of individually.  Charity was voluntary, and by the way it was considerable.  Read de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.  There used to be voluntary organizations aimed at every possible societal problem to be found at the time.  Now government has taken that over, and your freedom of choice to participate has gone.

Some people have described this as a form of slavery: forcing people to work for other people against their will.  But just saying that, many people will find offensive, because those who might say that are not usually of the same race of some other people who were slaves here 150 years ago.

This whole new value system of secularism is fundamentally changing our country.  It’s happening slowly, over generations, so that younger people start out with new normals, and nobody is teaching them the original ones. 

This goes the same for the millions of people who have been coming into our country over the last few decades.  We don’t teach them the founding principles of our country either.  They might get the new watered-down simplified version, but, being far from the original, over time, when they vote, run for office, and make new laws, it turns our country in a very different direction from where it was intended to go.

It’s like we are being taken over by a foreign power; but because it is gradual and the military is not involved, nobody is paying attention, or they are too busy to interrupt their lives to be involved themselves.
 
Does anybody remember the story about the camel’s foot in the tent?   It hasn’t been used in years.  It starts with the foot, but eventually the whole camel got into the tent, and, well, there’s not much room left for anything else with a camel in a tent.

The fact is that this is a war for the soul and life of our nation.  And wars require sacrifices and disruptions of our normal lives to do whatever we can to regain and preserve our freedoms.  Those who want to change our country in these ways will tell you that you got the original story wrong or that our country has been wrong all along.

Most people are probably not prepared to answer those views, but we need to get prepared.  That’s part of the sacrifice, and then we need to get involved.  The first way to get involved is to talk about these things, in conversations and then to the media and the people in government, and certainly to become active in every election and to know where the candidates stand on the principles that define them and not just the positions they publicly run on.

Wars used to be three or four years, and then they were over.  This war has been going on for generations and will last for, well, we don’t have no idea.  If you don’t want to do it for yourself, then do it for your children and your grandchildren.