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

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Why I Am Not Sold on Climate Change


I know that the media and many people in the government consider climate change a big danger to all of us.

And, frankly, I’m not convinced.  And here are the reasons why:

1)         Accurate worldwide average temperatures were not even possible until the advent of satellites in probably the 1970s.  I’m not even sure when anybody even started caring.

Since the average temperature changes that is causing this deep concern is less than 2° Fahrenheit, and average temperatures before satellites are just guesswork, I think we have too little information over too short a period of time to draw serious conclusions of this magnitude.

2)         There are six known ice ages that scientists are sure about, the latest went from around 1000 A.D. to the 1500s.  That is why the Vikings didn’t do more with North America than they did.  They couldn’t if they had wanted to.

But the entire world warmed up after that, and this was way before the Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels. 

Seems the average world temperature changes considerably over centuries without any help from us, and we just don’t know how the whole thing works.

3)         I understand that if all the recommendation of the climate accord in Paris were followed, the change in temperature at the end of the century would be minimal.  And I mean MINIMAL.

4)         I understand also that the United States is actually leading the world at this time in carbon emission reduction.  But we are only one country.  And if the rest of the world are big polluters (China, for example), our efforts will do very little, even less than MINIMAL. 

I have been trying to keep track of local weather reports.  I would like to compare their 5 and 7 day forecasts and see both day by day and week by week how often they are changed or wrong if not updated.  If we can’t be sure what the weather will be like next week, I think long term projections are too conjectural.  We see high pressure systems that might linger over an area for a month like in Texas a few years ago.  They had no idea why that happened.  They see how the jet stream changes, bringing artic air down to the states or not, and they don’t know why.

I am glad to see them working so hard to keep track of things, but I can’t help but think there is something else going on that is influencing their conclusions.

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