poligion: September 2019

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

Wednesday, September 11, 2019

slave owners

I would like to take issue with the Sun-Times Fact Check (Fact-check: They signed Declaration of Independence – but nearly three-quarters also owned slaves, September 11).

It’s not just a matter of finding facts but understanding them.

For example, the article states that “in 1776, slavery was legal in all 13 of the new states.” It fails to note that the United States was still a colony of Great Britain in 1776, and King George was responsible for most of their laws. The colonies then spent the next 7 years at war, so slavery was not the first thing on their minds. However, the northern states did begin enacting laws soon after such that by 1804, all of them had either abolished it or were in the process of doing so.

The new Constitution wasn’t ratified until 1788. The very next year, Congress had to deal with the question of new states coming into the Union. They passed the Northwest Ordinance, which said that any new states would be free states, i.e. no slavery would be permitted.

But imagine that you lived at that time and were opposed to slavery, what would you do?

You knew that any person who was put on the auction block would be bought as a slave. You knew that many (most?) of them were treated harshly. You knew also that if you bought a slave and then set them free, their future could be very uncertain. You could pay their way back to Africa, but the same people who enslaved them the first time could maybe do it again.

So what do you do?

If I were wealthy and lived back then, I think I would secure as many people as I could. Yes, they would work for me. Everybody works. But they would be treated kindly, housed, fed, and educated. In the absence of legal freedom, they would have security and care. Of course, in future generations, I would be branded a slave owner.

But what would you do?

Monday, September 9, 2019

Solving Chicago’s Budget Crisis

I am a long-time Tribune reader and subscriber. I still don’t understand the thinking of the people who run this paper.

Today you run a major article on how to solve the Chicago budget crisis. (September 9, “Forget property taxes. Forget Springfield. Here is the one way to solve Chicago’s budget crisis.” Here is the one way to solve Chicago’s budget crisis”). I’ll accept your printing of this article as your endorsement of the writer’s view. And, of course, the only possible answer is another tax.

The article notes right away that “the pension benefits of public employees are constitutionally guaranteed.” But so is a flat tax for the residents of the state, but the politicians don’t see a problem with changing the Constitution on that. A raise in a flat tax affects everybody, while a graduated tax only affects a portion of taxpayers at a time, so it’s easier to pass.

Public pensions are bankrupting the state of Illinois and most of the communities in the state. It is easily the number one problem facing Illinois today, and the only solution is to change the State Constitution.

Yet both Chicago newspapers are silent on this issue. Why aren’t you leading the way in saving our state? You’re supposed to be the defenders of the people, the watchdogs, the ones who hold our leaders accountable. You’ve watched this crisis develop for generations, and you’ve done nothing.

Shame on you! You should have weekly articles on this demanding that the necessary changes to the Constitution be put on the ballot for 2020.

Protecting our kids from smoking

The Sun-Times ran an editorial about protecting our kids (September 9, “For kids’ sake, Illinois should ban flavored e-cigarettes”). I have several. They are adults now, but they are still my kids.

But the kids in this editorial are “teens,” “young people”, and “under 21.” Adults don’t need this protection, because it is their right to smoke and they should know the risks.

But these same people who we need to protect, because they don’t have the maturity, knowledge, or wisdom to make responsible decisions for themselves are able to vote for people who will be making decisions for the people of our entire country.

How can people who can’t make good choices for themselves be able to make good choices for the rest of the country?