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, February 23, 2020

immigration - some problems nobody wants to talk about


There are about 7.5 billion people in the world who do not live in the United States.  So, theoretically, they are all potential immigrants.

According to a lot of people I’ve been reading, it seems that any one of these people, by virtue of their status of being an immigrant, would make a vital contribution to our society and culture.

I think the immigration controversy, if you want to call it that, exists because people aren’t really talking about what the issues are.

I have a problem with illegal immigration, because a country has the responsibility to know who is coming into our country.  New residents should have background checks and medical tests.  They should also have in-person interviews so we know whether they want to be an American or if they want our country to become more like where they came from.  We have had such a flood of people coming to our border over the years through Mexico, that we have been completely unable to do any of this.

I have a problem with family reunification immigration, because the reason they insist we need immigration is that we have an aging population.  If all our immigrants bring their parents and grandparents, and others, we will still have an aging population, and would still need more workers.

Our federal government is almost $24 trillion in debt, with no end in sight.  Why should we bring people into our country if we have to borrow money to support them from the federal budget?  Our plumber was an immigrant.  He said that, after his court appearance, they wanted to show him all the government benefits he could get.  He turned them all down, saying he can make his own money.  Why are we doing that in the first place?

I have read numerous times that the government generally puts blocks of immigrants in places where the voters tend to vote a certain way.  New immigrants tend to vote a certain way, so the government wanted to turn that area a different color in voting.

And, I have a problem that nobody wants to know how many illegal immigrants actually are in this country and where they are at.  Our electoral voters and Congressional representatives are distributed according to the citizens of our country.  Some will say that the Constitution doesn’t specify citizens.  But then I can’t imagine the Founders ever thought we would have tens of millions of citizens of other countries living here and counted just like citizens of our own country when it comes to electing the President and other government officials.

So, no, immigration in itself is not the problem.  It’s all the ways that the system has broken down or been abused that is the problem.  And that they won’t fix it.

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