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, June 6, 2020

After the protests, then what?


We have seen and heard the anger and frustration of so many people.  Fine.  Now what?

I really don’t expect to see much happen as a result of all of this, because there is no focus on what exactly we are to do now.  Legislative sessions will open, and they won’t know what to do.

The men involved in George Floyd’s death have been charged with crimes.  The courts will have to figure out their levels of culpability and the appropriate punishment.  The public, not being privy to all the information, likely will not be satisfied with all the outcomes, and maybe there will be another wave of protests.  The irony is that street justice is one of the very things they’ve been complaining about, and it will be very thing they will then be demanding.

So what do we do now?

Without people making specific reform proposals, nothing is going to change.

So I offer my proposals:

1.         My first thought here is that we should have thousands and thousands of people wanting to become police officers.  Somebody has to do it right, and when nobody is, the right response is for people to step up and show everybody how it’s done.

As much as possible, I would only employ minority officers to work in minority neighborhoods.  I see that as a step backward as a nation, but I see as much animosity from the public toward the police as the police are accused of having toward the public.  Maybe someday in the future we can stop seeing people by races, something like Martin Luther King talked about.

That’s going to require hiring by race, which will need to be cleared by the courts, but it seems that the conditions here mandate race as a requirement of employment in many cases. 
 
2.         I would change the method for funding schools.  We have relied on the property tax, and it’s not working.   Poor areas are not able to generate enough money for public education.  The state should determine a basic level of spending per student and raise that through the income tax.  Public education money must then be kept separate from general funds, otherwise it will be spent on other things. 

3.         The gangs must be shut down.  This decision must be broad-based in that you don’t want any one individual publicly responsible for making that decision.  The drug cartels won’t like it, so you can’t give them any particular individuals to target in retaliation.  It could lead to a real war of sorts, with casualties.  Wars cost a price, but sometimes they are necessary, and this is a necessary one.

4.         We need investment in the black community, but people are not going to want to invest there unless they can be sure their investment is safe from non-business risks.  Those who destroy or vandalize property must be punished.  There are no excuses.  They are hurting their entire community by their acts, not just the particular property owners.
 
I think this is a good start.  When I think of more, I will write again on this.