poligion: September 2020

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 9, 2020

Republicans, debt, and tax cuts

A Tribune reader called the Republican Party for hypocrisy (Hypocrisy in GOP, September 9) for calling for tax cuts and not focusing more on the national debt.

Actually tax cuts generally increase tax revenues. Federal government revenue has gone up every year since at least 1960, except for a few years after 2000. Kennedy, Reagan, and Trump were all known for major tax cuts in their administrations.

Our government debt is primarily due to Democrats insistence on trying to solve every problem and meet every need through spending money. Yes, the Republicans like to spend money on the military. That is one of the few things our federal government spends money on that the Constitution says it should.

Democrats resist and fight any attempts to reduce government spending. I fault the Republicans for not standing up to them enough. That would require government shutdowns, and the media joins the Democrats in blaming the Republicans, and they cave.

Monday, September 7, 2020

How to Fight Corruption in Congress

An alert reader made the Tribune readers aware of a bill in Congress that few people know about. (Bill would aid democracy, September 7)

The bill is “a sweeping anti-corruption bill.”

The writer then lists 13 specific changes that the proponents hope to effect.

And this fact highlights one of the biggest anti-corruption issues that needs to be addressed, and Congress won’t act on it.

Every bill in Congress has to be comprehensive. The longer the better. The more all-encompassing the better.

And this is where the problems start. And if you want to fight corruption, this has to be dealt with.

The bigger the bill, the more things in it that people will not agree on. Not only things that people don’t agree on, but things that would never pass on their own. So they’re put in bigger bills which you must then accept or reject together.

Congress should as much as possible submit single issue bills. Then discuss them. How can you have a debate on a bill with at least 13 specific measures?

Many of these comprehensive bills are too large to read, yet alone discuss. So many parts of these bills don’t even come to light until the bill is passed.

If I were a Senator, I would not vote for this bill, but not because I don’t think we need to fight corruption. They sell it as anti-corruption, but a lot of it has nothing to do with corruption.

So if you oppose it, you’re portrayed as opposing reform.

No. Let each bill deal with one issue at a time, and then let’s discuss it and see how much agreement there is or if the bill presents the best way of dealing with these issues.

So What Can Be Wrong with Mail-in Voting?

Everyone seems so enamored with mail-in voting, like: why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? [Mail-in voting lessons from Oregon, the state with the longest history of voting by mail, September 4]

Obviously, we have all recognized the need for a lot of people to vote by mail for various reasons, like fighting a war overseas, but we are now talking about massively increasing the amount of mail-in voting beyond where it is necessary.

Has it been so long since we voted that we forgot what it’s all about?

First of all, with in-person voting, we know who’s voting. A person shows up and says that they are registered to vote. Some states try to verify that, and some don’t. With mail-in voting, we have no idea who voted.

With in-person voting, there are no unaccounted-for ballots. With mailed ballots, we don’t know who received them or if they were received at all.

When people vote in person, they vote in private. Nobody knows how they voted, and nobody is influencing them how to vote. With mail at home, we have no idea if a person is voting without undue influences.

And finally, at the polling place, the voter places the ballot into the box personally. Again, nobody knows how they voted.

The Sun-Times showed a picture of a man putting a handful of ballots into the machine. You don’t want people handling multiple ballots where they can see how the ballots were filled out.

You may recall that on Election Day, news media are not allowed to start giving results until the polls are closed, because knowing the voting trends can influence the outcome by influencing votes not yet cast.

With mail-in ballots, we will be having ballots counted way past normal times, and many people are rightly concerned that close elections will suddenly find a surge of votes for the other candidate as mail-in ballots are counted. And, of course, many ballots are routinely rejected for all kinds of reasons. My registered signature is 45 years old. I don’t write like that anymore. My ballots would be rejected if I mailed them in.

There’s an expression we often use: an accident waiting to happen. You don’t wait until something goes terribly wrong before you correct something that has so many indicators of potential problems.