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, January 31, 2019

Taxes on Income or Taxes on Imports


I have been working on my taxes for the past few weeks.  Little at a time.  So much tedious record keeping, scouring through investment documents, adding up receipts, blah blah blah blah blah.  Trying to find anything to reduce my taxes.  I often have to pay more.

The United States didn’t have an income tax until 1913.  Prior to that, taxes on imports paid for almost our entire federal budget.  We also had taxes on whiskey and other hard liquors.

I have long argued that all foreign products coming into our country should be taxed.  Same rate all across the board.  This is not a penalty.  It’s just a means of taxation. 

A country has to decide how it wants to raise the money necessary to run the government.  For most of our nation’s history, that method was to tax products brought into our country.  Instead of taking money directly from the people, a tax on imports is a voluntary tax on those who choose to buy foreign products rather than domestic ones. 

This is criticized today by the term ‘protectionism’, as though somehow, we are supposed to think of that as being a bad thing.  Those who use that term try to shame businesses as being greedy b****** who only want to stifle competition to keep their prices and profits artificially high.  They seem to have forgotten that when you have half a dozen companies making televisions in our country, they are competitors, not colluders. 

You can always make something cheaper somewhere else in the world, so if there is no tax on imports, why not make the stuff somewhere else?  And they do.  Try to find something, anything, made in our country anymore. 

It’s in our country’s best interest to keep the jobs here.  Growing up, we always had access to foreign goods, and they always cost more.  And we didn’t mind paying more for them, because we were getting something unique.  But they were true foreign products, like Swiss chocolate, French wine, or Japanese cars.  Now most of them are American products made somewhere else and then sent back here.

They tell us that free trade is good, because everything is cheaper.  Again, growing up, people were supporting their families quite well on one income.  You could work in a grocery store stocking shelves and be able to support your family.  Now our government has sent millions of jobs overseas, and it wants us to be grateful that we can save a few bucks on things, which is good, because jobs aren’t paying what they used to.  The government ruins our economy and then tries to turn our attention somewhere else.

We used to make everything here.  We had plenty of jobs, and they were good paying jobs.  When we stopped taxing imports, the jobs left the country, and our economy has never been as good. 
We need to bring all the jobs back, and taxing imports is the main way of doing that.  If our government can control its spending, this will reduce the need for income taxes.

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