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, March 7, 2019

Tariffs, Trade, and Trade Deficits - a letter sent to the Wall Street Journal


Much has been written about tariffs lately, and there are few people who write about them who favor them.

We forget that we didn’t even have an income tax until 1913, and that taxes on imports paid for almost entire federal budget for most of our nation’s history.

Apparently taxing imports hasn’t hurt consumers as much as the detractors claimed it would, since imports have increased a lot in our country. 

But let’s cut to the chase.

The purpose of tariffs is to keep jobs in the United States.  Period.  You can always make something cheaper somewhere in the world, so jobs will always leave our country for cheaper production costs elsewhere.  Try to find anything made in America anymore. 

When we made everything here, good paying jobs were plentiful and middle-class jobs could support a family on one income.  You could always buy foreign products, and they always cost more, and nobody cared, because you were buying true foreign products, like French wine or Swiss chocolate.  They were not American products made somewhere else and sent back here.

The single greatest thing we can do for our economy is to bring all the jobs back here.  When people aren’t working, we lose twice: we lose the taxes on their incomes, and we usually pay them while they’re not working.

We lost the jobs when we stopped taxing imports, and the way to bring them back is to do it again.  There will be some adjustments in our economy, because economies adapt to what you give them.  But taxes on imports are a voluntary tax.  You don’t have to pay them, if there is an American alternative, which is the goal.  And, of course, government revenue from tariffs reduces the need for income taxes.  It only doesn’t look that way, because the government is on a mission to spend as much money as possible.

Critics of tariffs claim that American producers only want them in order to stifle foreign competitors and maintain artificially high prices.  But when you have five American manufacturers making televisions here again, competition drives the prices down.  Do you still want to save a few dollars by having them made somewhere else and shipped here?   You will end up paying more in subtle ways like higher taxes, lower wages, and higher unemployment.