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, March 7, 2020

Some Random Unscientific Observations on the Economy after a Lifetime of Work


Lenny, not his real name, is our local StreetWise vendor.  He’s been out there for decades.  We talked again recently.  I recommended a good place to get a job.  They were always hiring, you could write your own ticket, and they had the highest ratio of fulltime workers of anybody.  At least all this was true when I worked there. 

Well, I lit a fire.  I saw him again in a few weeks.  He applied there and at the store he was standing in front of.  Both companies would only offer him 12 hours a week.  I thought that strange until I thought more about it.

The company I recommended was under a new owner, and they now boast a $15 an hour starting wage.  The company gets the good publicity, but they don’t want to spend more than they have to on an untrained new employee, so they limit the hours.

The second company is a union company which historically gave good insurance to anyone working 16 hours a week.  Now they hire people for 12 hours a week, so they don’t have to pay for insurance. 

Why the change?  I would surmise it was from Obamacare, where the government demanded that insurance companies include a long list of things in all of their policies.  This was why so many people lost their insurance under Obamacare.  The government made it unaffordable for companies and a lot of people by telling them how to run their business.

Which reminds me of the last company I worked for.  Parttime work there was anything up to 32 hours a week.  But then the government required companies like this to give insurance to anyone working 30 hours a week.  So they cut parttime hours down to 24 hours a week.  Still no insurance, but now less hours.

When I was growing up, you could work in a grocery store stocking shelves and support your family.  The grocery and meat business were all good union jobs.  But then things changed with the coming of non-union companies.  Coincidentally, this all happened at the time when illegal immigration was becoming an issue.  Working in the field, you could see the change in demographics in the work force. 

Local grocery stores do not face foreign competition, so when everybody worked on the same playing field, wages were strong.  But here, what I would call unfair competition destroyed the entire field as an option for a middle class life.

Concluding thoughts?  To me, the government creates more problems that it solves.  Then it tries to solve the problems it created by doing more of the same things that caused the first problems. 

Posted by at