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

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Illinois and its need for money


Many of the states in our country are in a tug-of-war with the federal government about money.  The federal government has unlimited resources to fund anything it pleases.  It just borrows the money with no intention of ever paying it back, or it just prints it.  How great is that!

The Sun-Times takes up the cause for Illinois in its latest editorial (The fiction of Mitch McComnell’s ‘blue state bailout’, April 28), but I find the case less than compelling. 

I don’t doubt the need for more money, but the Times seems to approve the call by a bipartisan group to “unrestricted fiscal support” from the federal government.  It’s only a half trillion dollars.  The feds shouldn’t have any say in how it’s spent.  Really?

McConnell had the audacity to express the idea that maybe states like Illinois should declare bankruptcy.  The Times didn’t find that amusing.

So really, how much longer do you think Illinois can go on like this?  It’s losing money like a broken water main.  I don’t care if you have a graduated income tax or not, Illinois is not getting out of this hole.  And our politicians don’t even care.  They passed the last budget with a billion dollar deficit.  So they waste our money on interest payments.  It doesn’t take an economics professor with a minor in math to know that Illinois’ pension program is not sustainable.  But nobody wants to deal with it or even talk about it. 

And then, of course, Illinois deserves to get more money from the federal government, because it receives less in money from it than they gave to it in the first place.  If a state is supposed to get back from the federal government what it first gave to it, then why are they giving it to them in the first place?  The answer is that it’s not the job of the federal government to give any money to the states.  When did that start, and who’s idea was that? 

Illinois has mismanaged its money for decades, being far too generous to its employees’ pay, far too generous in its benefits, and far too generous in their hiring and staffing.  The state has far more government agencies than any other state in the country. 

Yes, this virus crisis makes everyone’s financial state worse, but Illinois, and the Times, is hoping that in the hurried chaos nobody would notice how much of its financial problems is its own doing.


Posted by at