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

Sunday, December 27, 2020

COVID relief and government malfeasance

Average Americans wonder why it is so difficult for Washington to help average Americans through one of our most difficult years ever. 

Our government has forced the shutdown of thousands of businesses, forcing millions of people to wonder how they will get by without a regular paycheck.

The most obvious thing Washington could do would be to increase unemployment payments until those businesses could reopen. 

Businesses that were forced to close or to work at a limited capacity should receive substantial tax relief, property and otherwise, to help them survive until they can go back to normal.

All this could and should have been done months ago.

So what happened? 

Congress refuses to pass short simple bills directed at specific problems.  Any bill it considers is an opportunity to spend money, and this in their mind is their primary responsibility. 

They combined the COVID relief bill with the general government appropriations bill, so it is now over 5,500 pages long.  There are hundreds of separate issues and items in this bill.  This is selfish, shortsighted, and even scandalous.  Instead of quickly coming to the aid of the people whose welfare they were elected to serve, they are eager and willing to put their own wishes and wants over that of their constituents. 

In reporting this fiasco, it is easy for the news media to insinuate the guilty parties, but I think they tend to miss the mark.  I could point fingers as well, but I think it’s best to blame a political culture that we have accepted for generations without resistance that sees the government as the answer to all of our problems and that answer is always spending more money. 

We need to demand that government write only short bills with one main subject and all amendments to that bill be related to that one subject.  Government aid would then be swift to those who need it, and trust would soon return to our government.

Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Defunding the police?

I agree with the Sun-Times article (Trained civilians, not sworn police officers, could better respond to hundreds of 911 calls, December 15) that police do a lot of things that other people could do better.

However, police in Chicago are working a lot of overtime, and that’s not because we have a shortage of traffic guards at school crossings.  When I worked in business, a lot of overtime meant that it was time to hire more people, not reduce the workforce.  

The number of police that we have is not determined by the number of 911 calls.  It’s determined by how many police we need in a crisis.  Like the holiday weekends.  The summer surge in shootings.  The rioting and pillaging that we are seeing more often.

You just can’t put an ad in the paper and have more police officers on hand for these crises and then let them go when the need diminishes.

We could use the police like we do firefighters.  We keep firefighters together in special housing units, and they only come out when we have a real emergency.  The police we use for other things.  If we don’t use them for these other things, then we have to hire a whole lot of other people, and we’ll end up spending more money on public safety than we do now.  Just what the taxpayers want to hear!

Friday, December 11, 2020

How to choose, or not choose, a President

The Sun-Times printed a lengthy letter advocating for the elimination of the electoral college.

This aligns well with the Progressive movement today which believes that America was a flawed nation from the start that must be reinvented to accord with modern enlightened thinking.

Our Founders did not believe in a direct democracy.  This is why we have a Senate and not just a House of Representatives.  Representatives serve two-year terms as well, so they can stay more attuned to the mood and needs of their constituents. 

The Founders thought the masses as being too easily swayed and needed to be tempered by speed bumps in the legislative process, thus another body of legislators, the Senate, elected under a different set of rules.  In fact, they didn’t even have Senators chosen by the public either.  They wanted state legislators to choose them, so they would best represent their states.

They also believed that the States should elect the President and not individuals, that this would be the best way that the President truly serves the interests of ALL the people.