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, December 9, 2021

An Open Letter to the American People

Congress just passed a bill that allows our government to continue spending money at its current rate for another two months. 

This is considered by most as being a good thing, because then the government won’t shut down, because it has run out of money.  Actually, it wouldn’t run out of money.  More like you left you wallet at home while at the store.  You have the money; you just can’t access it right that minute. 

They say that we would be defaulting on our debt if we didn’t raise the debt ceiling.

No.  We would be defaulting on our debt if we were going out of business.

But we are not. 

What they might not mention is that it’s not that there isn’t enough money to be had.  This is money that they want to borrow.

The government is in debt.  They are not interested in paying off the debt.  They are only interested in paying interest on that debt.

They don’t see a problem with this. 

Does anybody see a problem with this?

You wouldn’t do this. 

You wouldn’t advise anybody to do this.

Only very foolish people would do this, just keep going deeper and deeper into debt without any intention of paying off the debt.  Those people and our federal government.  You can add some state governments to that as well.

This means that an ever-increasing amount of any money they get will be used for interest payments, or, you could say, just totally wasted money.  Billions and billions of dollars every year. 

The Federal Reserve Bank, which for some unknown reason, has been given responsibility for the health of our economy, in their extraordinary wisdom, has been keeping interests rates as low as possible for years now. 

They say this is to stimulate the economy. It is also to hide the magnitude of the government debt as well as to lower the interest payments.

When I was a kid, it was common for people to retire and live off the interest on their savings accounts.  But since the government has gone off on its spend-as-much-money-as-possible agenda, the Fed has no interest in returning to normal interest rates.  Then we would be spending a trillion dollars a year just on interest.  Again, totally wasted money.

So the government has totally ruined a significant retirement option for millions of our people.

Why?

The short answer would be that they want(ed) to use the money for short-term political gain.  The more money they spend, which is often just given to people in some way, the more public favor they believe they will receive.  They can create new headlines to distract people from the longterm losses to our people.

I believe it is time to end this.  Long past time, and we need to do this now.

No more.

You may ask how we can do this.  What action can I take right now to change this?

And I would have to say I don’t know.

You can write the politicians, but I don’t even know if they will see the letters.  You can write the newspapers, but they won’t print the letters.

The place to start is public awareness.  Talk about this.  Every time you get in a political discussion.  Or start a political discussion with this issue.

If you meet candidates, tell them what you think.  Don’t just ask them what they think.  Tell them what you think and expect. 

The biggest problems in government right now are not specific bills but the culture.

Writing massive bills that are too big to read and discuss, where you have to vote for ten things you don’t like to get five things you do.  Drawing Congressional districts that almost ensure a particular party’s success.  Spending money that only increases the size of the federal government and the dependency of the American people on the government.

Oh, and spending money the government doesn’t have, so that it has to borrow money for pay for these things.  And that includes letting the Federal Reserve create money, but that’s another story.

All these things have gone on for too long with nobody apparently trying to stop it.  Oh, a few people have tried.  Rand Paul is one.  But he’s not trying hard enough, or the system is too entrenched for him to make any headway.  If you’re not in the majority party in the Senate, or the House for that matter, the leaders of those chambers won’t give you much attention.

So it’s up to us.  The people.  I’m sorry I can’t give you more things to do with a greater chance of success.  Maybe somebody reading this can do that.  I hope so.

 

 

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