poligion

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, March 15, 2020

Our Confession - for the National Day of Prayer, March 15, 2020

America, America, God shed His grace on Thee.

And we forgot and then denied, and turned our back on Thee.

O God, we have sinned, and of that the very worst kind

We were blessed and prospered, and then we lost our mind.

I blame the courts who took God from our schools

For too long a time we raised gen’rations of fools

We knew from your Word that knowledge begins

with a deep fear of God and a hatred of sin.

But we let it be done, we put up no fight

We didn’t think that it would be right.

The ungodly arose, and we turned to flight

We set up our camp, far out of their sight.

You told us how often to diligently teach

our kids from their youth their souls if to reach

But we were so busy with so much to do

We missed the first things and then everything too.

Our nation is not what we’ve been led to believe

It was a gift from our God for His own to receive

Clamoring voices raised up a fuss

We left them unanswered and did not discuss.

Now our nation is built on a lie,

that God is irrel’vant and can now please die.

We have taken a gift, from our Creator our King

and allowed it to rot while its failings we sing.

We were once a light on a hill

Now we’re embarrassed, that we are here still

There will never be, a nation like ours

that forgot its roots and knew not its hour.

Larry Craig

2020

Friday, March 13, 2020

Maybe we should have virtual representative districts

I read dumbfoundedly an editorial by a ChangeIllinois director no less how gerrymandering can be fair if it’s done for the right reasons.

The right reason to create incredibly contorted voting districts is to create a majority/minority district, so we can be sure that we get a minority representative, because that is fair. Certainly not fair to all the non-minority residents who live in those districts.

But it still meets the definition of gerrymandering. Gerrymandering isn’t simply diluting a group’s numbers; it also occurs when you concentrate a particular group into as few districts as possible. Oh, they may get their one or two candidates of choice, but they will be the only people looking out for their ‘unique’ needs vs. having many representatives with a lot of those constituents in their districts. Any representative with a sizable group of any demographic in their district will always have their back.

True fairness seems to me requires virtual districts. Let every person fill out a form defining their demographic in order of importance: race, ethnicity, religion, age, language, wealth. Then let the computers sort it all out.

We won’t number our districts anymore. We will have the black districts, the Latino, the rich, the Christian, the Muslim, the Jewish, the old people. But we will be linked together with all the other people whose values and interests best match ours, and then we will all truly be represented.

Other than that, I would recommend that districts be drawn blindly, compactly, following natural boundaries. Anything beyond that only leads to mischief.

Saturday, March 7, 2020

No, Sexism did not stop Elizabeth Warren

Everybody it seems, including the Chicago Tribune (Did sexism stop Elizabeth Warren?, March 7), thinks that blatant, outright or subtle, subliminal sexism is depriving women of achieving political heights in our country.

No, it’s an election process that needs fixing, but nobody seems to see the problems with it.

When you only get to pick one candidate out of a field of 20, you don’t learn the breadth of a candidate’s appeal. Somebody may get 20% of the vote, but the other 80% may hate him. Another candidate may get 3% of the vote but a favorability rating of 60%.

In a primary, voters can be asked to pick their favorite, but they should also be asked to vote for every candidate that they can support. That will tell you who the nominee should be.

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.

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

a letter to my Senators about babies

I hope you are doing well.

I read something in the news that disturbed me. I hope I heard it wrong or it was wrong.

The basic founding principle of our country is that God gave unalienable rights to human beings, among which there is a right to life. That is from the founding document of our country, the Declaration of Independence.

It seems that a lot of Senators are either unaware of this or choose to ignore it. In either case, that should disqualify a person from even being a Senator and they should resign their position as Senator.

When a child is born, that child has a right to life. There is nothing to debate. We have a living human being, and it is the government’s responsibility to protect that life.

I don’t know the outcome of that vote and debate in the Senate, but I hope you will do the right thing here.

Thank you

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

the morally superior immigration position

The Declaration of Independence says that governments, our government, exist for the safety and happiness of the citizens of our country. That does not mean that, among other things, this is something that they will do. It means that that is why they are there in the first place.

Your article assumes that open borders is clearly the morally superior position to closed borders. To word it differently, putting the needs and wants of people who are citizens of other countries over the needs and wants of the citizens of our own country is a morally superior position.

It is not moral to be elected to do one job, but then you intentionally do something else because you think it is the right thing to do. If you cannot in good conscience do the job for which you were elected, then you should resign.

With regards to borders, a country has the responsibility to know who is coming into its country, whether temporarily or permanently. People are clamoring today for background checks for anybody who wants to buy a gun. Shouldn’t we at least do the same for somebody who wants to move here?

We are concerned about the mentally ill, the violent, the criminal, the extremist, the terrorist. Shouldn’t we have the same concerns about people who want to live here?

The article specifically brings up the coronavirus, a medical condition with a two week incubation period before anyone knows who has the disease. Most borders throughout the world are unable to house everybody wanting to cross their borders for the necessary two weeks to ensure that they are safe to enter the country, and you shame them for not just letting them in? Seriously?

The fringe has become mainstream in our country, and the mainstream has become fringe.

Monday, March 2, 2020

Columbus Day: what it's really all about

I read the responses in the Sun-Times to the Chicago Public School’s decision to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day, both the letters and the articles, and they missed the point. All of them.

Columbus Day is not about honoring an explorer who exemplified the ultimate in virtue and courage. Neither is it about giving an ethnic group their own holiday so they have some public pride and acknowledgement.

Columbus Day is about the whole New World venture itself, whether people from Europe should have come here in the first place.

I get the impression that many of our public school educators are not proud of our past and many seem to regret the entire enterprise. They don’t begrudge modern day migrants seeking to improve their lot in life, but those who founded our country apparently did more harm than good and should not have come.

What all our modern-day critics miss is that the world today would not know freedom apart from the United States. The world would be a very different place were it not for the United States.

Europe would be run by Nazis and communists. Asia would be run by communists, Muslims, and the Emperor of Japan, and Africa would be Muslim. And, of course, there would be no New World. And there would be no freedom. Period.