where religion and politics meet




We are being told today that the United States is and has always been a secular nation, which is practical atheism.


But even more basic, our country was founded on the belief that God gave unalienable rights to human beings. And that is a Christian belief based on the Bible. Islam, for example, does not believe in unalienable rights. Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’ have the United States of America.

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.


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.





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.






Thank you.

Larry Craig

Monday, August 19, 2019

Why we have the Second Amendment

Read the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers.

Our country had just fought a war against its own government.  The Founders thought we might need to do that again. 

Governments exist to protect the unalienable rights that God gave to the people.  When they don’t, the people have the right to change the government.

The Founders figured that any state would be able to amass far more troops than any national army would have.  The people were already “armed”, unlike the people in Europe who were unarmed and ruled by kings and tyrants.

But what about all the gun violence today?

The Founders knew that our rights come from God, and that people had a corresponding responsibility to God.  Our nation has rejected God, and secularism knows no corresponding responsibility toward God.  Secularism cannot restrain hatred and evil.  That requires the fear of God.

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

The Immigration Myth

Anyone who talks about immigration is required to begin by saying something like: Both my wife’s and my grandparents were immigrants, and my wife’s grandfather had the proverbial $5 in his pocket when he came here.  He went on to start a business and built several apartment buildings.

There are almost 7.5 billion people in the world who do not live in the United States.  That means that there are over 7 billion possible immigrants to the United States. 

According to modern immigration thinking, every single one of them would make a positive contribution to our country, simply by virtue of not living here already. 

Our modern immigration system is like a job fair where there are no job interviews or resumes.  Everybody who can make it here is accepted.  We have no requirements; we make no demands. 

The words on the Statue of Liberty are often quoted when discussing immigration:


Do you know what’s missing here?  It doesn’t say what happens to them when they get here.  It doesn’t say that we will take care of you.  You have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  You have the freedom to pursue your dreams, and our government will not stand in your way.

The United States has always been a compassionate country, but it’s the people who are compassionate.  Government cannot be compassionate, because it is not spending its own money.  It is spending other people’s money.

The fact is that the rule about immigrants being self-sufficient has been around at least 100 years.  Our government has just been loosening the definition of self-sufficiency over the years.  We are essentially paying people to come here.  Would they still come here if we weren’t so generous with our government benefits?

Monday, August 12, 2019

speeding up baseball games

 I have seen a lot of articles lately about speeding up baseball games, the most recent was a letter to the Tribune (Limit foul balls to cut time, August 10).

The only rule change I think that that has merit is a clock for batters and pitchers.  It shouldn’t rush them, but there are some players who definitely take way too long.

But nobody seems to be asking how much time is being set aside for commercials.  Baseball keeps statistics on everything.  Surely, they know.  

Commercials are killing baseball as much as anything.  Some will argue that you need more commercials to pay these exorbitant salaries.  Well, exorbitant is right.  If commercials were limited, maybe it could curb salaries a bit.  And maybe that might even curb ticket prices a little.  And then maybe more average people could go to baseball games again.

Sunday, August 11, 2019

guns and the Constitution

A reader (August 11) wondered if the right to bear arms is reconcilable with the Constitution’s directive to our government that it exists “to insure domestic tranquility” and “to promote the general welfare.”

The Tribune printed the letter, so I’m guessing he wasn’t the only one who’s wondering the same thing.

The same people who ratified the one ratified the other.  The Second Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights which a lot of the people who ratified the Constitution wanted included, because they were afraid that the new national government might try to limit their unalienable rights, and the right to bear and carry arms was no. 2.  So that was very near and dear to their hearts.

The difference between then and now is that they were not hesitant about their belief in God and the importance of God’s laws for the moral foundation of our country: the Ten Commandments, Love our neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

Guns were always a big part of our country, and gun violence only became a problem when our country decided to become a secular country, and all things religious were considered unimportant, irrelevant, and shunted off the public square.

stopping mass shootings

A NU researcher has studied mass shootings in our country, and she has a lot of answers for all of us (NU researcher urges fighting hate speech: ‘killing follows’, August 11).

Now I’m against mass shootings as much as anyone.  I’m just not sure about the solutions that people are offering to stop them. 

Like many people who are trying to provide answers, she strongly recommends banning semi-automatic weapons.  She, like so many others, calls them military-style weapons.  That’s not really accurate.  Making a gun semi-automatic is just a simple improvement in engineering, like an automatic transmission in your car.  Calling them a military-style weapon is just using language to frame the argument. 

Certainly, restricting access to different things, like guns, knives, baseball bats, explosives, trucks, will reduce the incidence of people using those things to commit crimes, but it won’t reduce the hate that drives the crimes.  Resourceful people will find alternatives to act out their hatred.

She also recommends preventing people from having large capacity magazines for their guns.  I heard that it took the police 57 rounds to stop the killer in Dayton, Ohio.  And those were trained law enforcement agents.  It would be morally indefensible to limit people in this way in protecting their homes, property, family, or, in many cases, other people.

She’s worried too that we must stop all hate speech, because that spurs people to violence.  But violence comes from hate.  Did the hate speech cause the hate or just precede the act of hate?  Hate speech would not find an audience unless people had already felt the same hate.  And what prompted that hate in the first place could later prompt it into an outward act.

People are either forgetting or never learned that our country has always been a nation of guns.  The Founding Fathers applauded that, because they saw that as essential to preserving our liberty. 

Mass shootings have only become a problem since our nation removed the moral code that had undergirded our country since its founding: the Judeo-Christian ethics of the Ten Commandments and the Love your neighbor as yourself, and the fact that there is a God in heaven to whom we will all have to give account after we die.

racism and immigration

OK, let’s say for the sake of argument that all white people are racist.  Inherently, subconsciously, blatantly, in whatever form, let’s say that all white people don’t like minorities.  I’ve certainly read enough to know that there are a lot of academics, politicians, and very vocal public people who believe this.  They say that America is a racist nation and always has been.

If this is true, or even if there is a good possibility it is true, or even if there is just the perception that it is true, then I would contend that the government has no business or right to bring 2 to 3 million more minorities into our country every year.  That would only increase the division and turmoil that already exists in our country.  And this has been going on for more than 50 years.

Since 1965, our immigration policy has favored minority immigrants almost to the exclusion of white immigrants.  This was changed partially or maybe even entirely as a response to the Civil Rights Movement, which was certainly a very contentious time in our nation’s history.

The opening lines of the United State Constitution, you know, the document that tells us how our country is supposed to function, says that “We the people in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility,. . . , promote the general welfare, . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution to the United States of America.”

Establishing justice could apply to the civil rights laws that had just been passed, but I see the government doing nothing to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, or promoting the general welfare.  On the contrary, I would say that it is hellbent on promoting division, strife, and turmoil.  It is putting the welfare of foreign citizens over the welfare of its own.

I am by no means trying to justify or condone racism.  I am just saying that the government has no right to force things on the American people that can promote division, strife, or turmoil, and if our country is racist, then the government is wrong to keep pushing diversity.  It should stop all immigration then until our country as a whole can agree on a policy that it can fully support.

Thursday, August 8, 2019

solving the problems of the black community in Chicago

I like Father Pfleger.  (How to encourage more Chicagoans to work with police to solve murders, August 8).  I also have a lot of respect for him.  He sees his responsibility as not only speaking to the people who come to his church on Sundays but speaking to the whole society at large as well.

Having said that, I must say that I was greatly disappointed in his recent article about helping the police to solve murders.  His article covered a lot more ground than simply public relations with the police.  He also went into what he saw as all the underlying problems in the black community that contribute to the current violence so rampant there.  And this is where he, and so many others, is missing something, and a big something at that.

His list of problems in the black community was long.  And serious.  But,  he missed something.
Everything was somebody else’s fault.  Everything depended on other people spending money on programs, businesses, and monetary assistance for people in these communities.  Everything involved waiting for someone else to ride in and rescue them.
I won’t deny that the city and some of those other people can and should do more where they can to improve the lives of the people in this community, but Pfleger said nothing about what the people themselves can do to end this seemingly endless cycle of violence.  I won’t offer any suggestions here, because I am an outsider.   But the first step in solving any problem is figuring out what I can do before thinking about what other people can do.