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

Monday, January 5, 2015

The biggest problem with our elections and what to do about it

The biggest problem with our electoral system is that most elections are made for only two candidates.  If there are more than two candidates, many people who would have voted for one candidate vote for another, and the other candidate who would have lost often ends up winning the election with less than 50% of the vote.  This is wrong, but don’t expect lawmakers to change this.  This would completely revolutionize our electoral system and lessen the chances that most politicians currently in office would keep their jobs.  People could finally vote their conscience and not just for the candidate pundits say has the best chance of winning.
Any election where no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote should require a runoff election of the two highest vote getters.  An alternative to this is to allow voters to rank or otherwise show preferences for more than one candidate on their original ballots, so that votes can be shifted from a person’s first choice to their second choice if there is no clear winner on the first ballot.  This is especially pertinent in Presidential elections where a third party candidate splits the vote in a state, so nobody gets a majority.  You don’t want to wait for a runoff election before finding out who won that state.
This principle applies particularly to primaries, where often there can be a large field of candidates.  In the last Presidential primary, the large number of candidates failed to show a clear winner.  I don’t think any candidate ever had more than 50% of the vote, so we didn’t ever really know which candidate had the most support of all the potential voters.
My suggestion:  Say we have ten Republican candidates and ten debates.  After the first debate, have the Tea Party and the Republican Party each conduct a poll of likely voters.  This would be necessary to keep both parties honest here.  Then after the second debate, let them conduct the same poll but without the name of the person who got the least number of votes the first time.  After the third debate, conduct another poll but again eliminate the name of the candidate who got the fewest number of votes the last time.  I wouldn’t ask these candidates who got those least votes to drop out or be removed from the debates just yet.  Some of them may still be unknown to the voters.  After the fourth or fifth debate, you could ask on the poll if any of the dropped candidates should be brought back, but I think things should be getter clearer.  After the fourth or fifth debate, these candidates could be asked to withdraw from the debates.
But the final candidate should have a majority of the likely Republican voters and not just be the best of three or four leading candidates.

So I agree with you that more candidates running for office is better than fewer.  It’s just that our system is not currently constructed to best handle that.  
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