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

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

The Real Problem with Gerrymandering

Deep down inside, everybody knows that gerrymandering is wrong.  It is politics at its worst, where politicians do what they want to try to stay in office or to give their political party huge advantages in elections and policy decisions. 

A big reason it has been put up with is that it is portrayed as being necessary, and, of course, the supposed beneficiaries of this practice are minorities, who could not possibly succeed in life without the help of government due to the inherent racism of white people which keeps them trapped in poverty and hopelessness.  While gerrymandering won’t solve this problem entirely, it is believed and promoted that gerrymandering will ensure minority representation in the political process, and that is considered a necessary part of any government efforts to help the disadvantaged demographic. 

Is this true?  I don’t believe so.  Why?  For example, there are 435 Representatives in Congress.  Having a handful of, say, black Representatives is not going to pass any bills if the needs and wants of the black community are so very different from those of whites.  But if minorities are a substantial voting bloc in any district, the Representative, white or black, would be sure to work with them, because he knows his election may very well depend on their vote.  In this case, there will far more districts with the interests of minorities in mind and far more likelihood that anything could and would be done. 

Let me say this again in another way, because this is the most important point here.  Having a majority minority district actually reduces the influence of that minority in the political process, because it concentrates its power on the fewest number of Representatives.  If the minorities were represented in more districts, they would have more Representatives interested in getting and retaining their votes.

And this assumes, of course, that the needs of minorities are different from the needs of everybody else.  I can’t imagine, for example, that a Representative would only try to help some of the schools in his district.

The real danger of gerrymandering lies elsewhere though.  We know that gerrymandering is done to dilute the votes of the opposing party or to concentrate them in the fewest districts to minimize their overall number of elected officials.  That alone is enough to discourage any opposition to the majority party.  I live in Illinois, which is a prime example.

However, who says that that is the only criterion they use when they divvy up the districts?  Districts can be drawn to dilute or concentrate voters by any measurable demographic: income, age, religion, sexual orientation, education, ethnicity, even their positions on particular issues, like abortion.  There is no end to the mischief which someone can do with a computer and the power to draw voting districts.

I agree with the use of computers, but any and all demographic information should not be a part of the process.  The computer should only be used to calculate the number of residents in each district, following the natural boundaries of geography and existing borders as much as possible.  People living in the same areas will have more in common with their neighbors than artificially constructed districts that pick and choose their constituents.


This is not a problem which we can expect politicians to solve without the public demanding it.  You need to start talking about it everywhere.