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, August 2, 2015

Time to End the Two Party System


So Bernie Sanders is a Socialist and Hillary Clinton is a Democrat.  Jeb Bush is a Republican, and Ted Cruz is Tea Party.  Ron Paul, from the last election, was a Libertarian. 

So why is it when we have an election for President, we only get two choices?  Oh, there are others, names you never heard of from parties you never heard of.

But anybody who is somebody tries to run under one of the two main labels in American politics.  Why?   Because we have a two party system in the United States.  When a third major candidate runs for President, he ends up splitting the votes of one party and essentially giving the election to the other candidate, meaning that the winner has less than a majority of the vote.  In Presidential elections, the winner still needs a majority of the electoral votes to win, but he could win a state without getting a majority of the votes when there is a third party candidate.

My question is: why doesn’t anybody see a problem with this?  Whether it is the newscasters reporting on the election or the candidates or party that lost the election, nobody says a word about it.  The only time the subject comes up is before the election when a would-be candidate mentions the possibility of a third party candidacy, and he is then cautioned against it, because a) he has no chance of winning, and b) he is essentially giving the election to the person farthest from his own views.
We have a nation of 330 million people, and we can only get two people to choose from for the most important job in our country? 

Someone will say that we have a primary system that sorts through the candidates, and anybody that doesn’t win the primary surely wouldn’t win in the general election. 

What could possibly be wrong with this thinking?

The first thing is that, for example, a Socialist running in the Democratic Party faces a non-Socialist leadership and non-Socialist donor base.  If the leadership of the Party that you are running in doesn’t support you and the big Party donors don’t support you, do you really think you are going to win the primary for that Party?  Yes, people still have to vote for these candidates, but I don’t believe for a minute that anyone will win any Primary election and become the Party nominee who does not have the full support of that Party’s leadership

But wouldn’t other Socialists rally to his cause and provide the support that the Party leadership is not providing?  That would be like a Mom and Pop store trying to survive in the shadow of Walmart.  A political party in existence for 150 years is not going to let some outsider come in and ruin their party (pun intended).

The second thing wrong with the thinking that the primary process is the best place to sort through and weed out all these various Party contenders is that the Primary process strongly favors established candidates with large donors.  Many candidates drop out after the first few primaries even before most of the votes get a chance to even vote for them, because nobody knows them well enough, and their money has run out. 

There are currently 16 or 17 declared Republican candidates, and half will drop out before half of the primaries take place.  If they ran as whatever Party they wanted or even as an Independent, more people would get a chance to learn about them and money would be less of an issue.

We need to demand more choices for President and not let the Parties winnow our selection down to two.  And there is only one thing that stops this from happening, and it is something that voters should have demanded years ago.  It’s already in place in many elections that currently take place in our country, but we need to demand it for all elections, and particularly for the election of the President of the United States.

We must demand that no candidate wins an election without getting a majority of the vote.  It sounds so obvious, but in most major elections, if there are more than two candidates, a person could win the election with as little as 34 % of the vote.  Not only is this absurd, but it is also wrong.  Yet we see it happen all the time and nobody says a word, except before the election warning that third person not to run.

We need more candidates, not less.  And winners must have more than 50% of the vote to win.  In the elections that require this now, they have runoff elections, which frankly can be expensive, and for a Presidential election could be problematic.

The solution for this is a ballot that allows for a second choice.  If the first choice is for a candidate who is eliminated, the second choice becomes valid.  This would save time, money, and ensure that we get the best candidates available.  Now people often will not vote for third party candidates, because they know that if they lose, the election would probably go the candidate neither of them want. 

Don’t expect our current politicians to suggest this fix to our current election system.  This is something that people need to talk about, write letters about, get the local newspapers involved, and mention to every politician and candidate that we can. 

If I had to make a short list of actions that our country needs to take to save us from the death spiral it is currently in, this would be on it.




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