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

Thursday, August 12, 2021

Is voter suppression really a problem?

No doubt you have heard about the hundreds of bills passed in the different states trying to suppress voting rights and voter turnout.  Evil people and coincidentally all of the same political party.

The Chicago Sun-Times gave a full page to a story about the “battle to pass federal voting rights legislation.”  (Aug. 28 marches for new generation, August 12)  The federal laws are needed to supersede all the malicious laws passed by the states.

The message of the article is urgent, because of “a wave of voter suppression laws” passing in our country.  “Voting rights are under attack.”  There is a “continuing fight for civil rights.”  “suppress voting rights”  “advance voting rights”

At this point, I was really anxious to read examples of these egregious acts of evil people depriving or suppressing people of their right to vote.

Here is a list of the ways that politicians of that other party are suppressing voting and voter rights, according to the article:

1)      banning drop boxes 

Who knew that using drop boxes was a right?  How did we get by for 240 years before this?  You do realize that putting a ballot in a drop box is not actually voting.  You haven’t voted until somebody puts that ballot into the tabulation machine.  When you vote in person, you put it in yourself.  When you use a drop box, you don’t know when or if that ballot is ever counted.  You have no idea if the person collecting the ballots opens each one first and discards the ones they don’t like.  And we don’t know if that person adds a bunch of her own.

2)      banning mail-in voting

Nobody is banning that.  There are always people who physically cannot leave their homes to go somewhere to vote, and they will always be able to vote absentee.

One of the principal tenets of elections in a free society is that people are able to vote in private, free from any outside influences.  When people vote in person, they go to a secluded place and make their choices, away from the eyes and voices of other people. 

We don’t have that with mail-in ballots.  We don’t know if people are pressured to fill out a ballot in a certain way.  We don’t even know who is filling out the ballot.  Plus, when officials have stacks of opened ballots that they then need to feed into a tabulation machine en masse, we have no safeguards that ballots won’t be discarded, changed, or if they even add fraudulent ballots to the pile.  We don’t know.  When people vote in person, you put your own ballot into the box.  That is the safest and most secure way to vote.

3)      slashing early voting hours

Early voting is a relatively new concept.  How is that a right?  And how many days and what hours are you entitled to?  And how are fewer hours suppressing your right to vote?  Nobody thought voter rights were suppressed when everyone had to vote in person on one day for almost our country’s entire history.  It was difficult for some people, yes.  But people planned their lives around that one day, election day.

4)      restricting mail-in eligibility

Two fundamentals of a safe and secure election in a free society: a) ensuring we know who is voting and that they are eligible.  That can only be done in person.  b) ensuring that the ballot is filled out without any coercion or undue influences.  Again, that can only be done in person.

People leave their homes for countless reasons: work, shopping, visiting.  Voting should be another one of those reasons.  Voting by mail is a luxury, not a necessity, for almost everybody.  Asking people to vote in person so we can verify their identity and ensure they vote in private is not a hardship.  Once, twice a year.  Make the effort.

Yes, voting is a significant responsibility in a free society.  The only way we can truly protect that right to vote is to put up the strongest and highest bulwarks against any possibilities of fraud. 

One fraudulent vote can erase your vote.  You’re worried about voting rights, then you need to protect your vote against any possible false votes.  As much as possible, you need to put your vote into the voting box yourself.  That’s the only way you know you voted and that nobody did anything to your ballot.  And the only way you know your vote mattered is if the election tried very hard to eliminate any possibility for mischief. 

 

 

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