stopping violence

Two days and two letters to the paper about how to solve the problem of violence in Chicago. (Wrong ideas on how to curb violence, January 30; Chicago’s leaders fail over and over to find a solution to gun violence, January 31)

I have to say that I don’t think either letter has any better answers.

The first letter suggests that the violence problem is everybody else’s fault.  If only everybody else would do more and spend more money, surely that would do it. 

The writer lists a number of things that we as a society need to spend money on that will no doubt end violence, starting with vacant lots and public education for 3 year olds and opening more grocery stores. 

I submit that ultimately violence is a personal problem.  People are responsible for their lives and the choices they make. 

People driven by anger, hatred, frustration, greed, or envy and who have no working conscience and no love or respect for other human beings are willing and even able to unleash evil on and hurt other people. 

How is any amount of money going to change that? 

Both letters say it’s about money and mentoring. 

But every child begins life with two built-in mentors.  They are called father and mother.  There used to be a stigma for people who had kids when they weren’t married, but we didn’t want people to feel bad about themselves, especially when it was for something that they did themselves, so we essentially encouraged people to have kids without the stable family structure of a father and mother. 

Having a father and a mother together can at least have one person providing for the family while the child is young enough to require constant attention.  Why do I insist on a father and a mother?  Because that’s the only arrangement where the child will have both of its original parents in its life, and generally they are the two people who will love that child more than anyone else.

Ending violence requires a change in people’s hearts so that they now love other people instead of hating, envying, or resenting them.  And when we still allowed God to be a part of our public life, people learned to have a fear of God, knowing that they will be held accountable for their lives at some point. 

It is a fear of God and a love for people that will end violence in society. 

 

abortion and the right to life

A reader to a local newspaper wrote a letter and raised the question of the rights of the unborn. Unfortunately, he never tried to answer the question.  I will try.

Our nation is founded on two fundamental principles:  1) All people are created equal, meaning, that nobody has a divine or inherent right to rule over other people; and 2) God, our creator, has given human beings unalienable rights, rights that precede and supersede government, rights that the government did not give and that the government cannot take away.

These rights include the right to life.

The issue as regards the unborn is when do they get this right.

It seems to me that if we are even asking this question, then we are assuming that we have the right to decide that.  As if it is our right to give the child this right.  Like we have a right to decide whether this child lives or dies.

Is it after the child fully exits its mother’s womb?  Is that when the child receives the right to life?  Sometimes babies are born during an abortion process, and they then let the child die.

What about during the process of birth?  Does a child receive the right to life then?  Many abortions are done at this time.

At what point before birth might this child receive this right to live?  But again, why do we act as if it is our right to decide this?

And this is where and why our country is so divided on this issue.

Our country was founded on the belief that human life was created by God and that He gave all people unalienable rights.

If people were not created by God but are merely the results of random and necessary chemical reactions, then life has no meaning or importance beyond what we choose to give it. 

But the Bible, which used to be a major part of the public education in our country and is still regarded by a large majority of people in our country as God’s guide to life, speaks often of life before the womb, people whose lives were chosen by God before they were born and their whole lives were planned out ahead of them as well.

Is a child a restriction on a woman’s rights, or is it the greatest privilege that God can give to a human being?  God created the first human beings, but now we, we, create all the new ones.  Beings in the image of God, we get to create them.

Having a child is like the king himself came to your house and told you that you have been chosen for a very special mission.  You are being entrusted with the task of raising the next creation of God.  You are to nurture and instruct this new living being in the wisdom of life. 

The issue isn’t woman’s rights.  The issue is: what is this thing that we want so much to be able to kill?

 

 

Is it unconstitutional for our government or our country to favor one religion over another?

We are told that our government must be neutral with regard to religion, and this stems from things that the court called supreme has said.

The problem is that not favoring one religion over another is impossible.

It begins with your definition of religion. Webster sees it as an: “institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices.”  That’s true but hardly the whole picture.

In modern thinking today, a religion is basically and essentially a set of beliefs.  Period.  A set of beliefs that has no normative value.  Meaning, that they are all personal beliefs.  Like, I like classical music, action movies, fast foods, and old cars.  That doesn’t mean that you should too or that I think the government should favor classical music, action movies, fast foods, and old cars either.

But is that all a religion is?

Actually, no.  Far from it.

A religion is a worldview, a systematic description of life, all of life, defining all important aspects of it.  What is good, what is bad, what is important, what is not, what is right, what is wrong, what are the rules, are there any rules?

Is there a God, or is there not a God?

If a worldview believes that there is a God, it is called a religion.  If a lot of people share that same worldview, they give it a name.

But everybody has a worldview.  You have a worldview.  Countries have a worldview.  The worldview is that view of life out of which they write their laws and develop their policies.

So what is the worldview of the United States?

I admit that it is changing.  Or at least the perception of it is changing.  

The worldview that created our country is clear from our founding documents.  If we don’t follow it or even know what it is, our country will gradually morph into something else, but it won’t be the country we were given.  The name will be the same, but it won’t be the United States that our Founders created.

For example, the single most defining statement of the United States is that God gave unalienable rights to human beings, and governments exist to secure those rights.  Today we talk about God as a belief; the Founders considered that a fact.  The Founders didn’t just believe that God gave unalienable rights to human beings; they called it a fact.

These rights come from God.  That means that they precede and supersede government.  That means that government did not give them, and government cannot take them away.

So at bottom, our government has to support theism over atheism.  We can’t even talk about the foundation of our country without talking about God. 

There are a lot of people who insist that we can’t do that.  The government must remain neutral on that point.  But it can’t.  That would destroy our nation right at its roots. 

Disagree with it if you want, but that’s the United States.  Remove that from our nation’s consciousness and its laws, and you no longer have the United States.  Oh, it will still have the same name, but it won’t be the same country.

And, frankly, this is at the heart of our country’s political divide today, though it’s rarely talked about.  For obvious reasons.  If people knew what the real issues were, they would see them in an entirely different light.

But we need to take this a step further.

These unalienable rights include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Without naming names here, there are religions that don’t believe in a right to life or a right to pursue happiness, as the Founders understood it.  Not every God or religion would say that human beings have unalienable rights given to them by God.

And how would the Founders even know that God had given these rights to human beings?  What was their source of information?

In short, the answer is the Bible.  It was the Bible that informed our Founders of these rights.  That’s why the First Congress had Bibles printed to be used in all our public schools.  If we don’t teach each succeeding generation the values and principles of our country, we will lose them in a generation or in several, as the older generations die off.

The First Amendment, rather than removing religion from all facets of our public life, policy, and education, only removed the government from choosing which Christian denomination is to be preferred in our country, as they already had done in Europe, where England had, and still has, the Church of England (the Anglican Church) and other countries had the Lutheran or Reformed or Roman Catholic Churches as their preferred choices.

The fact is that without the Bible and Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’t have the United States of America.

This doesn’t mean that other religions are denigrated or ignored; it just means that our country is based on Christian principles.  That’s why we have the freedoms we do.

Some countries have the worldview that there is no God.  Their system is repressive; they persecute people who do believe in God.  And the people are under strong control of the government.  A lot of countries have a worldview of Islam.  They too persecute people who have other beliefs.

We are told that we are a secular country, and that is why we have all these freedoms.  But that is not the reason.  All those freedoms are from when we remembered our roots and still had God in our public life and consciousness.

The people today who are promoting secularism the most are the same people that want to limit the rights that we have known since our nation’s founding, most particularly, the right to free speech, a free press (think social media here too), free exercise of religion, and the bearing of arms. 

The more secular a society becomes, the more restrictive it becomes, the more fearful of the free exchange of ideas, the more need for a strong government to exercise control over everybody.  It’s the secular societies that feel the need to remove the undesirables from their midst. 

A free society has problems, yes, because it’s free.  It’s not trying to control people.  It relies on people controlling themselves, because they fear God and are taught to love people.  You have the freedom to act and talk stupidly as long as you don’t cross the lines.  Where are the lines drawn?  The Ten Commandments.  Don’t murder, steal, take somebody else’s wife, make false charges, and leave what belongs to other people alone.

Government cannot and should not tell people what to believe.  But it does need to teach each generation the principles on which our country was formed.  People are created equal and that same creator gave them certain basic rights. 

That is who we are as a nation.  That has made the United States the freest and most prosperous nation in the world.  Not knowing and not acknowledging our heritage gradually diminishes our freedom such that we will no longer know what it meant to be free.

 

what to do about climate change

Climate change is probably considered the most important problem we face in the world today, according to most of the people whose opinions our society most highly regards.

The basic culprit in changing the climate is carbon dioxide emissions. 

So we have essentially two options here: reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

OR, convert it to oxygen.

Reducing carbon dioxide emissions involves retooling the entire world’s energy systems, replacing it with a new system, at the cost of trillions and trillions of dollars, to be paid through higher taxes and inflation, and which would probably be too little too late.

OR, we could plant a billion trees.  Trees feed on carbon dioxide and give back oxygen. 

My question is: why is nobody, NOBODY, talking about planting billions of trees, or millions even, to reduce the levels of carbon dioxide without disrupting the energy system that has made modern living possible?

Is it because arborists are not big political donors?  Is it because there is not a lot of money to be made by planting trees?  Is it because there are no government subsidies and grants for tree planting?

Regardless of however else you want to solve this problem, if the powers that be are not actively engaged in planting as many trees as possible, I seriously doubt that they believe in the danger of climate change.

getting elections right

One of the most important election reforms needed today is a system that ensures that winning candidates get more than 50% of the vote in order to win.  As it is now, if there are more than 2 candidates running, a person can win without getting a majority of the votes.  And not only that, but generally a third candidate will split the vote of one party, so that the other party wins.

If there are three candidates running, somebody can win with as little as 34% of the vote.  Four candidates, 26%.  Five candidates, 21%

We now have 5 Republican candidates for governor.  I have written to four of them already about this, but I haven’t gotten any responses, so I don’t know if they even saw what I wrote.

How will they feel if someone wins the primary with, say, only 25% of the vote.  Not only is that wrong, it’s stupid.

How do you expect to get the best candidate if most people in your own party didn’t vote for him?

We had a mayoral race in Chicago that had 15 candidates in the primary.  Nobody got more than 50% of the vote, so they had a runoff.  So far so good.

The runoff was between the two leading candidates, each of whom got less than 20% of the primary vote.  That means that more than 4 out of 5 voters didn’t choose them.  Four out of 5 voters could have hated them, but we don’t know.  But one of them is now the mayor.  I think the mayor is going a good job, but this is no way to elect a mayor.

Alaska is introducing a new system.  Their approach has two key components. 

The first is ranked choice voting.  When there are more than two candidates running, people often face a voting dilemma.  Usually some of these candidates will split the vote of one party, so that the candidate of the less favored party wins the election.  So people are afraid to vote for that ‘other’ candidate so as not to split the vote and then give the election to the person furthest from their political views.

With ranked choice voting, you can vote for that ‘other’ candidate, and if they don’t make it, your vote can go for that moderate candidate, so the vote is not split.

That’s a major win for our elections.

But they added a second component which I think destroys any advantage they hoped to gain by the first move.

They want to have non-partisan elections.  Instead of each party having their own primaries, they would have a general primary, and the top four candidates would meet in the general election.

Their thinking is that this will force candidates to try to appeal beyond their base, but that’s what they do anyway in the general election anyway.  So this is not really a valid argument.

But what it does do is to conceal the candidate’s political party. 

Is that important?

Yes.  Immensely important!

Why?

Because our political parties today are divided at the very foundation of their beliefs.  Every candidate will talk about creating jobs and boosting the economy, but each party will have totally different ways to achieve those goals and totally different ways to evaluate their success. 

Our two major political parties have two entirely different visions for our country, its priorities, even its history.

So essentially, the single most important thing we can know about almost any candidate is their party affiliation.

Look at Congress now where the Senate is evenly divided between the two parties, and they can’t pass a thing.

The bigger reason why this isn’t happening is that most bills are so large they contain dozens of things that people will disagree on, so you can’t even debate the bill.  But that’s another issue. 

But the divide in the Senate illustrates the vast divide in political thinking in our country.  Remove the party labels when choosing, say, Senators, and they will often look alike in their promises, but when they get to the Senate, they will divide according to the general direction each party is heading.

To allow candidates to run for office, whether it is for a local school board or governor of the state, without declaring a political party is actually political deception under the guise of bipartisanship and trying to gain broader appeal. 

Ranked choice voting is essential in electing the best candidates for any office.  Knowing the candidate’s party affiliation, meaning, their political philosophy, is also essential in electing the candidates the people really want.

voting rights: what are they? are they being suppressed?

There are two major bills in Congress now that for some reasons only one party is enthusiastic about. 

Both bills are framed as voting rights bills, that somehow, someone, like the other party, is trying to suppress the voting rights of millions of other people.  But then when you look at the bills and what they want, I find it hard to think what voting rights are being suppressed.

The bills, or bill, do address the issue of whether people who have been incarcerated have a right to vote.  The Constitution doesn’t even talk about who can vote, except for the 26^th Amendment that allows people as young as 18 to vote, but it doesn’t say that every person over 18 has a right to vote such that the government cannot restrict that.  Then there is the Fifteenth Amendment that suggests that criminals indeed can be restricted in their ability to vote.

The only rights our Founders spoke of are unalienable rights given to us by God.  And when they finally decided to enumerate some of these and codify them in the Constitution as the Bill of Rights, they didn’t think to include a right to vote.

I venture to say that the most important part of the bills in the minds of the bills’ authors and their supporters is allowing all voters to vote by mail.

Is voting by mail a right?  Are people being suppressed if they can’t vote by mail?

Why was it not a right for the last 246 years that we have been a nation?

I submit that fair and free and honest and secure elections are built on three pillars that can only be ensured with in-person voting, such that mail-in voting should only be reserved for rare, necessary cases.

1)                  When people vote in person, we know who is voting.  When ballots are mailed in, we don’t know who filled them out.  But wait.  It seems that to know who is voting somehow suppresses the vote.  Apparently there are millions of people in our country, mostly minorities, who don’t have drivers licenses or other forms of IDs.  And thinking that any person who really wanted to vote could get one in the four years between the Presidential elections is just expecting too much of people. 

2)                  When people vote in person, they vote in private.  Nobody else knows how they voted, and nobody is able to influence that vote.  We don’t know the circumstances under which a mail-in ballot was filled out.

3)                  When people vote in person, each person puts their own ballot into the box, again without anyone else knowing how they voted, thus ensuring that only ballots whose voter’s identify has been confirmed and who voted in private are counted.   With mail-in ballots, stacks of ballots are entered into the machines at one time in full view of the person entering them.  There’s almost nothing to prevent additional ballots from being added to the stack and counted.

 With mail-in voting, all the safeguards that have been at the foundation of our election system for 246 years are cast aside as unimportant and unessential and burdensome. 

I am concerned that by constantly referring to these bills as voting rights bills, people will too eagerly support them without fully knowing the extent, the content, and even more importantly the justification of all the desired changes to current voting practices.

 

 

 

Divided America

A wise man has said that a house divided cannot stand.  Our country has never been more divided than it is today.  A friend of mine disagreed and thought we were more divided at the time of the Civil War.  I said no, because then we were divided only on two issues: states’ rights and slavery.  Now we are divided on everything; and if that wise man is right, we need to focus on uniting our country while we still can. 

I want to discuss 6 key, fundamental issues that are at the root of this division.  There could be more.  I just stopped looking when I got to six, so I could write this article.  But by identifying the issues, we know where we need to focus our discussions.   And discuss them we must.

The first issue is whether the United States is essentially a good country, the freest country in the history of the world, a light on a hill, an example to the nations, or whether our country is fatally flawed, inherently racist and oppressive, founded on hatred for non-whites, and in serious need of a major rewrite of our founding documents.

Another person, a wise woman, once said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.  And herein is the dilemma. 

When you allow people enormous freedom, you are saying that you trust people.  You trust them to do what is right.  Our Founders believed in and believed in teaching our children such things as the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have other do unto you.), and the second greatest commandment, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  All of these are from the Bible.

If our people actually cared for each other and wanted to do what is right, they could enjoy the immense freedoms described to us in the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to our Constitution. 

Some will say that our country’s history of oppression and discrimination against blacks and other minorities proves that we are not a good country.  But like the statement about democracy, any person living here still has more freedom and opportunity than anywhere else in the world.  You can look at instances of discrimination and feel oppressed, or you can look at the opportunities and feel empowered.  The choice is yours.

The second issue is whether our country is inherently religious or secular.  By religious or secular, I mean the structure of the country, not the people itself.  That will follow.

The Declaration of Independence says that our rights are inalienable and come from God.  That means that our rights precede and supersede government.  Government did not give them and government cannot take them away. 

When we say that God gave us these rights, how did we know that He did?  And what God are we talking about?  Some religions don’t believe in a right to life.  Another major one does not believe in a right to pursue happiness, as the Founders understood it.  That’s why God, prayer, and the Bible were part of our public education, public life, and policy making for almost 200 years after our nation’s founding, until the court called supreme said we can’t do that.

When we remove God from our public life and public education and public policy, then rights are no longer inalienable.  They are negotiable, contingent, limited.  They also change in other ways.

Our founding rights were things that we could do without the government’s permission, regulation, or interference.  Now rights have become things to which we are entitled.  Rights are what is owed to us.

Which leads us to the third dividing issue: the role of government.  The Declaration of Independence asserts that governments exist to secure us our inalienable rights.  Now that we have removed God from our public life, education, and policy, government exists to take care of our people.  People have rights to more and more things that the government now must ensure that they have.

And as we are learning, there is not enough money in the world to take care of the people who rely on government to provide for their needs.

The last three issues have become the secular answer to the Ten Commandments, though I don’t know what they call them.  Are they commandments? Edicts?  Goals?

And those are diversity, equity, and inclusion.

So the fourth issue dividing our country is diversity.  We are told that diversity is our strength, but we are not told how or why that is. 

If life was about solving problems such that every different possibility of looking at a problem was needed to reach the best solution, then, yes, diversity is a strength.  But we would be hard pressed to think of an example where we need that.

In real life, people gather with those of common interests.  Churches, clubs, organizations all have common goals and activities that unite them.  Your friends are those you share things with. 

America was founded around a common set of ideals: equality and inalienable rights.  Not equality in that everybody must have the same standard of living, same incomes, same education, but equality such that nobody has a divine or inherent right to rule over other people, like they had in Europe at that time.

We have millions of people who come into our country to live every year, legally and illegally.  Do we even care that they know the principles on which our country was built?  How can we be united if we have a hundred different ideas about what America is?

The fifth issue is equity.

Equity and diversity go together.  We no longer think of our people as Americans, but we are all part of smaller subsets of people, by race, color, religion or lack of one, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, did I miss one, all groups competing for a piece of a limited pie.

We are no longer on one team, America, but we are all on different teams.  As one team, America, we sought out the best and brightest, but now we are more concerned that every subgroup is proportionally represented rather than we have the best people for a position.

Thankfully, we still have sports where people qualify strictly on their abilities and not their membership in various subgroups. 

The last issue is inclusion, where we will demand things of everyone for the sake of a few.  The Chicago Public Schools, for example, no longer has male and female bathrooms.  They are designated by the facilities provided in each one: some have only stalls and some have urinals as well.  Students are free to use whichever one they want.  This means that the vast majority of the students may find themselves sharing a bathroom with people of the opposite sex, which can make them feel uncomfortable and unsafe. 

Is this a wise policy?

We didn’t explore these issues in depth.  But we did identify them, and these are the things we need to talk about, as families, in schools, and in our government halls. 

These are the issues that divide us, and we need to understand them so we can resolve them, so we can heal as a nation.

omicron covid and evolution

 A Tribune reader finds omicron variants to be a strong proof of evolution.  (Evidence of evolution, January 5)

Except that it is not.

No creationist doubts that living things can change over time. 

Those who study DNA now know that the vast majority of DNA variations, or mutations, are not favorable.  Yet we are to believe that random and necessary chemical interactions can create life out of inert matter and can create complex biological systems like the cell, the brain, eyes, and the thought processes and self-consciousness itself.

Sorry.  Life is just too complex and wonderful to think that it is merely the result of chance.  Experience tells us that order and complexity require an intelligence guiding the process.  Random, unguided events only create random results.  If the omicron mutation is a good one, then it’s like flipping a coin and saying that heads is proof of anything.