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, January 18, 2022

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.

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