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

Monday, April 11, 2022

Is Voter Suppression a Problem?

The Tribune thinks that there is an evil plot among Republicans to restrict the voting of minorities.  (A campaign is underway to suppress the right to vote.  It must be defeated, April 11)

Last time around, many states greatly eased election rules, because our nation was gripped with a life-threatening pandemic.  Now any reduction of those modified election rules is seen as suppression.  And suppression aimed at minority voters. 

So what exactly are they doing to suppress voting and particularly to restrict the votes of minorities?

1)      “barriers to voting by mail”   Until the pandemic, there was never felt to be a need for massive mail-in voting, particularly for minorities.  This was only deemed necessary, because people’s lives were in danger if they were to go a polling place.  And certainly the lives of non-minority people would be in the same danger.

 

So why is a restriction on mail-in voting particularly more severe for minorities?  They don’t like interacting with people?  They can’t fit voting in person into their lives, because they all work 2 jobs? 

Mail-in voting should only be used in rare situations, because it violates the very basic principles of a fair and safe election. 

a)       With mail-in voting, we don’t know who is voting.  When people vote in person, we do.  And we usually or should make sure we identify that person too.

b)      With mail-in voting, we don’t know if the person filled out the ballot without interference from other people.  When people vote in person, we know they voted in private, away from the eyes and words of others.

c)       With mail-in voting, we don’t know if the ballots entered into the machine are only the ballots that were mailed in.  When people vote in person, each person puts their own ballot, sight unseen, into the box.  With mail-in voting, stacks of ballots are put in at the same time, in full view of the polling judge, and there is no way to ensure that additional ballots weren’t added to the pile.

2)      “cumbersome voter ID requirements”  Why is a voter ID requirement cumbersome, and why does this disproportionately affect minorities? They don’t drive cars or have bank accounts?  They don’t cash checks?  Who doesn’t have or need an ID? 

3)      “shortened early voting”  How does this restrict anyone from voting, particularly minorities?  The big voting event is once every four years.  If it’s important to you, you make the time for it.  Simple.

4)      Then there were some vague references to “restrictions on what steps election officials can take to help foster voter access” and “harsh constraints on voter registration groups.”  But no details.  If people want to participate in an election once every 4 years that they need to sign up for ahead of time, they have four years to do that.  They shouldn’t need to have some organized group reach out to them.  Anybody who needs that probably doesn’t know enough about what’s going on to make a good choice anyway.

The editorial lauds anything that makes voting easier but shows no concerns about securing the integrity of the vote.  Is the Tribune concerned about whether non-citizens vote?  Making voting easier will make that easier too.  Is the Tribune concerned that additional ballots could be added to massive stacks of mail-in ballots?  Nah, they would only favor their candidate of choice anyway.

 

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