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

Friday, April 15, 2022

ranked choice voting - why it's good and what to watch for

Mona Charen didn’t make the best case for ranked-choice voting (RCV) by focusing on extremists.  (Ranked-choice voting would help neutralize extremists, April 15)

In our current two-party election system, most elections only give us two major choices, so the winner will get more than 50% of the vote.  If you think they are extreme, fine, but most people still wanted them over the alternative.

There are other, better reasons to use ranked choice voting.

First of all, it finally breaks the two-party system on elections.  I remember when we had Hillary and Trump in the Presidential election, and I thought, 300 million people in our country and only two choices for President?

When there are more than two candidates in a race, our current system allows a winner to get less than 50% of the vote, which is both stupid and wrong.  People often don’t vote for who they really want, because that third candidate usually splits the vote of one party and essentially gives the election to the other party.

With ranked choice voting, you can vote for who you really want without worrying about that helping the other side.

But even more important than that, ranked choice voting finally ensures that whoever does win, they will have more than 50% of the vote.  They will often have far more than that.  It’s the only way to ensure that the person with the most support wins. 

An alternative to RCV is to have runoffs, but not only is that far more expensive, it becomes less useful the more candidates there are in the race.  The last mayoral race in Chicago had a runoff with two candidates who each got less than 20% of the vote in the primary.  That means that more than 4 out of 5 people didn’t vote for them the first time around.  That’s not right.  RCV would fix that. 

I do offer two caveats for RCV. 

With the use of computers, results should be known the night of the election.  I hear that in some cases, it took a lot longer to determine the winner.  That’s where we need to be careful and watchful.  Too many opportunities for mistakes and mischief.

My second caveat is that in complicated elections, like with a lot of candidates, all results should be double checked by hand.  Computers can be programmed.  Hand recounts are costly and time-consuming, but the benefits of RCV are well worth it.

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