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

Saturday, July 6, 2019

a plan to end gerrymandering - a letter to somebody with more influence than me


I am glad that you are fighting to end gerrymandering.  It has been an issue for me for years.  Finally, I hear others talking about it as well.

To be honest, I am not hopeful for the measures I have seen to replace it.

For one reason, they all talk about competitive districts.  I live in Wilmette.  Say, for example, Wilmette was the size of a standard Congressional District, and it was heavily Republican.  Should Wilmette be broken up and added to other districts to make the races more competitive? 

Chicago is highly Democratic.  Should it be divided up like spokes on a wheel to link each part of Chicago with a Republican-leaning suburb? 

The answer in both cases is no.

Districts should not be drawn up with any political end in sight.  If an area is highly one way or the other, it should be left alone.  It’s not the lack of competition that is the problem; it’s when districts are drawn to remove the competition. 

A second reason, and the courts have agreed on this, is that they all talk about creating minority districts.  Districts must be contrived for the sake of certain minorities so that that minority has enough of a majority in that district to most likely elect a minority to office. 

What’s wrong with that?  First of all, that is one of the complaints about gerrymandering.  Put as many of a certain constituent into as few districts as possible.  You may concede a few seats, but you have diminished their overall influence in the legislature.  Is it better to have, say, one black in the legislature than having blacks as a minority in a number of districts, so that there are a lot of representatives who have to consider blacks in their policy decisions?

And which demographics is so favored to have a district carved out just for them?  Is it only on racial lines? And which races or ethnicities?  Just blacks?  Hispanics?  What about Muslims?  Orientals?  (I use the word orientals, though it is out of favor today, to distinguish Far Eastern Asians from, say, Indians, Iranians, or Pakistanis.)  Heck, what about Polish, or Jews?  What about Catholics or Protestants?  You don’t think they all have some unique interests that deserve special attention?

With these two factors, we will end up with electoral districts as misshapen and contorted as any gerrymandered district is now.  Is it fair because both parties agreed to it?  A compromise? 

Any demographic can be used to draw a map that favors or disfavors any party or policy.  If Hispanics favor Democrats, then a Hispanic district becomes a Democratic district. 

I submit that the only way to draw a district is to admit no demographic information to the committee but where somebody lives.  Follow natural border lines as much as possible, city, county boundaries, major divides, like large rivers, lakes, mountains, highways, etc.

Somebody will always complain about the results, but they will be able to look at a map and see that nobody was trying to screw anybody over.  All the districts will be as normally shaped as towns on a map.

Thank you.  I wish you well.  Keep up the good fight.

Larry Craig


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