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, March 30, 2020

How to Significantly Improve our Representation in Congress


I live in a rigged Congressional District in Illinois.  I don’t say that by the regularly lopsided victories of the one political party over the other, but because of the shape of the district.  It’s like you would make two fists and then join them together by touching your extended thumbs.  I can only conclude that if they had included the skipped over suburbs in the middle, they would have been getting different election results.

There is a push today to change how these voting districts are decided, but the plan that is proposed still justifies creating convoluted voting districts but for different reasons.  The plan would encourage creating majority-minority districts, not thinking perhaps that it is also creating pretty much one-party districts as well. 

So I have a suggestion.  A radical one no doubt, but I think modern technology is able to create solutions to problems that we couldn’t do in the past.

I suggest that we create virtual Congressional districts.  I submit this not only will provide the best representation for our people, but it is the only truly fair way to do it.

Our society insists on putting people into groups, whether by race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, sex, gender, whatever.  Nobody is simply an American anymore.  We all must have one or more qualifying modifiers in front of that.

I suggest that every citizen fill out a form identifying in order what identities they most identify with.  If a majority-minority district is a major priority of political reform groups, then there are a lot of people whose main way of identifying themselves is race.  Others it’s their sexual orientation.
Let people make their own lists.  Am I Christian first, then white, then conservative Republican?  Or am I Republican first, then Christian?  Am I woman first, then a Libertarian?  They can have as many items on their list as they want.  They should be listed in order and allow items to have the same number in importance.

Then let the computers sort it all out. 

There are currently about 711,000 people in a Congressional district in the United States.  So a state needs about that many people in a subgroup to warrant a separate district. 

If my wife puts women issues at the forefront of her political thinking, and I put Tea Party as my number one, then we would have different Representatives in Congress.

So instead of districts listed by numbers, we would have districts listed by groups:  Latino 1,2,3; African-American 1,2,3; white, Muslim, Christian, gay/trans, Democrat 1,2,3, Republican 1,2,3.
The computer may even be able to identify further subgroups: minority Republicans, white Christian, female Democrats, depending on how many items are in a person’s list and the order.

How much fairer can an election be?



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