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

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

How to draw new legislative maps

All the states in our nation will be drawing new legislative maps in the next few months. 

The whole issue is under widespread criticism for politicians creating maps with almost predetermined voting outcomes.

I live in a Congressional district that looks like two fists joined by the thumbs.  That cannot be explained except by map drawers who have a certain agenda in mind.

The courts have even supported some mapdrawing to create certain desired effects, like majority minority districts to ensure minority representatives get elected, but what does that do for the other people who live in that district? 

I submit that when the people who draw the maps have detailed information about their constituents, it allows and encourages all manner of mischief, all under the guise of fairness.  But then it all works both ways.

For example, one of the tactics of gerrymandering is to put as many of your opponents into as few districts as possible.  You give them those districts, but in the end, they have fewer total representatives in office.

Yet we are told that this is what we must do for minority communities.  We must create majority minority districts so that they get their minority candidate, but wouldn’t they have better representation if they had minority status in a lot of districts?  Their voices would be heard in more places by people who will listen to them rather than in those few.

I submit that the only fair or unbiased way to draw maps is blindly.  The only thing the people drawing the maps should know is where the people live.  Let natural boundaries like city limits, county lines, major geographical dividers, like major expressways, rivers, mountains, etc., be determining factors and try to make the districts as compact as possible. 

If we create minority majority districts, are we not also creating Democratic districts?  If there are large white areas, will we try to dilute them for the sake of fairness, or something like that?

The Republican proposal calls for the Illinois Supreme Court to appoint 16 independent citizen commissioners with 30 days of the bill’s passage.

So how do they expect them to do that?  Where will they get these people from?  How will they choose them?  Independent?  How will they ensure that? 

Too complicated.  Just remove all demographic data given to the mapmakers.  Simple.  And I won’t care who draws the maps.

 

Posted by at