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

Thursday, April 14, 2022

Are open primaries a good idea?

The Tribune hosted a major opinion piece contending that open primaries will cure what most ails the state of Illinois.  (To remake Illinois politics for the better, we need open primaries, April 14)

His biggest issue seems to be that “in election after election, as many as half of Illinois House members have run unopposed,” and “uncontested and lightly contested elections tend to skew policy in favor of powerful special interest groups at the expense of everyone else.”

He believes that having open primaries will solve this problem by allowing “independent-minded candidates to run for office,” and voters will get to “choose the best candidate for the job.”

But what stops that from happening now?  The independent-minded candidates can run for office now.  If races are uncontested or lightly contested, it’s because Republicans aren’t even fielding candidates.  The field is wide open for anybody to run now.

The question is why they don’t.

I will give you three reasons why independent-minded candidates aren’t running for office in Illinois.

1)      The districts are gerrymandered to favor the Democratic candidate.  I tried to help the Republican candidate for Congress last time around, and I noticed that the district was shaped like two fists joined together by the thumbs.  The legislators picked their voters very carefully.

2)      The second reason is that they don’t trust the voting system in Illinois.  Last time around, there were some very close contested races that took days to determine, and voila, the Democrat won.  Was there any doubt? 

3)      When there are more than two candidates running for the same office, a person doesn’t need a majority of the votes to win, so in a three-way race, a person only needs to get as little as 34% of the vote.  That’s both dumb and wrong.

Open primaries won’t give the voters the best choices, because candidates don’t declare their parties then.  Now, more than at any time in our nation’s history, party affiliation will tell you more about that candidate than all their political speeches combined.  Party affiliation in general will tell you more about their priorities, their view of the role of government and their position on many of the major issues.

And the writer concludes his piece by advocating for non-partisan election maps.  Whatever that means.  As long as map-drawers have access to voting records and patterns when drawing maps, they will always create contorted maps to achieve their own political goals.  Is a non-partisan goal creating districts that are all divided 50-50, ensuring that half the district will never like their representative?  I contend that the only way to draws maps fairly is to draw them blindly.  The only information a person should have when drawing a map is where the people live.

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