100 DAYS UNTIL THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Will you go and vote on November 2? Have you decided who you should pick between G.W. Bush and J.F. Kerry? [Editor's comment: Here is another reason why I don't think it is right to vote on a third party candidate...] 

Go and read NS' (Noumenalself.com) post on activism before you go and vote.  It looks like the "compassionate conservatives" are mobilizing their supporters before the Republican national convention in August... I agree with Joel Belz' statement: "Presidential elections, however important, reflect the culture much more than they change it." [Editor's note: I don't know anything about the Christian World Magazine. Do you?] Here is an excerpt from Martin F. Nolan's article, John Kerry should be thankful for the enemies he has made: 

Republicans have owned the religious right since 1980, or is it the other way around? Reagan could deal with puritan busybodies, but his successor could not. In 1992, at the GOP convention in Houston, the handlers of George H.W. Bush handed over prime time to a declaration of "culture war" by defeated candidate Patrick Buchanan. The effect among moderate suburban voters, catastrophic for Bush, helped elect Bill Clinton. (San Francisco Chronicle, 07/25/04.)

UPDATE 07/27/04:

I want to introduce you to The Intellectual Activist Daily's election coverage project called Secularism Reader. Here is an excerpt from Robert Tracinski's article, God, Freedom, and Immortality:

That is the goal of a new project being launched by TIA. Our goal is to create a "Secularism Reader," a series of essays explaining and defending the secular basis of American civilization, while tying the unique achievements of that civilization--especially freedom and individual rights--firmly to their secular foundation.

I chose "secularism" as the central concept of this project, because it names a crucial issue that cuts to the heart of both cultural and political issues, and that names central battles both in domestic American politics and in America's conflicts with its enemies in the Middle East.

The theme of this book will be to show, by reference to philosophical argument, to the lessons of history, and to examples from contemporary politics, that man's most important spiritual values--epistemological certainty, moral clarity, individual rights, and an exalted view of man--require a secular foundation and are destroyed by religion rather than preserved by it. Its goal, in contradiction to Kant, is to show that freedom does not require God and that a reverence for the human spirit does not require a belief in supernatural immortality. (TIA Daily, 07/26/04.)