Mike, I've been reading your blog for awhile and enjoy your perspective on life and living. I wrote a post on my blog a few weeks ago about how I couldn't understand why someone would consider not voting. Voting is not an inherent right -- had I lived in this country 100 years ago, I wouldn't have had that right. My predecessors in women's rights fought for decades and generations for that right against strong opposition. Coincidentally, some of the opposition was supported by Christian teaching of the day. So I vote because I don't want to lose this right. I wonder if people would throw away the right so easily if they thought they might lose it.

Welcome Heather.

I agree. The fact that millions of people have been and/or continue to be disenfranchised makes exercising my right to vote all the more important. People are fighting and dying in some parts of the world for the right to have a say in their own governance, so it seems insensitive and even arrogant of me to choose to throw my own vote away based on some religious notion of "purity".