My Take on Barack Obama

I just read an excerpt for Obama's newest book and found it to be a very interesting read. The excerpt can be found at Time Magazine.

First he admits that we are a religious people, note he does not say a Christian Nation. Our founding fathers were Christian and formed the nation in a way to protect our freedom to worship the one true God in our own way. You'll see his definition of religious in a little bit.

"It is a truism that we Americans are a religious people. According to the most recent surveys, 95% of Americans believe in God, more than two-thirds belong to a church, 37% call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people believe in angels than believe in evolution. Nor is religion confined to places of worship. Books proclaiming the end of days sell millions of copies, Christian music fills the Billboard charts, and new megachurches seem to spring up daily, providing everything from day care to singles mixers to yoga and Pilates classes. Our President routinely remarks on how Christ changed his heart, and football players point to the heavens after every touchdown, as if God were calling plays from the celestial sidelines."

Next he says that the biggest gap in the election between the parties is faith. He admits that the Democratic party is playing this card hard in the election process.

"The single biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans is not between men and women, or between those who reside in so-called red states and those who reside in blue states, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don't. Democrats, meanwhile, are scrambling to "get religion," even as a core segment of our constituency remains stubbornly secular in orientation, and fears rightly, no doubt that the agenda of an assertively Christian nation may not make room for them or their life choices."

This is the one that gets me fired up. In his campaign ads he claims to have grown up being taught Christian Values. Yet, in his book be makes the following claims.

"I was not raised in a religious household. My maternal grandparents, who hailed from Kansas, had been steeped in Baptist and Methodist teachings as children, but religious faith never really took root in their hearts. My mother's own experiences as a bookish, sensitive child growing up in small towns in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones. Occasionally, for my benefit, she would recall the sanctimonious preachers who would dismiss three-quarters of the world's people as ignorant heathens doomed to spend the afterlife in eternal damnation and who in the same breath would insist that the earth and the heavens had been created in seven days, all geologic and astrophysical evidence to the contrary."

"This isn't to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her mind, a working knowledge of the world's great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my partno introspective exertion or self-flagellation. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many waysand not necessarily the best waythat man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives. In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist that she would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well. Moreover, as a child I rarely came in contact with those who might offer a substantially different view of faith. My father was almost entirely absent from my childhood, having been divorced from my mother when I was 2 years old; in any event, although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist, thinking religion to be so much superstition."

Then he commits his life to Christ at small community church because he feels the need to connect with others you share his values. He doesn't say he truly believes everything they believe, just that he wants to be a part of the group.

"It was because of these newfound understandings that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God's spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth."

Yet he refuses to speak of his faith as part of his political standings, even though his campaign ads do exactly the opposite.

"To begin with, it's bad politics. There are a whole lot of religious people in America, including the majority of Democrats. When we abandon the field of religious discourse when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations toward one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome others will fill the vacuum. And those who do are likely to be those with the most insular views of faith, or who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends."

This is the one that makes me doubt Obama's commitment to running the Nation as the Christian Nation that it is.

"Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America's population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers."

The following excerpt shows that Obama has not truly understood the very basics of the Christian faith and yet claims to be a Christian man. He may express a "Christian" value system, but is the furthest thing from a true Christian.

"This is not to say that I'm unanchored in my faith. There are some things that I'm absolutely sure about the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, the value of love and charity, humility and grace.

Those beliefs were driven home two years ago when I flew down to Birmingham, Alabama, to deliver a speech at the city's Civil Rights Institute. The institute is right across the street from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the site where, in 1963, four young children Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair lost their lives when a bomb planted by white supremacists exploded during Sunday school, and before my talk I took the opportunity to visit the church."

"I thought of Sasha asking me once what happened when we die"I don't want to die, Daddy," she had added matter-of-factly and I had hugged her and said, "You've got a long, long way before you have to worry about that," which had seemed to satisfy her. I wondered whether I should have told her the truth, that I wasn't sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure of where the soul resides or what existed before the Big Bang. Walking up the stairs, though, I knew what I hoped for that my mother was together in some way with those four little girls, capable in some fashion of embracing them, of finding joy in their spirits."

It just really gets me fired up when political ads say one thing and the politician himself says something entirely different. It just shows that we as a people need to do our leg work before committing our vote to anyone. It is a known fact that all politicians lie to get in office, but to lie about the core of your being, which in my opinion a persons religious beliefs is the core, doesn't make you a lying politician, it makes you a liar.

You might wonder what makes the difference, but too me telling a few falsehoods to make people feel good about your stand on non moral issues such as taxes and the economy is entirely different and a normal, expected political stance. However, to lie about ones beliefs is lying about who you are. It takes a very "special" person to openly lie about your religious background and beliefs. Obama is a person I would have a very hard time trusting to run the country.

So in summary, I say a vote for Obama is a vote against America remaining a Christian Nation. Any Christian thinking about voting for Obama should really begin to look at his religious heritage and his faith to make sure they match the stories he is telling the public during his campaign. He is both "Christian" and "Muslim", "Religious" and "Secular", ""God-fearing" and "Atheist". He is a double-minded man, which is the last thing we need to run this country.