That’s quite the insult to Obama. Only one order of magnitude? One order of magnitude higher that Bush is my brother’s dog from his university days that spent its time eating grass and puking on the couch.

As he’s a scholar of the Constitution, I trust Obama orders of magnitude more than anyone else to continue to recognize (and promote!) the fact that we are a pluralistic society, not a Christian nation. He even has mentioned, in his speeches given at churches no less, that we are not only a nation of Jews and Christians and Buddhist and Muslims, but also of non-believers. In so doing, he doesn’t vilify us.

I can’t even remember a time when non-believers were *mentioned*, much less in as honorable a way as believers, in public discourse.

So while his faith is still a bit disappointing to me, one of the biggest reasons why I support Obama is his overarching view of faith in America — and his understanding that if freedom of religion is to have any meaning at all, it must also mean freedom FROM religion for those who so choose.

Great Blog, Friendly!

Elise

So much for Wright being just a lunatic hater.

Despite all that he does not and cannot say, Obama’s candidacy is genuinely thrilling: his heart is clearly in the right place; he is an order of magnitude more intelligent than the current occupant of the Oval Office; and he still stands a decent chance of becoming the next President of the United States. His election in November really would be a triumph of hope.

Cool – I’m really glad to see Harris is a supporter. He has it so right. Can you even imagine, in your wildest dreams, W. delivering a speech like “A More Perfect Union,” let alone writing it himself? I’d say Obama’s more than an order of magnitude more intelligent than most politicians, and more than that, he’s hugely more authentic and courageous. Hearing someone running for office actually be honest about tough issues is frankly unprecedented in my adult life.

I’m glad he’s no longer affiliated with Obama’s campaign, but it’s still hard for me to understand how someone with Obama’s intelligence could have been influenced into Christianity by someone like Wright.

Hmmm. I’m increasingly starting to realize that you have to be a religious person, or have been a religious believer, to understand the pull of religious belief – particularly in its views about the afterlife. It doesn’t surprise me at all that intelligent people are religious, because the appeal of religion is not intellectual primarily, it’s emotional and “spiritual.”

In his book, Obama talks about his conversion experience being tied in directly with two deep emotional struggles – coping with his mother’s very sad and early death from ovarian cancer, and establishing his identity as a black man in America. Watching his mother die without a hope for heaven (she was an atheist) was devastating to him, I think, and he found a way out of that for himself when he started attending Wright’s church.

I’ve heard several members or former members of that church weigh in on the controversy recently, and they all said that the clips that have been shown were very small portions of what he regularly preached. It wasn’t hatred and vitriol and wild lies week in and week out – but of course those very shocking moments are the ones being emphasized now.

I wish I could believe that Obama has just been going to church for political reasons (instead of going because he believes their theology), but even if that were true, we’d never find out about it.

Actually, I would hate it if I found out he’d been going to church for political reasons. That would totally undercut the way he portrays himself as an authentic person who values honesty. And I admired the way he disagreed with Wright’s more inflammatory comments while not denouncing the man himself. That was rare and brave.

The Religious Right are just as bad, and I would like the media to go after them as well. McCain has reached out a hand to a lot of the worst of them. I’m far more certain McCain is pandering than Obama, and I was impressed with the “agents of intolerance” comment, until he went back on it. McCain goes back on a lot of things it seems, he went from zero-tolerance on torture to “when the president says it’s OK”.

There’s talk of Hillary and her connections to conservative religion with something called the “Fellowship” a.k.a The Family, where she goes to prayer meetings. I couldn’t find too much information on this, but The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power comes out in may, and that’s a freaking long title.

Say what you will about Reverend Wright’s sermon excerpts. I like some of them; I dislike a lot of them.

The key word here is “excerpts.” We’ve seen some snippets of Wright at his worst and/or most offensive, but we are probably not getting a representative sample of his work.

Next, Wright’s sermons, despite the delivery style, had quite a bit of substance to them. You might see longer clips (about 10 minutes each) of his sermons in context:

In the first clip, he is not referring to anything supernatural but rather saying that the humans going from sorrow to having a blood lust for revenge is a very old trait (he quotes a psalm where a lust for a brutal revenge is expressed). In the second clip, he talks about human governments failing to stay moral; his expression “god doesn’t change” can be thought of as “basic human decency doesn’t change (e. g., murder, slavery are evils, then and now).

Sure, BHO had some political reason to want to join at first, but I can see why an intellectual theist would like this church.

I think Tribune columnist John Kass hit it closer to the truth when he said the real thing Wright was “guilty” of was “blasphemy”, not against God but against America. He dared to point out that America is not always the great shining hope it’s politicians (including Obama) like to paint it as, that it is sometimes just as evil and oppressive as any other empire.

I think what’s depressing about Obama (and all other candidates for that matter), is not that they can’t get by without at least nodding towards the altar of the Christian religion, but that they can’t get by without wholeheartedly worshiping at the altar of American civil religion, which makes this nation state the object of all hope and devotion. A less than totally devout Christian may still get elected (there have been plenty of merely nominally Christian presidents in history), but a candidate who is brutally honest about America’s own acts of oppression, and who suggests that we aren’t always (or even usually) the great nation we claim to be… well that person is utterly unelectable.