Obama speaking of his mother’s beliefs in The Pompous Agent of Fiction, er, The Audacity of Hope…
“For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness. “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 part. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that 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 she would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well.”
It was clearly a moral-relativist upbringing. A “working knowledge of the world’s great religions”? Not sure how religion could get a serious shake, or any sort of moral compass instilled, in a home of two atheist parents. Speaking for myself, had I grown up in such moral flexibility/ambiguity, and political confusion, would likely lead me to join a religion only for the society of it, or perhaps for the ability of that organization to get me where I want to go. That established, it’s not a stretch to believe that Obama chose Christianity with calculation because it might get him the farthest politically with, first, other black Christians in Chicago and then (should he dare to dream) rising to various levels of power within the most Christian country in the world.
Scary to think he might have planned this; that he might have methodically picked a religion like a country club to get gain in the world, but being a believer myself I will refrain from measuring another’s faith as much as possible. I just mention the circumstances as food for thought.
Another interesting quote…
What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy demands is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God’s will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
There’s so much round talking on the Left that one can hardly question whether we’re playing children’s games with conversation. Broken down to the core message, without the spin and lack of resolution, Barack Oblivious is saying “you can’t just use the Bible justify being anti-abortion, you have to use a reason that everyone will agree with” (based on what set of morals he’s thinking I don’t know, but I’ll bite. How about using the secular B.S. he espouses not far before this passage (bold added)…
And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known. She had an unswerving instinct for kindness, charity, and love, and spent much of her life acting on that instinct, sometimes to her detriment. Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, she worked mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. She raged at poverty and injustice.
Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional.
Wouldn’t his secular mother then have instilled in him the “reverence for life” that would conflict with the convenience of liberal abortion? He seems to have difficulty reaching obvious conclusions when they conflict with the liberal voting block.
He continues…
In a sense, my dilemma… mirrors the broader dilemma that liberalism has faced in answering the religious right. Liberalism teaches us to be tolerant of other people’s religious beliefs [does it?], so long as those beliefs don’t cause anyone harm [like a defenseless unborn baby?] or impinge on another’s right to believe differently. To the extent that religious communities are content to keep to themselves and faith is neatly confined as a matter of individual conscience, such tolerance is not tested.
But religion is rarely practiced in isolation; organized religion, at least, is a very public affair. The faithful may feel compelled by their religion to actively evangelize wherever they can. They may feel that a secular state promotes values that directly offend their beliefs. They may want the larger society to validate and reinforce their views.
And when the religiously motivated assert themselves politically to achieve these aims, liberals get nervous.
I would be glad to keep specific religion out of the public square (mostly because I wouldn’t have the patience to listen to Mulsims and VooDoo practitioners trying to get equal time) but certainly in all cases my belief that a person who believes in any brand of monotheism is a good thing. Cards on the table, anyone who thinks we’re an accident, or that there is nothing/no one behind all of this, gets no respect from me (and frankly they should be granted a pair of spectacles and a quiet place to think until the obivous occurs to them).
So that said, I will clarify that I don’t want religion systematically installed in the public square for the above reasons, but conversely it should not be forcibly withheld from the public square either. The desires (not rights) of the godless (12% of the U.S. population) should certainly not have the power to silence and suppress the desires of the many (85% of the U.S. claims Christianity).
Evangelism is a good thing. If any of us has found an eternal truth, the greatest thing we can do is share it with our fellowmen. I have a very clear set of beliefs of which I’m certain and confident, yet I see the evangelical efforts of those with different beliefs as a positive thing. My thinking is that anything that causes a man to believe in God is a good thing. Even if the belief system doesn’t mesh with mine, at least that person is now thinking about spiritual things and the importance, purpose, and meaning of this life a little more. That kind of thinking leads to prayer. Prayer leads to more personal revelation about eternal truth and the cycle continues. It’s a beautiful thing.
So no, I think we should all preach to each other always, and not be offended at the differences but take those things that touch the heart and soul and add them to our beliefs. Having the faithless keep me from exercising mine in public is against everything this country should and did stand for. The atheist activists can go pound sand for all I care. The arrogance of believing everything’s an accident is where my Christian patience ends. But I love them anyway, as best I can, and hope for their comas to end. Perhaps we should shake them harder.