Maybe a better way of asking the question would be:
Does GWB believe that he’s acting on a mandate from God?
That’s different than just acting within thebehavioral bounds outlined by God.
GWB’s proxy spokesman says
Perhaps that at least partly underlies december’s unusually vehement denial? A mechanism to cope with cognitive dissonance?
And keep in mind that when he said those things, Lincoln was not actually a believer (he may have become one at the end of his life however): he simply appreciated that he could not win support without appealing to people’s religious convictions. His private motto on prayer was “What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.” So even if Lincoln used language that suggested he was specially called for God’s will, he pretty demonstably didn’t actually believe it at the time himself.
If God didn’t side with Bush, would he declare Him irrelevant?
I heard an interesting comment from a preach on the radio yesterday. He had been to Washington recently and talked to several Christians who have contact with President Bush and his team. The thing that impressed me was the President Bush asks about any situation: “What is the right thing to do?”.
That does not mean that I always agree with everything President Bush does but I respect his approach much more than our previous President’s method, who seemed to only make decisions based on how the polls told him to swing that particular day.
.02
P.S. Sorry for the rambling sentence. Polycarp might be able to polish it up so that it makes some sense.
Later.
I’m not sure that I would hold too fast to that opinion. According to the Jewish World Review’s Eric Fingerhut, on the first occasion he was indicating that he had been corrected on the issue by no less than Billy Graham and on the second occasion, he was joking.
Now, I’ve got a bit of a problem with someone of Bush’s purported age and education (circa 1993) being so unschooled in his faith that he would accept the extremely simplistic rendering of the most rigid Fundamentalists. However, that is a separate statement from claiming that Bush actually said that Jews could not go to heaven in contradiction of the statements he apparently made.
Thinking that God is on his side is not equivalent to believing everyone else is damned.
tomndebb, He did not say he had been corrected by Graham, he said that Graham had agreed that Jews can’t go to Heaven, but that he shouldn’t get too hung up on it.
The problem is that Bush doesn’t seem to be willing (or able) to recognize that concluding that something is right doesn’t make it so.
Other people are aware that their beliefs about what’s right and what’s not can be mistaken; the rightness of things is ultimately a property of the universe, not of judgments.
Bush asks himself “what’s the right thing to do?”, and then cannot ever be convinced that his answers to that question aren’t correct.
…can you please show me the quotes where bush said this? -for curiousity’s sake.
From the link above:
Graham was also caught on one of the Nixon tapes making overtly anti-semitic remarks.
The second GWB incident may have been a “joke,” (He said, before his first trip to Israel that he was going to tell them theat they were all going to hell) but that’s akin to making a watermelon joke about black people AFAIAC.
Nomadic_One,
Click on tomndebb’s link above for a cite.
No, what is “obvious” is that Bush isn’t well studied on matters of evolutionary theory. So what? This would be a problem only if Bush was responsible for teaching advanced biological principles.
To answer Apos’s question, I would guess that Bush regards some truths as absolute, while others are up to debate. The “truth” that what terrorists did on 9/11 is bad, I would say is pretty absolute. Bush would agree with this. However, the “truth” that we needed to invade Iraq, Bush would not regard as a “truth”, but rather a matter that warrants investigation and critical decision making. In this, I’d think Bush is just like any other rational person.
And to stave off the inevitable “joke”, I’ll make it myself:
“Bush is rational? That’s news to me! Haw! Haw! Haw!”
Jeff
I’d say there is a huge problem if the POTUS wants to allow individual states the option of teaching religious mythology as fact. I would also say that it is inexcusably ignorant for a POTUS not to know that evolution is a fact.
[quoteRecessional
by Rudyard Kipling (1897)
God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine-
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget-lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrfice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget-lest we forget!
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget- lest we forget!
If drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law-
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget-lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In recking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to gaurd,
For frantic boast and foolish word-
Thy Mercy on thy People, Lord!
Amen.[/quote]
Better work on your timing a little. You’ll never make the Borscht Belt with that material, either.
Re Bush’s belief in creationism, I would suggest that yes, it is relevant, as an illustrative example of his thought processes. It shows his willingness to subordinate facts themselves to his own faith, whether religious or only quasi-religious. We’ve seen that, too, in his determination to make war on Iraq, no matter the actual lack of basis of so many of the rationalizations he proposed. It does not speak well of so many Americans, and others, that they share a similar quasi-religious ability to subordinate facts in favor of following someone who seems to them to be anointed by God. But that’s where people who take Fighting Ignorance seriously come in, right?
And while we’re in the quoting business:
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
- Thomas Jefferson
The President’s apparent conviction that there is a concurrence between his will and the Almighty’s will is nothing new in our history. Our governments, state and federal, have long justified local and national and international policies by claiming God’s approval. Witness the westward expansion, the impulse to incorporate Canada, the Prohibitionist Movement, the Abolitionists and the defenders of chattel slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, the Right-to-Life Movement, the Second Amendment absolutists and who knows how many others. Sometimes God’s chosen servants are conflicted, as with the present snake oil for education which seeks to put American public school students on a par with elitist European and Japanese students in mathematics and science yet at the same time wants to put the Genesis creation story or a par with evolutionary scholarship.
People who have a hard time explaining or justifying their policies have long since realized that much criticism can be squelched by asserting the Lord of Host’s support for their policies. When you really, really want to do something that is not as morally palatable as you might hope any number of people will swallow the thing whole when it is sugar coated with a fine dusting of religiosity. Polite people, and most of us are polite, are reluctant to demand to see the transcript of the conversation in which the Almighty expresses His divine will. We do not require a production and inspection of God’s marching orders, let alone counter by saying that we have gotten later orders by a superseding dispatch.
It has always been a marvel to me that almost without exception that when someone seeks God’s approval for a plan of action they find that God is whole heartedly in agreement with them. It also is a marvel that people have the mendacity to stand up in public and claim to be working the will of God and that so much of the public accepts such claims at face value and without question.
In the President’s case, I hope that the President is sincere in his claim to be doing the Lord’s work. I suspect, however, that what we see in the workings of a mind that is not able to grasp any other way to persuade than to claim omnipotence by association and to trump any opposition by resort to an unquestionable authority. We no longer seek the ghostly approval of Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Jackson. Instead our President turns to the ultimate ghostly authority, the Holy Ghost.
It is getting to the point that we seem to have our choice between a government run by well meaning incompetents and one run by ruthless bastards. The trouble is that I can’t tell the difference.
Yeah, heaven forbid we have a politician who actually gives the voters what they want.
Better instead to have a guy who does whatever the damn hell he wants to, and brand anyone who disagrees with him a “traitor.” :rolleyes:
Actually, David Frum has said Bush is pretty much obsessed with the polls and and tailors his policies accordingly, in contrast to Clinto who used them as a means to figure out how best to explain his policies to the public. Clinton was not afraid to make very unpoular choices (remember the liberation of Haiti?).
The September 11th hijackers also thought that God was on their side.