Jumping Jesus on a fucking pogo stick, how did things get so bad around here that the White House has to do the Press Release thing to remind folks that our President doesn’t have to go swing a dead cat counterclockwise over his head near a fresh grave during a new moon (or what the fuck ever) to get his worship on.
You know what would be awesome? Living in a country where a large minority of folks are not so willfully ignorant-- They seem so afraid of things. it’s sad.
Thank Allah we still have titty bars a block away from Ground Zero.
You’d be better off living in a country where nobody gave a fuck what religion politicians were, where even bringing the issue up is viewed as rude and pointless.
Like me. Living in a such a country, that is, not rude and pointless.
“And so the President is obviously a–is Christian. He prays every day. He communicates with his religious advisor every single day. There’s a group of pastors that he takes counself from on a regular basis. And his faith is very important to him…”
Hmm…Now, perhaps I’m wrong, but haven’t presidents Bush (GWB) and Reagan been pretty viciously assailed around here for saying and doing things like this? And less?
Were they? I thought the problem was not just praying and getting counselling and junk, but implementing Christian beliefs as government policies (or implying that this was a valid and desirable goal).
Well, yeah… and that they might take the sky fairy’s advice seriously. We can’t really know what Reagan and Bush43 were thinking, of course (and whether or not they were simply trying to mollify the fundamentalist part of their political base), but didn’t they say on several occasions that their decisions were guided by religion? I don’t know how often Reagan took this road, but Bush43 seemed happy with it.
No, it was the implementation that lead to the complaints. I think it’s pretty accepted by atheists (if grudgingly) that the realpolitik is that you have to go through the motions of being Christian to be elected Pres in the US. The horror with Bush was that he seemed to do more than go through the motions.
This of course begs the question of why Obama prays daily and feels it necessary to consult with his ‘religious advisor’ daily and ‘group of pastors’ regularly. Just for shits and giggles?
Wait, hold on, I just remembered the answer to the question of why Republicans get grief here for their religious convictions but Democrats don’t. The Democrats are just pretending, you see…putting on a show for the benefit of the religious Philistines who make up this country’s votership.
So, uh, nevermind, I guess.
(One has to wonder though whether Obama lets his religious advisor and group of pastors in on this little deceit.)
I think you’d have to admit that Obama is doing more than just ‘going through the motions’. Going through the motions would be making a show of going to church and things like that, not praying and consulting a religious advisor daily and a group of pastors on a regular basis. If true, that is some pretty heavy-duty religiousity going on there, and if occasional revelations of it weren’t necessary to combat the Muslim thing, we’d never know anything about it.
Oh, I’m prepared to assume that various Republicans were pretending as well, but it’s not their personal religious rituals (or how seriously they take them) that matter, it’s how willing they are to let religion have an influence on policy.
And there’s no “c” in my name, but that doesn’t matter.
I guess “nevermind” is right, because it’s not clear that the “griefers” on this board you allude to exist in the quantity you imply.
So a large percentage of Americans believe Obama is a nigger from the moon. In your estimation this shows that Americans are retarded. Premise granted. But don’t let this fact go to waste. The next time I catch you fretting about (gag!) the Will of the People I want you to remember our Obama, that dusky moor. Consider this yet another teachable moment, in the parlance of our times.
This, exactly. The stupid political reality (in the US) is, you HAVE to either believe in fairies, or pretend to, and I’d personally rather go with the pretenders.
I have an acquaintance who complains that Obama is an “atheist”, and I’m torn between replying, "Thank Og!"and “I wish!”. (But I just keep my mouth shut.)
BTW, as I’m sure you know, marshmallow was only pointing out that you need to be careful whenever you make an *ad populem *argument, because the populus is sometimes straight-up dumb as dirt – so that line of argument could backfire on you.
Personally I’ve always suspected that Obama was a lot more religious than he was letting on, but was not an impose-the-will-of-God-on-the-populace kind of guy so it didn’t matter. I’ve got no problem with him being a man of faith as long as he wasn’t making laws that required everyone else to follow religious-based rules.
I’ve also long suspected that all it takes to convince some people that Obama is a Muslim/atheist/whatever is for him to say anything which suggests that maybe Muslims/atheist/whatever are people too and have the same rights as everyone else. I mean, why else would he say that unless he was one of them???
Really, SA, if you think that the complaint was that he was religious and that Obama should be equally assailed for being religious then you clearly have misunderstood the issue. Bush felt that God was speaking through him and directing his actions, as evidenced by the quote above. Many of us non-religious Americans feel that’s a gross overstepping of boundaries. Your peeps have trumpeted the “BarackHUSSEINObama” thing so much he actually has to defend the fact that he’s a Christian by pointing out that he speaks with Christian religious advisors. The whole thing is fucking ridiculous, not to mention your clearly misguided conflation of the two issues.
