US presidential hopeful Obama leaves church
To minimise political damages and to ensure ultimately victory in the US presidential election, leading Democratic candidate Barack Obama has quit the controversial Trinity United Church of Christ. Obama was once speculated in Islam-sensitive US to be a Muslim and to dispel it, his campaign has been projecting him to be a very faithful Christian. Isn't it time for us to rediscover the truly timeless insights of Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ? (There are many abridged versions of the magnum opus of the British historian and the latest and shortest edition is The Christians and the Fall of Rome published by Penguin about three years back in London).UM seminar on religions in America' s politics
posted by James Wong Wing-On at 4:46 PM
2 Comments:
EXAMINATION QUESTION:
* Instititionally speaking, between now and a conformation of him officially joining a new church, Obama has no religion. However, ideationally speaking, Obama is still a Christian as long as still believes in Christ and publicly professes to be so. Do you subscribe to the institutionist or ideationalist school of thought on religious affiliation? Give reason or reasons for your views.
Barack Obama's biological father is a Muslim. The man his mother subsequently remarried, and essentially brought him up, is an Indonesian Muslim.
Technically Barack Obama could be considered a lapsed Muslim.
I have no problem with that at all, but I expect in the next few months, that fact will be "subtly" paraded by his political opponents (McCain doesn't have to do it himself), and I'm afraid it will bite deep in post-9/11 America.
A black candidate with a name like Michael Smith with impeccable Southern Baptist Church membership would probably go down better. Unfortunate, but that's realpolitik in the US.
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