Obama - an atheist in Democrat’s robe

January 19th, 2007
Opinion, Politics

Coming across a post on the Labour Humanist blog, I tracked back to The Friendly Atheist (blogger) and PZ Myers blog (Pharyngula) and have to put in a couple of pennies worth here from the hills of Vermont. I took a few hours and thoroughly enjoyed reading “Audacity of Hope” – at my wife’s urging. She’s an Obama fan from the last DNC. As it turns out, I had also just recently entertained myself reading Harris “The End of Faith” and Dawkins “The God Delusion”, so I had a particular sensitivity to the issue - as it were.

One (very carefully sought out) perspective in reading “Audacity” is that Obama is most probably an atheist. One will never know of course as he aspires to a career in politics. But as Dawkins and Harris both point out, somewhere in the political world there HAS to be an atheist hanging around. I hardly find Obama “pious”. Rather I find him very polished (almost Teflon – but in a non-pejorative sense) – and thus somewhat refreshing. Charisma is needed together with a fresh (unaccomplished) approach to address the problems we will be facing come 2008. And frankly a secular approach to energy and the economy (one and the same) will require some strong persuasive skills. A faint hope is this man can put together an agenda that relies on good old common sense and some national pride. He needs to have the religious right believe in him at any rate and I suspect that he understands that. A debate about teaching ID v. Darwin is of course absurd… but honestly the real debate is not that.

But then I’m not holed up in the Ivory Tower. (envy)

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