There has been some discontent with Mr. Obama's speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, where he delivered the following cautionary historical snippet:
Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
On their face, his words seem to mean more than one thing. One that occurs to me is that we ought to keep our moral outrage and our thirst for vengeance within some kind of reasonable bounds, since our Christian ancestors have done awful things. In short, don't imagine that you are somehow a superior, far more civilized creature than your average ISIS jihadi for the mere reason that you find cutting off the heads of innocents one of the lower forms of barbarity. Another implication seems to be that there is a perfect historical and moral parallel among the jihadis, the Crusaders, the inquisitioners, the American slaveholders, and the 20th century segregationists. All are the same manifestation of evil under different religious guises.Obama's upbraid was clearly aimed at Christians who, from their high horses, seem to be the major obstacle to progress in our time. I say this because the atheist regimes of the last century, who, in the name of Nothing, slaughtered more people than all the Christian inquistions and wars of religion put together, do not seem much on his mind. Of them he makes no mention. Maybe it was just an oversight.
A third implication of Obie's words is that one religion is just about as good as any other. They all do wonderful things when adherents remain true to the purity of original doctrine. A Muslim is just as likely as a Christian to revere with an honored deference the gentleness of women, to give of his substance to those in need, to turn the other cheek, to believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, to love his enemies and do good to those who persecute him, in sum, to love his neighbor as himself. Love is very much on the Islamic mind. Or maybe it's peace, because it is a religion of peace, and you can't have peace without love.
We know this about Obama because he can't bring himself to juxtapose the words 'Islamic' and 'terrorism' in the same sentence. He has flatly informed us that the terrorists are not Islamic. He knows this because he also knows - as he does of Christianity - what true Islam is. He's never actually told us what true Islam is, even though he claims to know. But somehow he knows. He has not, to my recollection, recited any verses from the Koran that communicate the pure doctrine, elucidated any works of their theologians, directly quoted any words of the Prophet himself, nor parroted portions of any Imam's sermon. And yet, he assures us, he knows.
It may seem odd to many that a man who calls himself a Christian sees no advantage to worshiping a God-Man (Christ) as opposed to a mere man (Muhammed) claiming to be God's messenger. If he thinks his religion true, why would he not think it superior to any other? A Muslim will insist, I'm sure, that Allah is his object of worship. But if no worship of Muhammed is intended, why is it that crafting a picture of the man on a piece of paper, or casting him in sculptured stone, can get you killed? Obama would say that only terrorists make such threats (and sometimes carry through on them). But if so, why don't any Muslims defy the ban? Ever. And why doesn't Obama ask: how come Christians don't behave this way? A reputed artist can sink the crucifix in a bottle of piss, display it in a museum, and have his ego stroked by the oohs and aahs of an appreciative intelligentsia. Some Christians will inevitably protest, but no one dies.
Obama doesn't say the things he does merely because he is morally, theologically and historically stupid. (I'll leave it to the historians to deconstruct his mistakes. See the link to Madden's article above, among many others that could have been given). It's simply that his faith lies elsewhere, in some brand of irreligion. The world would be far less vexing to him if religion did not exist. He appears, really, to have no use for it. In his contention that Muslim extremists are not really Muslim, and that Christian extremists not true Christians, he also appears to strike a pose of superiority, to hold himself above the fray, possessing a wisdom not available to those he condemns. Between the extremes of perverted faith and a politically fatal nihilism, he knows another way, a third way, if you will. Since he calls himself a Christian, let's grant that he is in fact compelled by his Christian convictions. Then he must believe that his way is what Christianity would look like if it were truly Christian.
This will likewise compel the listener to ask certain questions and to entertain certain conclusions:
1. Now that slavery and Jim Crow are behind us - (presumably, since the Obama justice department often conducts itself as though racism were as rampant as ever) - does Obama think that Christian extremism in this area still exists? He doesn't really say. If he does think so, he ought to point the finger in some direction. And if he did, he could only say of them, "Those aren't real Christians." Were some of the attendees at the National Prayer Breakfast real Christians in Obama's book? If so, why was he upbraiding them, since they aren't the kind of people who would do the sorts of things that so exercise him? Some of us who just can't let things go still wonder why Obama sat in Jeremiah Wright's church all those years listening to the pastor "goddamn America" according to the gospel of racial hatred. Is Jeremiah Wright an extremist? Obama was eventually forced to distance himself from the man, but it would be nice to hear him say it: "Jeremiah Wright is not a real Christian." I would also like to hear him say: "Louis Farrakhan is not a real Muslim." Or must you literally kill someone before you can rise to the level of extremist?
2. Concerning the honor of women, and our obligation to accord them full liberty and justice, does Obama still think that there are extremists marching beneath the Christian banner who would deny this most urgent duty? It seems he must. I don't see how he can avoid calling the Catholic Church an extremist cabal of woman-hating celibate zealots. Why else would he try to force all of its affiliated institutions to pay for drugs that mutilate a woman's God-given reproductive and biological beauty, something that they (the institutions) consider a grave evil, and destroying in the process a religious liberty of long-standing? Such destruction is only attempted when the force aligned against you is itself perceived as manifestly wicked in the extreme. The Church thinks out-of-wedlock fornication an evil, but calls the babies that result gifts from God. Obama hasn't said much (anything?) about the evil of fornication, but he has quite clearly called the fruit of the womb, whether in or out of wedlock, a punishment. A baby unwanted or unplanned is bad. Which leads us to...
3. ...the fact that Obama has lent his moral support to the greatest single slaughter of innocents in mankind's history, that perpetrated against the unborn, and the born alive (those who didn't "come out all limp and dead"), of which the Islamist fanatics who aren't really Muslim have a version, differing from his own in that they prefer the innocents to be out of the womb while he prefers that they remain within. I can't help but see a similarity between beheading an innocent in the Middle East and snipping a spine - or sucking out the baby's brains with a vacuum - in Philadelphia. Obama didn't say much (anything?) during the Gosnell mess, but the Catholic Church considers abortion of any kind an abominable crime. Obama thinks it a woman's constitutional and moral right. How can he not see the Catholic Church as extremist? And does he think that those extremists (the ones who believe that babies in the womb are human beings) are real Christians?
4. One way to avoid the punishment of an unwanted baby is to encourage the formation of healthy, intact families, which means, quite frankly, a mother and father in the home, where the sex between man and woman, and any consequent children whether planned or not, are protected by a vow of lifelong commitment. By love, in other words. I have not heard Obama say much about this, either; on the contrary, he has (in my extremist formulation) encouraged the abolition of marriage itself, propagandizing in favor of perverse alternatives that dishonor not only women but the very Scriptures upon which he hangs his soul. He has invoked the golden rule to justify his support of the homosexual marriage mirage, while the Catholic Church - and many millions of Christians outside its fold - condemn the arrangement as not only metaphysically illiterate, but morally reprobate. Someone's on the wrong side of the truth here, for the positions are radically, diametrically opposed, utterly incapable of reconciliation. Are those millions of Christians extremists, attempting to justify a terrible discrimination in the name of Christ, or are they 'real Christians'? If the former, shouldn't he say so? As a matter of honesty? A little of it, so I've heard, goes a long way with the American people.
We could go on, of course, but it should suffice to note that a Christian in the Obama mold - a real Christian - will hold to a creed that has almost nothing in common with that of his Christian forbears. Some of those forbears would likely consider him a rather pathetic and highly mediocre omen of the anti-christ. But those people were probably extremists. Dismounting my high horse, I am glad to be among their number. And may God - the extremist God of traditional Christianity - bless America.
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