Barack Obama's Religion

http://is.gd/kvX5

Portion of the book edited out of the audio version:

"I was not raised in a religious household. My maternal grandparents, who hailed from Kansas, had been steeped in religion as children: My grandfather had been raised by devout baptist grandparents after his father had gone AWOL and his mother committed suicide, while my grandmother's parents--who occupied a slightly higher station in the hierarchy of small-town, Great Depression society (her father worked for an oil refinery, her mother was a schoolteacher)--were practicing Methodists.

But for perhaps the same reasons that my grandparents would end up leaving Kansas and migrating to Hawaii, religious faith never really took root in their hearts. My grandmother was always too rational and too stubborn to accept anything she couldn't see, feel, touch, or count. My grandfather, the dreamer in our family, possessed the sort of restless soul that might have found refuge in religious belief had it not been for those other characteristics--an innate rebelliousness, a complete inability to discipline his appetites, and a broad tolerance of other people's weaknesses--that precluded him from getting to serious about anything.

This combination of traits--my grandmother's flinty rationalism, my grandfather's joviality and incapacity to judge others or himself too strictly--got passed on to my mother. Her own experiences as a bookish, sensitive child growing up in small towns in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones. Occasionally, for my benefit, she would recall the sanctimonious preachers who would dismiss three-quarters of the world's people as ignorant heathens doomed to spend the afterlife in eternal damnation--and who in the same breath would insist that the earth and the heavens had been created in seven days, all geologic and astrophysical evidence to the contrary. She remembered the respectable church ladies who were always so quick to shun those unable to meet their standards of propriety, even as they desperately concealed their own dirty little secrets; the church fathers who uttered racial epithets and chiseled their workers out of any nickel that they could."

And Later:

"Moreover, as a child I rarely came in contact with those who might offer a substantially different view of faith. My father was almost entirely absent from my childhood, having been divorced from my mother when I was two years old; in any event, although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist, thinking religion to be so much superstition, like the mumbo-jumbo of witch doctors that he had witnessed in the Kenyan villages of his youth."

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[peaco1000]

His mother seems like a sensible person who would never be a suicide bomber, butcher a child's genitals or seize another person's land claiming instruction from the creator of the universe.

[DigitalPraise7]

I am not an atheist. I Believe Jesus is the ONLY Way to God, but Obama clearly does not.

[StealthMarmot]

A very respectable position to take on religion. Too often one will end up demonizing religion when one should learn and understand it, as an expression of humanity.

Still, I think if one is to remain a rationalist, they will have to keep a certain level of detachment.

As has been said before, it shows an educated mind that allows one to entertain an idea without accepting it.

[cuteseesamantha]

JESUS IS A MOTHERFUCKER

[edpost2011]

Fuck you oklahoma christians and your holy ghost your god is gay his spirit sucks tony romos dick on a plane every payday

[sephiroth70001]

@fraka899 what about everyone besides isaac newton? and yes there were who denied religion in his era. half of the people i listed are from out civilization.

[fraka899]

@sephiroth70001 LOL. you have guts to say about isaac newton who lived in period when anyone who denied religion was killed instantly.. man.. NOBODY in history of our civilization was a genius and religious.. because that are opposite things.

[sephiroth70001]

Respond to this video... and the famous Isaac Newton (helped develop science of dynamics and the discipline of calculus / father of the Law of Gravity / invented the reflecting telescope)

you want more "not intelligent" Christians?

[sephiroth70001]

Respond to this video... Samuel F. B. Morse (invented the telegraph) Gary E. Parker (biologist and paleontologist) Blaise Pascal (helped develop science of hydrostatics / invented the barometer) Louis Pasteur (helped develop science of bacteriology / discovered the Law of Biogenesis / invented fermentation control / developed vaccinations and immunizations) William Ramsay (helped develop the science of isotopic chemistry / discovered inert gases)

[sephiroth70001]

Respond to this video... Lane P. Lester (geneticist and biologist) Carolus Linnaeus (helped develop sciences of taxonomy and systematic biology / developed the Classification System) Joseph Lister (helped develop science of antiseptic surgery)Frank L. Marsh (biologist) Matthew Maury (helped develop science of oceanography/hydrography) James Clerk Maxwell (helped develop the science of electrodynamics) Gregor Mendel (founded the modern science of genetics)

[sephiroth70001]

Respond to this video... William Herschel (helped develop science of galactic astronomy / discovered double stars / developed the Global Star Catalog) George F. Howe (botanist) D. Russell Humphreys (award-winning physicist) James P. Joule (developed reversible thermodynamics) Johann Kepler (helped develop science of physical astronomy / developed the Ephemeris Tables) John W. Klotz (geneticist and biologist) Leonid Korochkin (geneticist)

[sephiroth70001]

Respond to this video... Henri Fabre (helped develop science of insect entomology)Michael Faraday (helped develop science of electromagnetics / developed the Field Theory / invented the electric generator) Ambrose Fleming (helped develop science of electronics / invented thermionic valve) Robert V. Gentry (physicist and chemist)Duane T. Gish (biochemist) John Grebe (chemist) Joseph Henry (invented the electric motor and the galvanometer / discovered self-induction)