Terve from Canada

Barack Obama's "theology" is a mish-mash of his grandmother's liberal unitarianism, liberation theology and post-modernism. He's a good salesman, of course.

Wise words, Graham, wise words. I quite agree with you and I even strongly suspect thaty you are quite right, as I have I very similar feel about Obama.

As an atheist, I hope that Barack Obama is *not* lying, even about his Christian beliefs.

From his speeches I gather that he is a "modern" Christian, who cherry-picks the good consequences of Christian belief, rejected the bad implications, and simply ignores the ridiculous (e.g. Genesis). Similar to Martin Luther King who used biblical stories from Exodus to communicate the struggle for equality to the African-Americans.

This gives Barack all the socio-political advantage attached to the Christian label in the USA, with the sensibility of a secular outlook, just by ignoring everything in Christianity that doesn't make sense.

The Diogenes Vote
A Cynic’s View

Who, among the rational supporters of Barack Obama, does not hope that he is lying when he professes belief, not only in God, but in evangelical Christinanity? That all those years of enthusiastic participation in the United Church of Christ, all those impassioned professions of fealty to Abraham’s god, have been a calculated fraud perpetrated in the name of expedience, that what looks like either Machiavellian duplicity or willful self-delusion is in fact a protracted act of self-sacrifice, the subordination of personal integrity to a greater good. Again Brother Sam finds nothing so flexible, so relative, as the moral absolutism of believers. An exception, custom crafted on the spot to suit the terrain, is always within easy reach anytime the ground between right and wrong becomes too uneven to negotiate with certainty. Goddamn.

And John the Baptist? Not worthy of analysis.