Half Sigma
writes:
The Washington Post says, “The number of Americans who believe -- wrongly -- that President Obama is a Muslim has increased significantly since his inauguration and now account for nearly 20 percent of the nation's population.”
I still believe that Obama is an atheist, who is sympathetic to Islam because he was raised in an Islamic environment, who pretends to be Christian in order to get votes. There probably wasn’t a checkbox on the survey for that answer.
The figure is 24%
according to a Time mag poll, with just as many being unsure. That means about half the population is unconvinced that he is a Christian.
People are called Jews if they grew up in a Jewish household and keep a Jewish name, even if they are really atheists. Obama's father and step-father were Moslems, and
his mother was an atheist. He has a Moslem name and he has lived as a child in a Moslem country. He frequently supports Moslem causes, such as building a mosque in lower Manhattan.
I am sure that people would be happy to accept Obama as a Christian if he were to attend Christian church, say Christian prayers, and/or promote Christian ideals. The main reason for calling him a Christian is that he claimed to belong to a Christian church during his campaign. But then later he appeared to be unfamiliar with what goes on in that church every Sunday.
It is not just the right-wing Christians who doubt Obama's Christianity. Lots of leftist atheist sites do also. Eg, see
Raban's article.
Update: Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne
writes:
Many Americans are morons ... I still think he’s an atheist ...
We can write off the 18% as fools, since anybody who’s been alive for a year should know the incontrovertible evidence that Obama’s not a Muslim, but the 43% disturb me a bit, too. Who hasn’t heard of the Jeremiah Wright affair? And if you did, how could you not take in that Obama was attending a Christian church?
Simple. The Wright affair was about Obama denying that he heard the hateful and anti-American messages that Wright was regularly preaching in that Church, and Obama disassociating himself with the church.
Coyne says that he is disturbed that 43% don't know that Obama is a Christian, when Coyne himself does not believe that Obama is a Christian. Coyne offers this
Christopher Hitchens video as proof that Obama is an atheist. Coyne is effectively classifying himself as a moron or a fool.
Half Sigma
explains:
The attitude of the liberal MSM annoys me. The tone of articles will be, “Americans are stupid because 20% of them think that Obama is Muslim, even though we know he’s Christian because he says he is and we all know a politician would never lie about such a thing.”
Actually, what people consider someone else’s religion to be is more complicated than that. Obama was born a Muslim (as evidenced by his middle name, Hussein, after the grandson of Mohammed and an important early figure in the spread of Islam), his adopted father was a Muslim, and he was considered a Muslim in Indonesia.
As I stated above, what a person’s religion is considered to be is rather complicated, but generally people are ascribed to the religion of their birth and upbringing unless they make a convincing display of converting to another religion. ...
Also, people generally don’t default into atheism and agnosticism, so a person born to Methodist parents is still considered to be a Methodist even if he hasn’t been to church in the last five years.
Also, depending on the religion, merely attending church services doesn’t always count as a religious conversion. For example, Jews would consider a Methodist who attends Synagogue every week to be a Methodist who’s attending Synagogue every week; he doesn’t become a Jew until he undergoes a formal and rigorous conversion process.
Complicating the issue of Obama’s supposed conversion to Christianity is that Obama’s “church,” led by Jeremiah Alvesta Wright, is not unanimously considered to be a real Christian Church. Some may think of it as a political organization where God and Jesus are occasionally mentioned, kind of like a radical leftist version of the Republican National Convention. Furthemore, it’s not clear that Obama ever underwent any formal conversion process at this “church.”
So people who think that Obama is still a Muslim may have a legitimate basis for their belief. ... Certainly, many Christians legitimately believe that Obama does not share their values and therefore they don't consider him to be Christian.
He is right, and the morons and fools are the ones who do not understand this.
Update:
Half Sigma now says:
How Obama describes his religious beliefs can best be classified as unitarian universalist. As I’ve written before, unitarian universalism is the religion of the elites. Unitarian universalists believe that the major religions of the world are inspired by God and therefore they are all good and one can get closer to God by following the beliefs of any religion.
Obama explains that (1) he doesn’t believe in a literal Heaven or Hell; (2) he doesn’t believe that belief in Jesus is a path to salvation; he only believes that Jesus was a teacher of moral values; (3) he admires Ghandi who is a famous univeralist;
This is all stuff that an atheist politician might say. I can understand someone not wanting to call him a Christian.