What does Obama believe?

Parent Cafe
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<p>This is interesting…and seems to explain Senator Obama’s behavior:</p>

<p>By Jonah Goldberg
*Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is “being out of alignment with my values.” Statements such as this have caused many people to wonder whether Obama has a God complex or is hopelessly arrogant. For the record, sin isn’t being out of alignment with your own values (if it were, Hannibal Lecter wouldn’t be a sinner because his values hold that it’s OK to eat people) nor is it being out of alignment with Obama’s — unless he really is our Savior.</p>

<p>There is, however, a third possibility. Obama is a postmodernist.</p>

<p>An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.</p>

<p>“PoMos” hold that there is no such thing as capital-T “Truth.” There are only lower-case “truths.” Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false, are really just ways for those Pernicious Pale Patriarchs to keep the Coalition of the Oppressed in their place. In the PoMo’s telling, reality is “socially constructed.” And so the PoMos seek to tear down everything that “privileges” the powerful over the powerless and to replace it with new truths more to their liking.</p>

<p>Hence the deep dishonesty of postmodernism. It claims to liberate society from fixed meanings and rigid categories, but it is invariably used to impose new ones, usually in the form of political correctness. We’ve all seen how adept the PC brigades are celebrating free speech, when it’s for speech they like.

One reason Obama seems arrogant is that he can never admit he was wrong, a common shortcoming of politicians. But Obama sometimes literally gets exasperated with people who think his words can mean anything other than what he thinks they should mean

Would that I could have told my math teacher upon receiving a failing grade, “That’s not the math I know.”* :smiley:
~~~
The Obama campaign has a postmodern feel to it because more than anything else, it seems to be about itself. Its relationship to reality is almost theoretical.</p>

<p>Excerpted from: [Obama</a>, the postmodernist - Opinion - USATODAY.com](<a href=“http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/08/obama-the-postm.html]Obama”>http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/08/obama-the-postm.html)</p>

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<p>You ecpect JG to be an objective commentator on Obama or any other Democrat?? How naive. The quote was from a long interview with Obama about his faith. Here is an exerpt leading up to the quote and includes the paragraph following it that puts it in further context, one in which he obviously means “his values as a person of faith” as he said in the paragraph which JG artfully omitted.</p>

<p>Do you get questions about your faith?</p>

<p>OBAMA:
Obviously as an African American politician rooted in the African American community, I spend a lot of time in the black church. I have no qualms in those settings in participating fully in those services and celebrating my God in that wonderful community that is the black church.</p>

<p>(he pauses)</p>

<p>But I also try to be . . . Rarely in those settings do people come up to me and say, what are your beliefs. They are going to presume, and rightly so. Although they may presume a set of doctrines that I subscribe to that I don’t necessarily subscribe to.</p>

<p>But I don’t think that’s unique to me. I think that each of us when we walk into our church or mosque or synagogue are interpreting that experience in different ways, are reading scriptures in different ways and are arriving at our own understanding at different ways and in different phases.</p>

<p>I don’t know a healthy congregation or an effective minister who doesn’t recognize that.</p>

<p>If all it took was someone proclaiming I believe Jesus Christ and that he died for my sins, and that was all there was to it, people wouldn’t have to keep coming to church, would they.</p>

<p>GG:
Do you believe in heaven?</p>

<p>OBAMA:
Do I believe in the harps and clouds and wings?</p>

<p>GG:
A place spiritually you go to after you die?</p>

<p>OBAMA:
What I believe in is that if I live my life as well as I can, that I will be rewarded. I don’t presume to have knowledge of what happens after I die. But I feel very strongly that whether the reward is in the here and now or in the hereafter, the aligning myself to my faith and my values is a good thing. </p>

<p>When I tuck in my daughters at night and I feel like I’ve been a good father to them, and I see in them that I am transferring values that I got from my mother and that they’re kind people and that they’re honest people, and they’re curious people, that’s a little piece of heaven.</p>

<p>GG:
Do you believe in sin?</p>

<p>OBAMA:
Yes.</p>

<p>GG:
What is sin?</p>

<p>OBAMA:
Being out of alignment with my values.</p>

<p>GG:
What happens if you have sin in your life?</p>

<p>OBAMA:
I think it’s the same thing as the question about heaven. In the same way that if I’m true to myself and my faith that that is its own reward, when I’m not true to it, it’s its own punishment.</p>

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<p>Thanks, Originaloog. Context matters.</p>

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<p>The One could have just as easily been describing his politics here. Just vote “present” a lot and let people believe whatever they want to believe he stands for.</p>

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<p>p2n - wow, Wow, and WOW! I’m completely blown away by the whole concept of post-modernism, esp. if that is a philosophy to which one of our presidential cadidates ascribes. Sheesh!</p>

<p>loog - I don’t see how your post in any way changes the perceptions of the previous post.</p>

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<p>[Postmodernism</a> (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)](<a href=“http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/]Postmodernism”>Postmodernism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy))
Everyone should read this alongside the article to get a more complete and less negative impression of postmodern philosophy.</p>

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<p>Wikipedia clears this belief system up in a few sentences:</p>

<p>Postmodernism was originally a reaction to modernism. Largely influenced by the Western European disillusionment induced by World War II, postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness or interreferentiality, in a way that is often indistinguishable from a parody of itself. It has given rise to charges of fraudulence.</p>

<p>That was easy. Everyone get that? ;)</p>

<p>Isn’t it easier just to believe in G*d?</p>

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<p>So now you’ve moved on to dissecting the man’s personal relationship with God…(shakes head in abject amazement). It’s obvious you can’t see it, but this attempt to convict the man by way of mean spirited distortion says ever so much more about you than it does about Obama.:rolleyes:</p>

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<p>in change!</p>

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<p>Feel free to disagree with the posted article, poet. I’m not saying Obama believes this or not. Apparently Jonah Goldberg thinks so.</p>

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<p>Well, since we’ve anointed political columnists with the power to read minds, here is Maureen Dowd’s take on what’s going inside of McCain’s head and how it explains his behavior.

Source: <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/opinion/06dowd.html?ref=opinion[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/opinion/06dowd.html?ref=opinion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Makes sense to me. ;)</p>

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<p>Yep. McCain’s flawed.</p>

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<p>Where you get out of this that Obama doesn’t believe in God, I’m stumped. Actually, his religious beliefs sound fairly close to my own, and I’ve never felt them to be “post-modern” or lacking God.</p>

<p>Nuance existed long before po-mo.</p>

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<p>

Thank you, I will. How does he logical fallacy? Let me count the ways…</p>

<p>Straw man:
Obama is a postmodernist, postmodernism is an enormous intellectual hustle and deeply dishonest; therefore, Obama is a deeply dishonest hustler.</p>

<p>Ad hominem:
Obama has a God complex or is hopelessly arrogant, a sorcerer using magical incantations, whose policy proposals are stage props.</p>

<p>False dilemma:
Either a Christian cleaves to one set of values not his own or he’s a postmodernist.</p>

<p>Biased sample:
One interview quote taken out of context to support the author’s bias against postmodernism.</p>

<p>Appeal to consequences of belief:
If we elect a dangerous postmodernist like Obama, we will elect someone with only a theoretical attachment to reality.</p>

<p>Hasty generalization:
The Americans Germans like are entertainers who lack a serious purpose and substance because they like one, David Hasselhoff.</p>

<p>An opinion column by Jonah Goldberg, among the most neocon of neocons. Editor-in-Chief of National Review Online. Author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. All in all, a very good example of the far-right’s character-smear machine in action. Thanks for posting it.</p>

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<p>I never said Obama didn’t believe in G*d. I was making a joke about postmodernism. I’m pretty sure Senator Obama said he was a Christian.</p>

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<p>Mudder’s - add “circular reasoning” to your list, and “false syllogism”:</p>

<p>Obama thinks A. Postmodernists also think A, therefore Obama is a Postmodernist. Postmodernists also think B & C. Therefore Obama must think B&C. Because Obama thinks B &C, we can see that everything he says comes from postmodernism. </p>

<p>And “False cause” (Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc). Obama thinks A. Obama is a postmodernist. Therefore, Obama’s seeming arrogance must be a result of his being a postmodernist.</p>

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<p>“So now you’ve moved on to dissecting the man’s personal relationship with God.”</p>

<p>didn’t similar dissection take place about a 16 year old Goldwater Girl?</p>

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<p>How so, simba?</p>

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<p>As long as we are discussing dumb arguments and psycho-analyzing candidates, we might as well have the superhero test. Entertainment Weekly interviewed each of the candidates: </p>

<p>Mccain

</p>

<p>OK… well let’s see what that out-of-touch elitist Barack Obama would say…</p>

<p>Obama

</p>

<p>Mmm. OK. Either way we get Batman for president. Except Obama, with his moral relativism and straddling of issues and utter lack of body fat might also be Spiderman. </p>

<p>How should we decide, then, which would be best?</p>

<p>Let’s ask McCain:

</p>

<p>uh ??? ok. good idea. Let’s pick the black guy because he’s tough, he’ll take charge, and we can show that we can all be color-blind! People think he’s just a shallow celebrity, but he can do justice against insurmountable odds!</p>

<p>*Reason #11 why John McCain is a better spokesperson for Barack Obama than Bill Clinton… *</p>

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<p>“How so, simba?”</p>

<p>Well there were dissertations written proving that Hillary was a racist because at the mature age of 16 she was a Goldwater Girl.</p>

<p>and "Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is “being out of alignment with my values.” is the punch line of the whole interview.</p>

<p>I would not have any problem If he had said out of alignment with human or societal values. But ‘MY VALUES’ - that is BS.</p>