Which purpose?
Time to get cross with Obama. Rick Warren
compares legal abortion to the Holocaust and gay marriage to incest and paedophilia. He believes that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and other non-Christians are going to spend eternity burning in hell. He doesn’t believe in evolution. He recently dismissed the social gospel – the late 19th- and early 20th-century Protestant movement that led a religious crusade against poverty and inequality – as “Marxism in Christian clothing“. Yet thanks to his amiable attitude and jocular tone, he has managed to create a popular image for himself as a moderate, even progressive force in American life, a reasonable, compassionate alternative to the punitive, sex-obsessed inquisitors of the religious right. And Barack Obama, who should know better, has helped him do it.
He’s invited him to give the dang ‘invocation’ on January 20th. That’s depressing.
Warren supported the ballot initiative that stripped gay Californians of their marriage rights. He made the absurd argument that legalised gay marriage constituted a threat to the first amendment rights of religious conservatives. If gay marriage were to remain legal, Warren claimed, those who opposed it could somehow be charged with hate speech should they express their views. This is an utterly baseless canard, but one with great currency in the religious right, the milieu from which Warren consistently draws his ideas.
Canards of that kind are in fact (ironically enough) genuinely destructive of various rights, such as for instance when the Catholic church claims that gay rights violate the freedom of religion because Catholics want the ‘right’ to persecute gays. It’s bad that Obama is encouraging and sucking up to someone like that.
[W]hile Warren says he opposes torture, he doesn’t treat the subject with anything like the zeal he accords gay marriage and abortion. As he recently told Beliefnet.com, he never even brought up the subject with the Bush administration, where he had considerable access. Just before the 2004 election, he sent out an e-mail to his congregation outlining the five issues that he considered “non-negotiable”. “In order to live a purpose-driven life – to affirm what God has clearly stated about his purpose for every person he creates – we must take a stand by finding out what the candidates believe about these five issues, and then vote accordingly,” he wrote. The issues were abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage, cloning and euthanasia. Torture, apparently, is something that decent Christians can disagree on.
How ridiculous – how pathetic. Stem-cell research, gay marriage, cloning are ‘non-negotiable’ and everything else is more trivial. What a tiny-minded man he must be if he really thinks those are the five worst crimes in the world.
Furthermore – it is absolutely outrageous for anyone to claim that ‘God has clearly stated’ anything. God has done no such thing, and no one has any business trying to enforce that ridiculous notion. It is ludicrous to think that if God really wanted to clearly state some non-negotiable principles it would manage nothing better than to dictate a long rambling patchwork book full of all kinds of things over a period of a couple of thousand years and then stop updating it at an arbitrary point some nineteen centuries ago. If God really wanted to clearly state some non-negotiable principles then it would do that. Even if you think God has stated some non-negotiable principles – it’s still ridiculous to claim that God has done that clearly. Clearly is the very last thing you can call the way God is supposed to have done that. It’s just stupid bullying to say that God has clearly stated that everyone must do what one particular political movement thinks it ought to do.
I think what he meant was that RICK WARREN has clearly stated what so-called god says. RW is so far gone that he forgot that he’s not god. He is a pathetic, poorly educated snake oil salesman just like the rest of them. Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain. Obama should know better (and I am guessing he does). But the butt kissing has begun, I guess. It’s a horse’s ass.
So is there any Christian pastor who would have been acceptable?
“He believes that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and other non-Christians are going to spend eternity burning in hell.”
Don’t all Christians believe this?
@Jacob Tomasovich
————————Beginquote
“He believes that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and other non-Christians are going to spend eternity burning in hell.”
Don’t all Christians believe this?
————————-Endquote
No, I don’t think so. The cognitive dissonance of squaring the belief in a loving god with the doctrine of eternal torment in a physical hell has led to a number of theologial “reinterpretations”.(euphemism for philosophical legerdemain) :-)
I think you’ll find the phenomenon quite common at least in German and Scandinavian theology.
Basically to either simply disregard the references to physical torment, or to “redefine” the latter as “existensial torment” caused by “absence of god”.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
It’s a bit unfair on wolves to call him a wolf (in the news picks)…
Quite, dirigible, according to Mark Rowlands wolves are noble beasts. See here. But it’s still time to get cross with Obama. What on earth is he thinking? Surely permitting this polarising figure to grandstand during the campaign was enough ‘reaching out’ to the crazy religious right. Time for Obama to show he really meant what he said when he used the word ‘change’.
As to Warren’s belief in hell, the Saddleback ‘What we believe about… eternity’, says this: “Man was created to exist forever. He will either exist eternally separated from God by sin or in union with God through forgiveness and salvation. To be eternally separated from God is hell. To be eternally in union with him is eternal life. Heaven and hell are places of eternal existence.”
As for Michelle Goldberg’s claim that Warren is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Not so. If we want to continue to use the image, the wolf is all too visible. Bad choice, very bad choice, and it sends a troubling message.
“So is there any Christian pastor who would have been acceptable?”
I keep hearing about the existence of Christian leftists, but much like the fabled Sasquatch, they are remarkably difficult to locate.
“So is there any Christian pastor who would have been acceptable?”
How about Jim Wallis of Sojourners? Or Cornel West? Or Daniel Berrigan? Or any of the majority of Epicopalian or United Methodist clergy?
Does ChrisPer mean to imply that all Christian pastors, as such, are unacceptable to liberals? This is like something Bill O’Reilly would assert — on one of his bad days.
No, ChrisPer means to imply that all Christian pastors are unacceptable to me, and that I’m pretending otherwise. His question is meant to suggest that my dislike of Rick Warren is disguised as dislike of a reactionary pastor when in fact I dislike all pastors.
But ChrisPer is as usual wrong, and is as usual being heavily ironic to no purpose.
Here’s what I do think: that inaugurations should not include such items as an ‘invocation’ because the office of the presidency is a secular office, not a religious one. I don’t think any Christian pastors should play an official part in the inauguration. But I’m not being secretive or evasive or dishonest about that – I just think the inauguration should be secular, that’s all; I don’t consider that an embarrassing thing to think. However given that a secular inauguration is apparently not an option, I certainly think Rick Warren is a much worse choice than a more liberal pastor would be.
Well, Joseph Lowery gets the last inaugural word (or in church service talk, the benediction). He’s an 87 year old veteran of the civil rights movement who supports marriage equality. Let’s hope his dignity quietly makes Ricky “Hawaiian Shirts” Warren look like the gasbag fraud he is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lowery
Also an LGBT band is going to be in the parade and word is they will play the Wedding March as they go past the reviewing stand.
All in all it could be quite a circus.
OB is right – inaugurations should be public-praying-free zones. I wonder what year they started including pseudo-celebrity persons of the cloth as the warm up act (and the cool down act) at inaugurations.
My guess is that Obama chose the guy to avoid the posibility of his oponents on the right doing another rev right hatchet job on him, he can point to this reverent and say well he is one of yours? Still I think it is a bad move, rev Robert Shueler would have been a better bet, liberalish but not wacky enough to scare people.
A secular inaugeration will come about at the same time as the British republic and the disestablished church of England?(probably never).
Hear, hear, “OB is right” etc…
I hope those from the LGBT group deafen the (insensitive) ears of those on the reviewing stand.
Edmund Standing quotes these words from Ophelia on his website.
Quite so. But as an interesting sidelight on this, here are some words from the former Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries (now, of course, Lord something of something), from a book on Christian-Jewish relations (It’s so easy to find – it’s on page 100!):
In other words, it’s in the book. You need search no further. Then he talks about history drawing out the implications of what was finalised in the first centuries.
(my italics)
In other words, nothing is clearly stated, though reading the words something may begin to dawn on one. Oh dear!
Hoo-boy – that’s a good one. The ‘deeper truths’; so deep that no one noticed them for some 18 centuries.
Richard, notice I wasn’t making a prediction, I was stating an ought. Likelihood and desirability are separate things.
How uncomfortable it is to be read so perfectly, OB!
Didn’t mean to be HEAVILY ironic though – just imply what you said clearly here.
You know…there is an implication here that Obama better watch out because the “progressives” don’t like this gasbag. Obama doesn’t need to listen to us even if, and that’s a big if, he agreed with us. Whoa re Obama’s progressive voters going to support, Sarah Palin?
Ioz speaks the truth:
“Progressives will still come out for the party, before returning to their blurgs to murmur darkly about the traitorous thanksralphery of “purists,” whose uncompromising un-commitment to lesser-evilism makes them an eternal target of proggie ire. “The perfect,” they cry, “is the enemy of the good.” True. But so is the bad. The problem with the Democratic Party is not forgivable imperfection. The problem is that the Democratic Party is evil, vicious, and wrong. Is Rick Warren a vacuous moral apologist for American exceptionalism? Yes! The word for his selection is: appropriate
An implication where? In Goldberg’s piece, in my post, in the comments?
Sure, Obama doesn’t ‘need’ to listen to people to the left of him, because they have nowhere to go (apart from Nader, which is why I voted for Nader: I got tired of Clinton making that assumption), but I don’t think the implication in any of the three possible ‘heres’ is that he does need to listen for tactical reasons. My implication at least is that he’s going against (what I take to be) his own principles. I do think Obama has such things, and I think the difference between his and Rick Warren’s is too profound to make Warren a good choice for the inaugural.