Azih said:
What I'm saying is that I am just not comfortable with guessing at someone's motivations which is what you're doing with Obama. It just makes it possible to apply any agenda you wish on any person for any action. Obama's affiliation to his church can be painted as cynical, sincere, ambitious, noble, racist, religous, secular, pragmatic, or whatever the hell else. Better to just take the dude's word for why he goes to church regularly which includes both the parts that you bolded and left unbolded.
I guess the "atheist in disguise" part was what offended? Sorry. I don't literally think that he's somehow manipulating religion for political gain or something like that, but I do tend to think that humanity "compartmentalizes" very well when it comes to religious belief. Obama's own words seem to indicate that, and it's a notion that I observe when talking to lots of other religious people.
I guess I was just sort of poking fun at the fact that the more "liberal" interpretations of monotheistic religions tend to be the kind where you tend to focus on the social, cultural and/or emotional aspects of it, rather than anything inherently accurate within the religious claims themselves. It's an interesting phenomenon to observe. It's almost as if just having a belief in
something is more important than what the actual belief is, which is something talked about in
this book. Maybe that's why I found Obama's conversion reasoning interesting. Probably also explains why religious
belief has been so common throughout humanity, but the beliefs themselves are hugely varied.
Adult conversion stories provide more insight into that since it avoids the usual "he's Christian/Muslim/Jewish because that's what his parents raised him as"
Azih said:
Never said it was convincing evidence. In fact I said that 'convincing evidence' was a weird standard to apply to anyone's faith, nonsensical in fact, largely becuase it's such an extremely vauge requirement.
we have no problems defining "convincing evidence" when it comes to all sorts of other disciplines, so I'm not sure why it's all of a sudden "nonsensical" when it comes to religious claims. Well, maybe I do know why...heh.
Azih said:
I also said that 'feeling god's spirit' is certainly fantastical. So a fantastical emotion without any 'convincing evidence'. Isn't that some sort of hallmark of weak minded delusion... or something?
not sure what this means. Do I think Obama is weak minded and deluded? No. Well, I may think he's "deluded" on one specific subject, for obvious reasons (as I am an atheist, and he isn't), but not in general as a person.
note: I tend to look at religion from a sociological/cultural/psychological perspective in general, since I've found that debating actual religious claims about the world to be mostly a waste of time these days. So that may be why I come off as "clinical" or something.