God Damn America - that's what Obama's pastor preached

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If a particular politician knew that the priest from the parish where he belonged, had molested children, yet that politician continued to remain at the church and publicly embrace the priest, then yes, I think that politician's integrity should be called into question. The troubling issue in my eyes with Obama is that he talks about unity and equality while for 20 years he attended this inflammatory church-- and he is still a member. Racism is racism regardless of which side it comes from. So either Obama was deaf, dumb, and blind every time he walked into the congregation, or there is a major inconsistency between his words and his actions. For a regular person this would be no big deal, people are inconsistent all the time, but the man is running for office and should be under tighter scrutiny. I think he was right to denounce the pastor but the fact that it was done under public duress makes it look insincere and desperate.

I don't always agree with my boyfriend. This isn't going to cause us to break up. Would you say that I agree with everything he says and believes because I haven't? There are disagreements between us that are as old as our relationship with one another.

Yes, and Pastor Wright ought to be ashamed of himself.

Wrong on both counts, and it's doubly wrong for being phrased as a false dilemma. If Christians always believed everything they were told in church, my parents wouldn't have threatened to disown me for being an atheist in spite of their church being known for its tolerance. In the end, my mother's chief influence was her upbringing, which I'm afraid to say was stereotypically backwoods Baptist. My father's just a hothead, and he ended up helping me convince her to be sensible after he'd calmed down. I'm no stranger to religion. Attendants at a church are never reticent about criticizing their own pastors. If they find a pastor too disagreeable, they'll switch to a different church, and they'll go to a different denomination if they're continually dissatisfied. However, they have no illusions that they will always agree with their church on all points, and pastors have no illusions that their congregations will always agree with them. I'm sure that some church attendants really do see their pastors through rose-colored glasses, and I'm sure that some pastors really do believe and expect that their congregations uniformly agree with everything they have to say. Although I find religion delusional, though, it would be a mistake to assume that religious people are completely deluded. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to think that they are incapable of thinking for themselves just because they are affiliated with a church. In fact, veteran church-goers privately poo-poo on their church all the time, and the gossip can get outrageous.

Just as I'm under tight scrutiny when I walk into a job interview, so you are a little mistaken in saying it's "no big deal" for a regular person. The man is trying to get himself hired for one of the most important jobs in the country, but I'm under plenty of pressure of my own to convince an employer that I won't let him down.

Wrong. It makes him vulnerable to being portrayed as such by people who are desperate for him to lose. You know...people like you.

You're making a lot of stretches and fallacies, here. It makes you look insincere and desperate.

Last edited by Griff on 15 Mar 2008, 2:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Agreeing with the above. Further, Apatura, you seem to assume that "attending a church" means "going to every single Sunday sermon, and paying rapt attention to every moment of it." This would be logistically difficult, at the very least, for someone who for a number of years was in the state government in Springfield, quite some distance from Chicago, and later was elected to national government, requiring a second residence in D.C. Particularly, during the post-9/11 period in question, Obama would have been spending most of 2001 in Springfield, and he was elected to the US Senate in, IIRC, 2002.

As an example, my mother is a member of the Sumner United Methodist Church in Sumner, WA. She lived in Vista, CA, some 1400 miles away, for several years. However, she was still carried on the Sumner UMC rolls, and was regarded as "attending" that church. On the other hand, it would not be reasonable to expect her to be familiar with the content of sermons preached during that time...

Since the only grounds anyone seems to find to attack Obama on are personal (and often invented, like the idea that he was a secret Muslim), does this indicate that his political and economic stances are above reproach? If so, I must say, this would seem to make him more qualified to be President than either of his opponents.

I'm not voting for him, but not for the reasons listed above.

Blaming a guy for something another person said is just too strange for words. We don't know his internal motives or thoughts. On the periphery he seems dissatisfied with his Pastor's statements. Whether he is or not I can't say, but it just doesn't seem correct to blame him for another man's actions or words.

Seems like:

"Obama is a member of a Church. The Pastor of that Church said something offensive. Obama is offensive."

The above may be oversimplified in the last part, but I think it's close enough not to be a strawman.

Very well said. I agree completely.

To blame Obama for the statements of his pastor seems like the gullible buying-into of political mud-slinging.

I don't think this is logical reasoning. Obama should not leave a church every time a pastor says something that doesn't fit his political views. I would think that he would run out of churches to attend in Chicago in short order.

What is really sad about all this is the Reverand Wright is a patriot, an Ex-US Marine who loves this country and served it honorably. But when preaching, he can be very dramatic, and was not comdening the country, but was in fact just condeming some of its actions, and trying to bring attenting to mistreatment of Black by the US government. I think that is clear if you hear the whole speech, and understand the style.

But, people are stupid, they don't understand rhetortical style preaching, and most people take every word literially, they are very fundemental, if they actually attened a Black Church they would know what was being spun here. This are a few clips taken out from decades of preaching, out of context.

Anyone that honestly believes that Rev. Wright wants to destroy the US, and Obama supports that belief and idea, is just not a rational thinker.

Idaho Aspie- THANK YOU for saying that. It's so true. I just want to point out to people the Pastor's age. He's an older man, probably the same age as my mother, and let me say the America he grew up in was very different than the America Obama grew up in or any of the younger generations.

I dont know if what Obama's pastor said was really racist in the terms of "hate whites." To me it sounded like he was just pointing out how racist America used to be. But really isnt that just fact?

My mother grew up in North Carolina in the 1950s. She had rocks thrown at her while walking to (segregated)school with little kids calling her a n btch. I can imagined the pastor is so impassioned about this (ie saying hillary has never been called the n word or been passed over by a taxi) because he experienced it. Back then they used to put in the children's textbooks that blacks werent people or werent as evolved. My mother said that those things hurt badly, but she was able to move on because of the experiences she had later. Maybe the Pastor didnt have any positive experiences to change his views?

Similarily I grew up in Virginia in the 90s, and my experiences with whites have been totally different. I went to school with them, best friends with them, am dating a white guy, etc. I see a totally different America than Pastor Wright.

Im not goin to say that the Pastor was right, I dont see what half of what he said had to do with Obama, and I think he prejudged America too soon in terms of how they would vote. But I think that everything he said comes from resentment from the past and not from hatred.

People from the older generation will always harbor what they experiences as teens and young adults.

It's a totally different world now, and I feel bad that this isnt the world he got to experience.

Let's be fair and compare apples to apples and ask, "Should Catholic politicians who continue attending a church where the priest has either been proven guilty of child molestation but still remains the priest or openly preaches that child molestation is acceptable to God?" If that's the case, then I think they should be banned from office.

So, racism isn't racism if it's being practiced by Blacks? Okay then, I guess that makes it alright to pretend that it's plausible that Reverend Wright only made racist and anti american remarks when Obama/Osama just happened to be out of town. That's cool with with me.

If inflammatory speech were in the same category as child molestation, I'd be serving back-to-back life sentences until the sun had long since burnt out. As it is, it just makes my personality disagreeable, and I should really do it less often.

Obama isn't responsible for stupid things his preacher said

Yes, those black people shouldn't be so racist toward us. We should retaliate and declare white supremacy over them.

Have fun defending your White honor, sir. For my part, I just find the entire issue ridiculous.

Well, in that case, you should not vote for any Catholics. Because Catholics do support their religion, even in spite of what some of the Preists and Cardanals have done. Catholics also don't believe women are equal to men. Isn't that sexist? Why do they stay in a church, and support a church that doesn't believe women are equal to men?

We can find lots of politically incorrect things coming for the mouths of every politicians pastor, especially if you go back 20 years of speeches and cherry pick the statements out of context.

Being Pro-White, isn't the same as being Being Pro-Black. The reason being that being Pro-White means that you think you are superior to Blacks and other races. The Pro-Black movement doesn't imply or state that Black people are greater than other races. It is simply for the ending of mistreatment of Blacks, and helping Blacks get their communities together, and to reestablish and have pride of their heritage that was so destroyed by US Politics over the last 400 years.

One is predjudiced, the other is pride in who you are.

Haven't you heard? Time-traveling racists are the foremost scourge of black America.