Ah, That Politics and Religion

I love my doctor.

This afternoon I took the book I'm reading to the doctor's visit. It's Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama. I wasn't trying to make a statement, it's just that I was in the middle of an excellent book and I knew I'd have time to kill before seeing the doctor. Although making a statement doesn't seem like a bad idea.

Anyhow, I had a chance to make one, wasted as it was on a -- you guessed it -- total fucking moron. I wasn't expecting to be confronted about my choice of author by the nurse who took my BP, etc. She said, "He's running for president, isn't he?"

"Yes," I said.

"People who are running for president always have to write a book, don't they?"

I started to say that he wrote the book ten years before he became a candidate for president, but before I got it out her next question was, "He's a Muslim, isn't he?"

"No he isn't," I said, emphatically. This chick wants to pick a fight. "If you got your information from Fox News --"

"He doesn't have much qualifications for president."

"Could he be any worse than what we've got?" I said softly.

She said, "Well, I support Bush. He stands up for what is right. He's --"

"A born-again Christian?"

"Well, he's against things that are wrong."

"Abortion?"

"Yes, abortion and other things."

"Gay marriage?"

"Yes, gay marriage."

"Prayer in schools?"

"Yes."

I said, "Is there any consideration you would make about a candidate other than where he stands on one or two issues? Would you vote for Hitler if he was against abortion and his opponent was for it?"

"Bush is not Hitler." She went out the door and closed it.

And Barack Obama is not a Muslim. There is so much outright fucking lying that never even gets challenged. The likes of John Gibson and Britt Hume and Sean Hannity and those "Fox and Friends" twits (Teutonic or otherwise) on Fox "News" were chatting it up that Barack attended a Muslim school as a child in which, of course, he was taught to hate and kill the infidel. Right?

Wrong. Just for the record, since I'm reading his book, this is a little bit he wrote about the elementary schools he attended:

"In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies. My mother wasn't overly concerned. 'Be respectful,' she'd said." (Chapter 8, "Chicago") Little Barack was equally indifferent, some would say irreverent, in the Catholic school he also went to in Djakarta. As an adult in Chicago, he still didn't know what a "catechism" was, he said.

Probably still doesn't! He finally ended up joining a United Church of Christ (cf. Presbyterian) congregation in Chicago. He is not a fundamentalist (thank God! neither Muslim nor Christian!). He said he didn't experience an "epiphany" when he decided to join the church but made a conscious, rational decision with all his doubts about himself and the universe we live in.

Please read his Chapter Six, "Faith," in The Audacity of Hope. It's the only kind of discussion of religion that I can take seriously: honest-to-God honest, and thoughtful. He says that he "must be continually open to new revelations." Then: "This is not to say that I'm unanchored in my faith. There are some things that I'm absolutely sure about -- the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, the value of love and charity, humility and grace."

From there he goes right into discussing the 1963 racist bombing of a church in Alabama in which four little girls were killed -- while they were attending Sunday school. He thought, "How could [the parents] endure the anguish unless they were certain that some purpose lay behind their children's murders, that some meaning could be found in immeasurable loss?" Although that tragedy caused revulsion in many Americans even in Alabama, that "friends and strangers alike would have assured them that their daughters had not died in vain -- that they had awakened the conscience of a nation and helped liberate a people; that the bomb had burst a dam that allowed justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. And yet would even that knowledge be enough to console your grief, to keep you from madness and eternal rage -- unless you also knew that your child had gone on to a better place?"

I'm sorry, I can't stop, this is so vital to me. Barack then reflects on his mother's death to cancer and his knowledge that because of her atheism she is alone and afraid. Then, while putting his own daughter to bed, she tells him she doesn't want to die and he says, "You've got a long, long way before you have to worry about that," and she seems satisfied.

But he says then, "I wondered whether I should have told her the truth, that I wasn't sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure of where the soul resides or what existed before the Big Bang. Walking up the stairs, though, I knew what I hoped for -- that my mother was together in some way with those four little girls, capable in some fashion of embracing them, of finding joy in their spirits."

Oh by the way, to finally get around to why I love the doctor. He came into the examining room a few minutes later and I told him that his nurse had expressed her adoration of Bush because of his stands on her pet issues and didn't seem to know jack about anything else. The doctor said, "Bush is an idiot." He added, "A six-year-old child could stand up before an audience and say he is opposed to abortion and gay marriage." He paused and then smiled. "Of course that's what Bush is!"

Too old. I'd say more like about 18 months (I'll hold my breath until I get my way). "How annoying to find out that I'm not the center of the universe" is a thought and feeling that hasn't occurred to him yet. I remember reading in the hagiography, The Faith of George W. Bush (yeah, I read it), that the author said W wasn't narcissistic. Right. And I'm Donald Duck.