There are two relatively minor currents swirling around the presidential elections involving things religious that have caught my fancy. Those looking for deep thoughts will be disappointed, I know, but, then, what do you expect from me by now?
The first is one I have commented on before and is the continuing frenzy that Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ or has Anti-Christ like tendencies. If you want to see my previous reference check July 14 on the blog. At that time, there were about 650,000 hits for "Obama and antichrist" on Google. As a result of recent speculation fueled by a McCain ad, that number is now up over 800,000.
On the feature "Fundamentalist" from The American Prospect, comes this 'clarification.'
1. Religious Right Debates Whether Obama Has "A Spirit of the Antichrist."
At a state GOP convention and across the American Family Association's (AFA) radio airwaves, religious-right activists reacted to Obama's speech in Berlin by suggesting that he will undermine America's sovereignty and greatness and that he might just be channeling the Antichrist.
Mike Huckabee, speaking at the Arkansas GOP convention, said that "the kind of change [Obama] would bring makes us more of a part of some global, mushy, middle-of-the-ground [sic], milquetoast world in which America loses its sovereignty and distinction."
The AFA reaches a rural audience through its radio stations -- it owns over a hundred of them, making it the sixth-largest radio-station owner in the country -- and its daily AFA Report show presents a "Christian worldview" on the news of the day. On Friday, the day after Obama's Berlin speech, the AFA Report's host, Fred Jackson, made note of the "messianic tone" of the speech, then quickly denied that he believes Obama is messianic. Ed Vitagliano, one of the program's roundtable guests, chimed in, "I don't think he's the Antichrist, but there is a spirit of Antichrist at work in the West in a very strong and open way that is leading people to want to solve their problems and have a desire to have their lives improved without Christ. That's what the spirit of Antichrist does, it denies Christ." In other words, Obama's not the Antichrist. He's just like the Antichrist.
It seems that this may be an on-going undercurrent among the religious right until the election. Then, if Obama is elected, I can see this being the unspoken accusation throughout his administration.
One of the fears of the religious right about the endtimes is the creation of a one-world government headed by the Anti-Christ. Thus, I can see any treaty arrangements in an Obama administration being looked at through this lens. It will be interesting to see what continues to happen in this regard.
The second item was also found on The Fundamentalist. It probably speaks for itself.
2. Pray for Rain
"Would it be wrong if we asked people to pray…to pray for rain? Abundant rain, torrential rain. Urban and small stream advisory rain. At a particular time, and a particular location? Say at August 28, right here at Mile High Stadium in Denver? During prime-time TV hour when a certain presumptive nominee is scheduled to make a certain acceptance speech at a certain Democratic National Convention?" That's Stuart Shepherd, managing editor of Focus on the Family's Citizen Link, who recently mocked hate crimes legislation in a mid-July CitizenLink video, and now aims to set prayer warriors about the task of drowning out Barack Obama at the DNC convention at the end of the month.
This may have been a suggestion made in jest or, at least, with tongue-in-cheek, but I still find the suggestion to invoke God's power to rain out a political rival reprehensible.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Mix of Politics and Religion -- Again
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Obama has campaigned on a platform of nothing more than personal adoration and largely unspecified change. Of course this appears to be just the right appeal to an electorate most of whom have trouble finding the energy to vote, much less the inclination to educate themselves on the issues.
Obama would like people to believe that he is post-racial, and yet he belonged to and attended a very racist church for years. He would like you to believe that he is bipartisan and yet he has the most liberal and partisan record in the senate, with no real record of reaching across the aisle on any substantive legislation. He would like America to think that race is not a factor in election (and it should not be) and yet he is polling 90% among blacks.
With such a vacuum of accomplishments or real reasons for voters to support him, it is probably to be expected that he will attract these fanciful attacks. I doubt that there will be too many beyond the extreme fringe that would buy into the anti-christ message, and there are at least an equal number of whackos on the other side to balance them out.
In the words of the late Tony Snow, who had strong and admirable convictions but always kept things in perspective," just calm down", "if you can't laugh at politics you must be made of stone" "politics is the merging of high ideals and the exploding cigar of human nature"!
The following two YouTube videos best capture that sentiment, and the current state of the election.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id1IKJGVkvg&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/user/jibjab?ob=1
Obama might not be the Anti-Christ, but he does seem to have issues with the Ten Commandments.
To start with he seems very comfortable with murder given his long standing support for abortion. (see below)
Coveting and stealing seem ok with him too given his stand on taxes and income redistribution. (also see below)
Using the name of the lord in vain may not bother him much either given how his spiritual adviser Rev. Wright like to scream his GD's!
I am sure that we will get clear on his position with respect to lies, but if he does not approve of them he has picked two of the worst professions to practice.
We will just have to see about the other 5, maybe adultery is just a Clinton and Edwards and Kennedy and Hart thing, or maybe it is a plank in the Democratic platform.
A Catholic Case Against Barack
by Patrick J. Buchanan (more by this author)
Posted 08/12/2008 ET
In the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama rolled up more than 90 percent of the African-American vote. Among Catholics, he lost by 40 points. The cool liberal Harvard Law grad was not a good fit for the socially conservative ethnics of Altoona, Aliquippa and Johnstown.
But if Barack had a problem with Catholics then, he has a far higher hurdle to surmount in the fall, with those millions of Catholics who still take their faith and moral code seriously.
For not only is Barack the most pro-abortion member of the Senate, with his straight A+ report card from the National Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood. He supports the late-term procedure known as partial-birth abortion, where the baby's skull is stabbed with scissors in the birth canal and the brains are sucked out to end its life swiftly and ease passage of the corpse into the pan.
Partial-birth abortion, said the late Sen. Pat Moynihan, "comes as close to infanticide as anything I have seen in our judiciary."
Yet, when Congress was voting to ban this terrible form of death for a mature fetus, Michelle Obama was signing fundraising letters pledging that, if elected, Barack would be "tireless" in keeping legal this "legitimate medical procedure."
And Barack did not let the militants down. When the Supreme Court upheld the congressional ban on this barbaric procedure, Barack denounced the court for denying "equal rights for women."
As David Freddoso reports in his new best-seller, "The Case Against Barack Obama," the Illinois senator goes further than any U.S. senator has dared go in defending what John Paul II called the "culture of death."
Thrice in the Illinois legislature, Obama helped block a bill that was designed solely to protect the life of infants already born, and outside the womb, who had miraculously survived the attempt to kill them during an abortion. Thrice, Obama voted to let doctors and nurses allow these tiny human beings die of neglect and be tossed out with the medical waste.
How can a man who purports to be a Christian justify this?
If, as its advocates contend, abortion has to remain legal to protect the life and health, mental and physical, of the mother, how is a mother's life or health in the least threatened by a baby no longer inside her -- but lying on a table or in a pan fighting for life and breath?
How is it essential for the life or health of a woman that her baby, who somehow survived the horrible ordeal of abortion, be left to die or put to death? Yet, that is what Obama voted for, thrice, in the Illinois Senate.
When a bill almost identical to the one Barack fought in Illinois, the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, came to the floor of the U.S. Senate in 2001, the vote was 98 to 0 in favor. Barbara Boxer, the most pro-abortion member of the Senate before Barack came, spoke out on its behalf:
"Of course, we believe everyone should deserve the protection of this bill. ... Who could be more vulnerable than a newborn baby? So, of course, we agree with that. ... We join with an 'aye' vote on this. I hope it will, in fact, be unanimous."
Obama says he opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act because he feared it might imperil Roe v. Wade. But if Roe v. Wade did allow infanticide or murder, which is what letting a tiny baby die of neglect or killing it outright amounts to, why would he not want that court decision reviewed and amended to outlaw infanticide?
Is the right to an abortion so sacrosanct to Obama that killing by neglect or snuffing out of the life of tiny babies outside the womb must be protected if necessary to preserve that right?
Obama is an abortion absolutist. "I could find no instance in his entire career," writes Freddoso, "in which he voted for any regulation or restriction on the practice of abortion."
In 2007, Barack pledged that, in his first act as president, he will sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would cancel every federal, state or local regulation or restriction on abortion. The National Organization for Women says it would abolish all restrictions on government funding of abortion.
What we once called God's Country would become the nation on earth most zealously committed to an unrestricted right of abortion from conception to birth.
Before any devout Catholic, Evangelical Christian or Orthodox Jew votes for Obama, he or she might spend 15 minutes in Chapter 10 of Freddoso's "Case Against Barack." For if, as Catholics believe, abortion is the killing of an unborn child, and participation in an abortion entails automatic excommunication, how can a good Catholic support a candidate who will appoint justices to make Roe v. Wade eternal and eliminate all restrictions on a practice Catholics legislators have fought for three decades to curtail?
And which Catholic priests and prelates will it be who give invocations at Obama rallies, even as Mother Church fights to save the lives of unborn children whom Obama believes have no right to life and no rights at all?
A Nation of Thieves
Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
Edgar K. Browning, professor of economics at Texas A&M University, has a new book aptly titled "Stealing from Each Other." Its subtitle, "How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit," goes to the heart of what the book is about. The rise of equalitarian ideology has driven Americans to steal from one another. Browning explains that certain kinds of equality have been a cherished value in America. Equality under the law and, within reason, equality of opportunity is consistent with a free society. Equality of results is an anathema to a free society and within it lie the seeds of tyranny.
Browning entertains a discussion about when inequalities are just or unjust. For example, college graduates earn income higher than high-school dropouts. Some people prefer to work many hours and earn more than others who prefer to work fewer. Students who spend 25 or more hours a week on classroom preparation earn higher grades than students who spend five hours. Most would agree that these inequalities are just. There are other sources of inequalities that are unjust, such as: when incomes result from fraud, corruption, stealing, exploitation, oppression and the like. Such sources of inequality play an insignificant role in producing income inequality in America. Most economists agree that income is closely related to productivity.
Much of the justification for the welfare state is to reduce income inequality by making income transfers to the poor. Browning provides some statistics that might help us to evaluate the sincerity and truthfulness of this claim. In 2005, total federal, state and local government expenditures on 85 welfare programs were $620 billion. That's larger than national defense ($495 billion) or public education ($472 billion). The 2005 official poverty count was 37 million persons. That means welfare expenditures per poor person were $16,750, or $67,000 for a poor family of four.
Those figures understate poverty expenditures because poor people are recipients of non-welfare programs such as Social Security, Medicare, private charity and uncompensated medical care. The question that naturally arises is if we're spending enough to lift everyone out of poverty, why is there still poverty? The obvious answer is poor people are not receiving all the money being spent in their name. Non-poor people are getting the bulk of it.
Browning's concluding chapter tells us what the welfare state costs us. He acknowledges the non-economic costs such as infringements on liberty and strains on the political process, but focuses on the quantitative economic costs. The disincentive effects of Social Security have reduced the GDP by 10 percent, the federal income tax (as opposed to a proportional tax) by 9 percent and past deficits by 3.5 percent for a total of 22.5 percent. He guesses that welfare programs have reduced GDP by 2.5 percent. The overall effect of redistributionist policies has created incentives that have reduced GDP by a total of 25 percent. Without those, our GDP would be close to $18 trillion instead of $14 trillion.
So what's Browning's solution? First, he reminds us of the biblical admonition "Thou shalt not steal." Government income redistribution programs produce the same result as theft. In fact, that's what a thief does; he redistributes income. The difference between government and thievery is mostly a matter of legality. Browning's solution is captured in the title of his last chapter, "Just Say No," where he proposes, "The federal government shall not adopt any policies that transfer income (resources) from some Americans to other Americans." He agrees with James Madison, the father of our Constitution, who said, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
For years I've used Professor Browning's and his colleague Mark A. Zupan's excellent textbook "Microeconomics: Price Theory and Applications" in my intermediate microeconomics class. "Stealing from Each Other" is a continuation of his academic excellence.
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