Radical Atheist

It may be from The Onion, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t the truth.

WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation’s broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, “It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can’t catch a break.”

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James Pinkerton, a contributing writer to the Fox News blog The Fox Forum, has decided to try a new tactic in discrediting Obama. Instead of barely believable innuendo, he’s stooping to bat-shit insane fantasy.

In an article entitled “The Devil Is In the Details: Another Obama Connection You Ought to Know About” he shares his delusions with whoever reads this crap and takes it seriously:

Could Lucifer play a role in this presidential election? It may sound crazy, but one of the candidates in this race has publicly praised, even emulated, a writer-activist who himself paid tribute to Lucifer.  That’s right, Lucifer, also known as the Devil, Satan, Beelzebub—you get the idea.

Do you think that admiring a Lucifer-admirer would make a difference to some voters?

If you’ve never heard of this true fact—and most Americans obviously haven’t—well, that might help to explain why John McCain is behind in the polls.

OK, you might be asking, where is this Lucifer stuff coming from? It comes from a man named Saul Alinsky, who devoted his life to left-wing agitation in Chicago.  He also wrote two seminal books, “Reveille for Radicals” and “Rules for Radicals,” still regarded as key how-to manuals for left-wing activists.

But Alinsky was more than just a leftist; he was a genuine out-there crazy, someone who loved to shock and stun, just for the helluvit. And so in the first edition of “Rules for Radicals,” published in 1971, he offered this astounding dedication: “Lest we forget at least an over the shoulder acknowledgement of the very first radical, from all our legends, mythology, and history … the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.”

This dedication is no secret.  David Freddoso wrote about it in his book, The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate;  and the inimitable Ann Coulter noted it, too, just last month.

I won’t subject you to the full article, I’m sure you value your mental health. If you’re interested and fully inoculated against rampant stupidity , follow the links for the full “story”. He got one thing right. Ann Coulter is indeed inimitable. No one else would willingly sacrifice their credibility and expose their ignorance by trying to imitate her.

I’m not even sure why anyone at Fox is still defending McCain’s candidacy. After all, Fox News Executive Vice President John Moody already posted that if the Ashley Todd story was a hoax, McCain’s candidacy was over. The fat lady has sung.

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As I listened to NPR this afternoon I caught the end of a story about a speech given by Obama today. I didn’t hear who the audience was or what the topic was. All I heard was him saying, “…they’re usually working to help people of all faiths or of no faith at all.”

Wow, I thought. Almost brave of him to allude to non-believers, atheists and humanists. He nearly put us on equal footing with the theists. Don’t piss off the religious, Barack. Rationalists are far more forgiving and understanding. Unfortunately we’re also in the minority and represent too few votes to make a huge impact on the candidates or the party and their platform. So we’re safer to ignore than the faithful.

Non-believers are concerned with the issues that will affect all of humanity or that attempt to enslave the public forum to the rules and regulations (prejudices, phobias and myths) of a particular sect of theism.

You can trust a non-believer to give you straight information regarding issues of finance, foreign relations and military policy. Issues that require reasoning, logic and good old common sense best be left to those who determine their own agendas, rather than those who wish to inflict the agenda of their personal imaginary friend on the entire country.

In short, go ahead and pander to the religious to get their votes. But once you’re elected and if you are seriously concerned for not just the people of the country you now lead but for humanity everywhere, you would be well advised to seek council from those who do not put their allegiance to this country below their allegiance to a “higher power”.

So I got home a little while ago and thought I should blog about this and give the man a little credit.

First, though, I wanted to check out the whole story for some background.

July 1 (Bloomberg) — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said he would spend at least $500 million a year to promote community aid programs run by faith-based groups.

The proposal would expand an initiative put in place by President George W. Bush to aid religious organizations performing social service work, which Obama said “never fully completed its mission or fulfilled its promise.”

Obama, a former community organizer in Chicago, would create a new White House office for the President’s Council for Faith- Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Among other things, the council would help train faith-based groups on how to apply for federal grants and set up a program to provide summer educational opportunities for 1 million low-income children.

“While these groups are often made up of folks who’ve come together around a common faith, they’re usually working to help people of all faiths or of no faith at all,” Obama said today in Zanesville, Ohio. “Change comes not from the top down, but from the bottom up, and few are closer to the people than our churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques.” (Source: Bloomberg)

Damnit, Barack. Here I had all these positive thoughts about what I perceived as a small nod to the “community” of non-believers and I find out that your significant comment wasn’t exciting or brave. No one is grateful to the man who smuggles Cuban cigars by packing them in piles of manure.

Supporting faith-based programs with our tax dollars is a violation of the Constitution you want to swear to uphold. And if the requirements are written such that our money can’t be used in any way to pay for purely religious activities (no “busing people to mass in order to earn a dinner” type homeless shelters, for example), then why should faith even be a criteria? Why not use everyone’s money to support worthwhile social outreaches regardless of their motivation? Rev. Phelps is a faith-based organization. Can he apply for federal money to pay off his well-earned bankruptcy?

Barack, you’ve pissed me off. If I voted you’d be in danger of losing mine. As Carlin explains, since I don’t vote, I have every right to complain when our government, its representatives or its policies head toward the abyss of stupidity, illegality and/or theocracy.

I take back all the nice things I wrote above the quote.

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Edward N. Luttwak, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author of “Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace”, writing an opinion piece for the New York Times, raises an issue that I haven’t heard mentioned yet.  It’s an issue that could have serious repercussions in our dealings with the Middle East should he win the election.  While I don’t support the notion that our nation should change in any way simply to placate those who threaten us with violence, I do acknowledge that terrorists in the Middle East might find it too easy to exploit and capitalize on this particular situation.

…One danger of such charisma, however, is that it can evoke unrealistic hopes of what a candidate could actually accomplish in office regardless of his own personal abilities. Case in point is the oft-made claim that an Obama presidency would be welcomed by the Muslim world.

This idea often goes hand in hand with the altogether more plausible argument that Mr. Obama’s election would raise America’s esteem in Africa — indeed, he already arouses much enthusiasm in his father’s native Kenya and to a degree elsewhere on the continent.

But it is a mistake to conflate his African identity with his Muslim heritage. Senator Obama is half African by birth and Africans can understandably identify with him. In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith.

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).

With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings. (Some may point to cases in which lesser punishments were ordered — as with some Egyptian intellectuals who have been punished for writings that were construed as apostasy — but those were really instances of supposed heresy, not explicitly declared apostasy as in Senator Obama’s case.)

It is true that the criminal codes in most Muslim countries do not mandate execution for apostasy (although a law doing exactly that is pending before Iran’s Parliament and in two Malaysian states). But as a practical matter, in very few Islamic countries do the governments have sufficient authority to resist demands for the punishment of apostates at the hands of religious authorities.

For example, in Iran in 1994 the intervention of Pope John Paul II and others won a Christian convert a last-minute reprieve, but the man was abducted and killed shortly after his release. Likewise, in 2006 in Afghanistan, a Christian convert had to be declared insane to prevent his execution, and he was still forced to flee to Italy.

Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad…

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