Barack Obama Will Save Religion in America

 
Frank Scaheffer writes in The Huffington Post [President Obama: Bad News For the New Atheists and Other Fundamentalists].

The Obama presidency is great news for almost everyone. It's bad news for some odd ideological bedfellows: the Religious Right and the so-called New Atheists.

Into the all or nothing culture wars, and the all or nothing wars between the so-called New Atheists and religion the election of President elect Obama reintroduces nuance. President elect Obama's ability to believe in Jesus, yet question, is going to rescue American religion in general and Christianity in particular, from the extremes.

There is no way to understand President elect Obama's victory as anything less than the start of not just a monumental political change but a spiritual revolution as well.

Who knew? I bet all atheists and agnostics are feeling pretty stupid right now knowing that they've been tricked by the slick-talking Obama.

And what is the "nuanced" spiritual revolution going to look like?

To the New Atheists who think that with the resounding defeat of the Religious Right, we are entering a secular age, think again. Obama will block your path. He'll do it for the same reason he'll make the Religious Right's paranoid fantasies about him soon seem shamefully ridiculous. That's because President elect Obama is that rarest of all rare people: a thoughtful, compassionate and likable statesman who also is a thoughtful, compassionate and likable religious believer.

Sounds like trouble. President Obama is going to block the path to a secular society. Gosh. I knew that American Presidents were leaders of the free world and the most powerful men (no women so far) on the planet but even I had no idea they were that powerful.

President-elect Obama brings another perspective to faith . It goes something like this:

How do cultures define themselves if not through ritual? In the "big moments" of life; birth, marriage, sickness, death "who" -- in the inimitable words of Ghost Busters -- "you gonna call?" As President elect Obama has said, and I paraphrase: Strip the human race of our spiritual language and what do we tell each other about hope?

As President elect Obama has pointed out, a world of all math but no poetry is not fit for human habitation. If everything feels flat and dull, stripped of mystery and meaning who will bother to do the science? Why bother, if all we're doing is serving those selfish genes for another round of meaningless propagation?

So does this faith always make "sense?" No. Because our perspective is from the inside, something like paint contemplating the painting of which it's a part. We're all in the same boat, all stuck on the same "canvas."

Ohmygod. Frank Shaeffer and Barack Obama have discovered the atheist dirty little secret. All of us atheists are flat and dull—we can't be born, get married, or die without calling upon God to help us.

Does anyone actually believe this stuff?

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[Hat Tip: RichardDawkins.net]