Thanks, Tuttle8.
I appreciate it.
As to Senator Obama's resignation from Trinity UCC, while I would have advised him to do so earlier, I can, as much as is possible for a non-believer, try to understand that this must have been a tough call.
I see three ways to look at this:
1) He'd finally had enough. It's hard to say what will push somebody over the edge and force a life-altering decision. I have myself been in situations where my personal loyalties have made me hold on to people for far longer than I should have. Absent the religious dimension, I could understand if this were the case. I suspect that the religious part would make the decision even harder to make, although I cannot know that.
2) He truly believes the ideology of Reverend Wright, but jettisoned him and Trinity because it was hurting his chance to be President. I don't think that's true, but I can can certainly see how someone could come to that conclusion. If it were true, it would be an example of the most cynical ambition and power-lust I can think of, short of actually harming someone to gain power. The primary reason that I don't buy it is that that kind of ambition tends not to be confined... it leaks out in other ways. And I haven't seen anything else beyond Trinity that tells me that Senator Obama has that kind of ambition. Obviously, he's ambitious and seeks power. Duh... he's running for President. But degrees matter.
3) He doesn't believe any of it, but needed to demonstrate his "faith" in order to get elected. Given the statistics, both in terms of people's willingness to vote for non-believers and the percentages of people with the education levels of your average US Senator who are non-believers, I'm sure that, if this is the case, he's not alone. It would not surprise me at all if there were 20-30 atheists / agnostics in the Senate right now... and all of them attend church occasionally and publicly claim to be some species of non-controversial Protestant. Such is the reality of American politics. As an atheist myself, I understand those pressures, albeit to a much smaller degree. I know that I'm very careful who I "come out" to, at least in my real-world life. So, if this is the case, I can't really blame the man for it.
But no matter which conclusion one comes to, we must all admit that we cannot know for sure. None of us can see into another's heart, nor read another's mind. All we can do is decide based on the ambiguous evidence at hand, hopefully with a minimum of preconception. It is no surprise that we're usually wrong when we do.
--Shannon