A Freelance Monotheist >>

Let me tell you a story that I SWEAR has a point.

A while ago, I had a flaky friend with his head in the clouds. He was high on life, and made my ADD look like Zen. Unpredictable and erratic, his daily or weekly fancy was just whatever fit his whimsy or became the focus of his attention-getting mania. He would pensively gaze at the world through a lens of psuedo-intellectualism and annoying serendipity, noting obvious facts that he perceived as cute little ironies of the world.

“Ya know, Drake,” he hurriedly muttered in a gravel voice with hidden intensity, “the entire world is driven by rhetoric.”

Ok. Not listening. But he did not stop. He was on a mission to impress someone and I was at arms length.

“I mean, to learn that skill…dude is like…” he continued, whether or not I cared.

Man, he never shut up. He had learned Spanish like myself, but then forgot it all to learn Portuguese, and then later French. He traveled to foreign locales with no real purpose in mind other than to say to people that he had been there. Synagogues, ashrams, mosques, and churches were his frequent haunts. And one day, while sitting with him at the Atlanta Bread Company, he made the dumbest statement about religion I have heard in my 2 1/2 decades on Earth. He told me that he was a “freelance monotheist.”

Wow. Good job. Nouveau bohemian has a new suburban voice.

Nothing is more wasteful than a person who mistakes their mania or insecurity for a quest for truth, which brings me to Barack Obama and the newly found religion of the DNC. There has been a recent push in the election politics of the left to scoop up the religious; a vote-getting mania that has Democrats attending seminars and training, and perfecting how they can properly wordsmith their delivery on tough questions. Yet for all that said, none of this movement seems to incite liberals into re-examining the wrong-headed platforms that they hold and possibly changing them for good. Let’s look briefly at the DNC record:

· 40 million dead since Roe v. Wade
· Defense of sodomy
· Endorsement of gay marriage
· Banned home schooling in California
· Banned school prayer
· No parental notification for student abortions
· Accused Bush of zealotry for his faith-based initiatives.
· Banned the 10 commandments on public display
· Promoted drug legalization
· A policy of forced benevolence with other people’s money
· Defense of Anti-Catholic defilement of the Virgin Mary as “art”
· Class warfare used to ride waves of covetousness into office
· Fewer funds privately given to charity among liberal voters than conservative voters, according to economist Arthur Brooks
· A shrugging apathy towards radical Radical Wahabism in the Middle East, which Christian heartland voters distrust
· A warm Hollywood embrace

Clearly, Midwesterners have to be very forgiving and open-minded to overlook these transgressions. But in recent election-speak, younger heartland voters describe their vote as up for grabs, yet I remain skeptical. True, heartland voters are less party-monolithic than the black demographic, which hovers around 92% for Obama. But core values still remain strong. A recent statement by a prominent Baptist minister said that this heartland demographic hopes to “add to these core issues, not exchange them.”

On the issue of abortion for example: some elaborate hoaxes have been bandied, such as liberals who talk about bucking their party and being “pro-life,” like Catholic Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey who replaced Rick Santorum in 2006. He ran to essentially dig into Pennsylvania values voters and perhaps woo naïve conservatives into hoping they could encourage a positive trend in the DNC. But ask yourself what kind of judges these charlatans will confirm! Another common claim by Democrats, becoming more the fashion, is to “reduce” the number of abortions annually. Obama even used that language at the Saddleback Summit with Rick Warren. Often, liberals fall back on their shining city on a hill, Europe, as an example of how social safety nets cut abortion statistics. But they don’t point to the fact that adjusted for a small youth population in Europe, the numbers come out relatively the same in both continents. This is a honeysweet election roofie to sedate conservatives into accepting an alternative socioeconomic framework in exchange for what they hope it will earn back in terms of fewer abortions. Don’t hold your breath. Remember, all Democrats are against abortion as well. In fact, most of them find it repulsive. But as they then hurry to add, they just simply refuse to legislate it onto another person (despite the universality of its negative vibes). But if a leader confines that unfavorable sentiment about abortion to themselves, and snuffs it under a bushel on the Senate floor, that leader’s personal dislikes (which is what the belief would simply become at said point) mean little to the legislative process and less to my vote. I am not fooled.

On immigration, Hillary said to an approving audience that border enforcement was not what “Our Lord” would do. I would ask her who’s Lord she refers to, and put her on the defensive with her secular wing, or also ask her what Jesus would say about gay marriage or abortion. I take my recent assertion a step beyond; all Democrats are pro-Jesus too. In all seriousness. They are convinced he would grant amnesty to 11 million illegals (despite his encouragement of civil obedience), that he opposes war (which he never totally decried since it was God’s vehicle to overthrow reckless tyrants in the Book of Kings), and he would grant public largess to all who asked (even though Jesus relied on the voluntary kindness of strangers and never established an agency). Liberals delude themselves into feeling that Christ’s commandments and God’s Talmudic tradition serve to subordinate themselves to the state’s policies, which is ultimately higher.

Contrastingly, conservatives believe that God is sufficient unto God, and that we’re just along for the ride if we choose to be. The best way to make that choice is when the government does not inhibit it in any way. The founding fathers wanted no government sponsorship of a particular sect, but what they DID want was that our rights and human dignity would be linked to the Divine, far out of a state’s authorship or abridgment (the Soviet Constitution held rights as privileges granted by the state, not a Creator). As to the speculation and nature of that divine, it would be left to the citizen.

There is a clear media double standard when Barack Obama (as many liberals do) evokes the name of God like a good messiah does, whether talking about Ezekiel’s “field of dry bones” as a metaphor for his renewal of of the American Dream, or his statement that we are metaphorically called to be “soldiers” to fight against evil. Geez! Dividing the world into evil and good and rallying a war against a moral abstract? Apparently Barack only accuses McCain of being Bush’s third term because he wants the title for himself! Democrats can talk about all the faith they don’t believe in ad nauseum, but don’t let me near that neozealot Bush!

On pure theology, Barack Obama stuck with Reverend Jeremiah Wright for 20 years at Trinity United Methodist Church. This church teaches Black Liberation Theology, a virulent strain of Social Christianity that interprets the world though a viewpoint of black grievance, separatism, hatred of America, Sandinista Marxism, and plain ol’ retribution. In fact, the belief structure is not really a theology so much as a radical leftist social bent that merely uses churches as a medium of conveyance. The only thing religious about this “thought poison” is that it uses the alter as its syringe, and not a streetcorner soapbox. I don’t know, at this point, whether or not Obama actually believed this malarkey (I know where his wife stands, ye reckon). But supposing that he doesn’t, borrowing a church’s Chicago prestige does not make one appear above the political status quo. Not good either way.

The friend I mentioned in the anecdote opening this article had his own arcane life insights. He was fascinated with “Samsara” in Buddhism and he was elated with “Sanctity” in Christianity, he saw joy in the absence of “Original Sin” in Islam, and marveled at the Zoroastrian dialectic of “existence versus non.” But while it was true that he enjoyed them all, not all of them can co-exist in the same pot, and would confuse the dickens out of a curious son or daughter if mixed. Furthermore, he wilted in Spanish when he sporadically took up Portuguese and French, having only so much hard drive space to remember it all. His dexterity in language could one day be tested by a foreign plane crash, and maybe his commitment to a particular faith may be tested by whatever fanatic posts his ransom on Youtube. Either way, he is not running for office, which confines the inaneness to him alone. Where conservatives need to be careful is in putting stock in the credibility of a member of your ideological foes when he/she tells you exactly what you want to hear – but relegates the promising beliefs to his/her own person – such as in the case of not liking abortion but doing little about it. You can light the values candle, but to little avail if you cover it with a bushel. What you as a voter need to decide, while the Democrats hold their convention at the Pepsi Center in Denver, Co, is whether or not you would trust this capricious fascination with everything, this sudden commitment to faith for the sake of approval, with the looming moral challenges of the 21st Century. >>