While personally I think Obama got caught uttering a truth, or at least something he actually believes, I personally record it as a negative, because as president he needs to control his tongue. It doesn’t change the fact that I will vote for him. It’s just that in a very disciplined campaign, it’s disappointing.
If he wanted to utter the actual truth, I think it would be that some people fall back on parts of their faith as a justification for existing bigotry. Faith doesn’t justify bigotry, it gets co-opted by bigotry. The partial truth results in a generalization that will certainly be false, which is again a problem. We try to distinguish moderate Muslims from radical Muslims; we need to also distinguish ignorant bigots from ordinary, hardworking people.
But what Jon Stewart did about this on The Daily Show was more fun, and also showed Hillary Clinton as the suddenly faith-filled, spiritual, gun-toting gal that is wants to be perceived as.
I saw Bart Ehrman talk a few months ago, and at the end of his talk someone stood up and asked “but does any of this change any doctrine of the church?” The man was angry – you could hear the anger in his voice. And Ehrman said “No.” But he went on to say that people will always find something in the Bible to justify their doctrine.
The Bible is a great place to justify your biases. It’s also a great place to find support for whatever doctrine catches your fancy. It’s really sad that people have been taught to take every word in the Bible as authoritative, to just flip it open and read a passage out of context, let alone with any sense of how the words were used, or what the phrasing meant to the writer.
I think it is a huge assumption that there is some absolute truth out there that we can “know.” In the past 200-300 years we have thought that if we can only discover the “truth” then everything will work out… but this is a fairly new concept when you look at the history of the world. Jesus says that HE is the truth, not some information that we are supposed to discover, but a living, growing person! I think we are too fixated on finding all the “right” answers instead of just knowing and loving Jesus, and each other!