I doubt Obama believes in anything, not in God, not even the evidence of the senses – but to be officially a Muslim, you have to publicly pronounce the Shahada: “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet”. Obama did as a child, and recently repeated in public as an adult. To cease to be a Muslim, you have to publicly reject that proposition, which he has not done, or publicly accept a contrary proposition, such as “Jesus is Lord”, which he has not done.
To be officially Christian, you have to be baptized in the name of Jesus, and call Jesus “Lord”, which Obama has not done, nor has his “Christian” pastor, the Reverend Wright, done.
As for what I am: I think that Mohammed was a mass murdering pedophile rapist who made up all that stuff about angels telling him the word of God. I think Jesus was making an honest and sincere effort to reform Judaism into a more peaceable faith, both for the general good and to protect Jews from getting squished by Romans, but the evasiveness of his prophecies reveal him to be a mortal.
“Nation shall rise against Nation, and Kingdom against Kingdom”. And verily I tell unto you bears shall shit in the woods.
Jesus’ prophecies for the fall of Jerusalem and temple were only marginally more impressive. He did not give an approximate date, nor tell us that the Romans would be the ones to do it – thereby keeping his ass covered against the possibility that Rome would fall before Jerusalem did – which ass covering reveals him to be a mortal, though it also suggests the books of the New Testament were written up before seventy AD. If they had been written up after the fall of Jerusalem, his prophecies probably would have been sharpened up a bit by the chroniclers. The argument that the New Testament must have been written after seventy AD is people irrationally hostile to Christianity going overboard in their desire to piss on Christianity. To cast doubt on Christianity, you merely have to cast doubt on the proposition that Jesus lives, not on the proposition that Jesus lived. The argument that the books of the bible were written long after the ministry of Jesus is an effort to disprove the existence of Jesus the man, which effort is silly – there is plenty of historical evidence that Jesus lived, preached, was crucified by Pontius Pilate, and stayed dead.
What I do believe in is that our senses give us straightforward access to reality as it really is, to things in themselves, that we are not trapped in Plato’s cave because we can reach through the windows and break things apart to see what they are really made of, that with due care and competence, categories and concepts can be and should be constructed to correspond to the likeness and origins of particular things, reflecting commonalities between particular examples of real things. I believe that all words are defined by pointing at examples, or defined by other words that were defined by pointing at examples, that children rightly learn the meaning of words from the examples pointed at by their mothers, and that the ultimate authority of what words mean is the type examples provided by mothers and fairy tales to children – thus words mean what children think they mean, and not what ideologues and philosophers say they mean, that language, reality and the connection between language and reality are what children think they are.
While Obama is a Muslim, I not only doubt that he believes in Allah, but doubt that he believes that reality exists external to himself, or that words have any definite meaning.
[…] is a Muslim, his place of birth is suspiciously concealed, and while he does not rub his hands […]