“GG:
Have you always been a Christian?
OBAMA:
I was raised more by my mother and my mother was Christian.”
Here, he simply does NOT answer the question.
“GG:
Do you still attend Trinity?
OBAMA:
Yep. Every week. 11 oclock service.
Ever been there? Good service.”
So much for his, “I wasn’t there” defense on Wright.
This is the interview with the quote about “confused Americans” who watch Fox, and listen to Talk Radio, also. Seems that kind of behavior is “dangerous” in Obama’s view... Long interview, but worth every minute.
Religion
A “friend” from high school has said that Dunham “touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue.”[6]The first mention I find of religion in this lengthy Time Magazine article is on page 4Maya Soetoro-Ng, when asked if her mother was an atheist, said, “I wouldn't have called her an atheist. She was an agnostic. She basically gave us all the good books — the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching — and wanted us to recognise that everyone has something beautiful to contribute.”[19] “Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example. But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways.”[20]
In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father Barack Obama wrote, “My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn't possess... In a land [Indonesia] where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship... she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.”[21] In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope Obama wrote, “I was not raised in a religious household... My mother's own experiences... only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones... And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I've ever known.”[22] Religion for her was “just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives,” Obama wrote.[20] In 2007 Obama described his mother as “a Christian from Kansas.” “I was raised by my mother,” he continued. “So, I’ve always been a Christian.”[23][24] Also in 2007, he said in a speech, “My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew. But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution.”[1]
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1729524-4,00.html
“Ann took a job teaching English at the U.S. embassy. She woke up well before dawn throughout her life. Now she went into her son's room every day at 4 a.m. to give him English lessons from a U.S. correspondence course. She couldn't afford the élite international school and worried he wasn't challenged enough. After two years at the Catholic school, Obama moved to a state-run elementary school closer to the new house. He was the only foreigner, says Ati Kisjanto, a classmate, but he spoke some Indonesian and made new friends.”
So he went to a Catholic school briefly because she thought it might be a better school.
On page 5 of the article, there is this:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1729524-5,00.html
“Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, but Obama’s household was not religious. ‘My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew,’ Obama said in a 2007 speech. ‘But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution. And as a consequence, so did I.’”
What is a “healthy skepticism of religion as an institution” for a devout Christian?