Do you have two hours and a lot of antacids? Then by all means torture yourself by watching a bunch of politicians pander to religion in the latest National Prayer Breakfast, which took place yesterday. You can skip the first 37 minutes as nothing happens: it’s just people coming in and sitting down. Then it’s introduced with an explicitly Christian purpose (they mention Jesus, and later note that the purpose of the breakfast is to “lift up the nation with Jesus”).
This is part of the description of this event from Wikipedia:
The National Prayer Breakfast is a yearly event held in Washington, D.C., on the first Thursday of February each year. The founder of this event was Abraham Vereide. The event—which is actually a series of meetings, luncheons, and dinners—has taken place since 1953 and has been held at least since the 1980s at the Washington Hilton on Connecticut Avenue NW.
The breakfast, held in the Hilton’s International Ballroom, is typically attended by some 3,500 guests, including international invitees from over 100 countries. The National Prayer Breakfast is hosted by members of the United States Congress and is organized on their behalf by The Fellowship Foundation, a Christian organization. Initially called the Presidential Prayer Breakfast, the name was changed in 1970 to the National Prayer Breakfast.
It is designed to be a forum for the political, social, and business elite to assemble and build relationships. Since the inception of the National Prayer Breakfast, several U.S. states and cities and other countries have established their own annual prayer breakfast events.
Every U.S. president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has participated in the annual event.
While it may not be sponsored by the government, it certainly has the imprimatur of the government, and it shouldn’t be taking place. You can bet your tuchus that Founding Fathers like George Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Ben Franklin, and so on wouldn’t have anything to do with this. Remember that they refused to open the Constitutional Convention in 1787 with any prayer!
If you want to see our esteemed President pander to faith, start watching at 1 hour and 49 minutes in and stop at 2:16:15: about 27 minutes. If that’s too much (and it was too much for me), read the transcript of his remarks here.
If faith is the great cure for fear, it’s also a great instigator of fear, both as a motivator of religiously-based violence and as a promoter of persistent fear about going to hell, something that plagues many Catholics.
I honestly cannot watch. I’m afraid I’d loose faith in humanity. Thanks for watching for me and posting this report.
Please do not loose any more faith in or on humanity. There is more than enough to go around at present.
In point of fact, clean up operations are well under way, and you seem to be attached to one of the better operations going.
Keep the unfaith, and godspeed!
Oh…bother.
I read the transcript of Obama’s speech. It was rather long and I imagine the faithful were pleased, although the right wing will be looking for hidden clues that he really is a Muslim.
There are some who think Obama is a secret atheist. If so, he is an extraordinary hypocrite. That is why, if he is a secret atheist, he’ll never admit it.
I’m convinced he’s at least practically-speaking a non-believer. In “Dreams” there is zero reference to God, religion or any faith commitments. That was all ginned up to run for office. I don’t think it’s hypocritical at all not to commit political suicide. That said, maybe he’ll admit his real views in the memoir.
Maybe the word hypocrisy has a different meaning for politicians than for everyone else.
“Maybe the word hypocrisy has a different meaning for politicians than for everyone else.”
As part of a political family I can say that while it may not have a different meaning it’s certainly something you can’t worry about if you want to have success as a politician. My father used to say “show me a successful politician, and I’ll show you a liar.” He was never particularly successful. He was a perennial winner and looser. He would win one election, and then fail to be reelected for upholding his principles.
I wanted to add one of the things he )my father) was most proud of in terms of accolades was a Boston Globe article where he was described in the headline as being “too honest for his own good”.
Sad to say but it appears most voters, despite whatever else they may say, would rather vote for someone who tells them what they want to hear than for someone who tells them the truth.
Lots and lots of God-talk in Obama’s other book “The Audacity of Hope”.
If the President is, in fact, not a religious believer, I doubt we’ll ever know. I was interested to see if any analytics had been done on President Obama’s public remarks regarding references to religion. So I did a google search using those terms. What I got in return was a smorgasbord of agenda hawking nonsesne. Some of the links complain that he doesn’t make enough references to Jesus, others accuse him of only making references to Jesus or christianity to conceal the fact that he’s secretly a Muslim. There was even a link to something written by Allen West which was, of course, barking-at-the-moon crazy. After a cursory scanning it seemed as though about half of the links could even be remotely construed as legitimate news items or op-ed pieces.
I am hopeful that in the realtively near future we may see the line move on this issue and when it does, I think it’ll move fast as it has on same-sex marriage and marijuana decriminalization. But right now, God is still the third rail of American politics and in order to be an effective President, the occupant of the Oval Office is gonna have to shine it on, at least a little bit. It stinks but it’s probably the kind of thing Churchill was referenceiong when he said, “The best argument against Democracy is a five minute coinversation with the average voter.”
The ‘needle’ on general cultism will not move. Cultism is ingrained from birth.
Marriage issue was combination of younger generation exposure to “gay? ho hum”
and
Kennedy’s ‘social liberalism’. http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/obergefell-v-hodges/
imo, 14th amd wasn’t as prime a basis for decision as 1st amd establishment.
I thought I’d read that Sotomayor granted certiorari, so possibly she tactically limited consideration to 14a arguments.
On the other hand, the ‘losers’ (Hodges) would have had to avoid the 1a issue (as their public arguments tried to).
We’re seeing the needle move on religion right now.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/27/millennials-less-religious_n_7452998.html
Hmmm…”decline in religiosity was found to be greater among young women than young men.”
I did listen to about 5 minutes of the video. The insincerity doesn’t come through on the transcript, but I think I see it in his posture, his pacing, and all the other cues to lack of force behind the words. Of course maybe you do have to have faith to send drones out to kill Americans without trial. God is certainly great!
They’re looking for proof. They already know that he’s a Muslim. They have faith in that ; what they need is to find the proof that us poor, deluded fools need to see.
It should be called National Talking to
Yourself Breakfast. I talk to myself all the time and I never lose an argument. Praying,
I mean talking to myself, makes me feel warm, and gives life meaning and I see frozen
waterfalls and something else that I can’t
remember, but I’ll pray, I mean…and see if
that helps.
If you pray for long enough, the waterfalls will unfreeze, which I guess helps the waterfalls.
(I’m reminded of a drought in Canterbury, New Zealand, where a local vicar led his flock in praying for rain. A reporter asked him “Does it work?” and he replied “Oh yes, it always works, eventually”. This being New Zealand, I have no idea whether the vicar realised the sceptical undertones of that last word.)
cr
Sounds like PT Barnum being concerned about the supply of lambs for his World Peace project.
I just ate lunch, so I will pass.
President Sanders will not put up with this crap, I get ‘ya.
Rightly or wrongly, some of the founding fathers may have been just a tad more sanguine towards this than some might suppose. They were not unanimous on this. George Washington’s proclamation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday is very faith-(boosting/coddling). GW was a Freemason, a deist, and a non-communicant at his local Anglican church, but none of this stopped him from participating in public prayer at meetings of various kinds on a large scale. Prez #2 John Adams did the same.
My big problem is that breakfast’s founding group, The Family, is secretive and seems to have links to a lot of right-wing stuff including the Ugandan anti-gay legislation. Their claim to be non-sectarian is bogus.
In the 70s they did have a good keynote speaker (Mark Hatfield) who in front of Nixon and Kissinger spoke eloquently against the Vietnam war, and Bono’s 2006 keynote speech on helping the marginalized was pretty good too. However, I regret to note that the only person who has been keynote speaker twice is Ben Carson.
This is the first I’ve learned it is the first Thursday of February. That means it is on my birthday once every seven years, including 2016. I prefer however to observe the confluence of my birthday with that of Rosa Parks and the discoverer of Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh.
Yes, The Family is a shady outfit, and these events are intended to inject christianity into politics. It seems to be working.
And yes, all are welcome so long as you agree to pray to their god.
Hmmm, where have I heard of them recently? Possibly here.
[Prepares 10ft bargepole].
Is there any chance that they’re as interesting as “Family Guy”? [reads Wikipedia].
Oh, slimy! I’d better go and wash the computer now. They do leave some hostages to fortune though :
If that isn’t an invitation to the The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name crowd to come along and play.
Shameful. Especially since this event is sponsored by The Fellowship, a fundamentalist organization responsible for such horrors as Uganda’s kill-the-gays legislation.
sub
These statements of faith explain why Obama won’t go on Bill Maher’s show. I think Obama is scared of Maher questioning his faith. Faith doesn’t cure fear at all, apparantly.
I had not thought of that little point. Now that you mention it…..
Sometimes I have the feeling the religious know perfectly well that what they’re saying can’t possibly be true. Hence the need for blasphemy laws.
They know it on some level, surely. How can everyone not have had the same questions bumbling around in their heads that I had for over 30 years before discovering first Richard Dawkins and then the rest of the logical world? I suspect, as you suggest, they all have doubts on some level. Those that don’t…well, those are atheists because there’s very little doubt in not believing in those myths. If God does exist in some way unfathomable to us at present, she surely ain’t the God of Abraham, or Mohammed, or Vishnu and Brahma.
If people stop believing, then all the priests, imams, popes, rabbi’s, ayatollah’s, etc. are out of a job. And since politicians think faith is necessary to gain the favor of an electorate, they too benefit from reinforcing the idea that having faith is beneficial. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a hate preacher from Egypt, once said that islam today would not exist if apostasy wasn’t punishable by death. I think he has a point. In a way, blasphemy laws are an illustration of the deep insecurity of the religious, an acknowledgement that the whole thing is a fabrication and can only be sustained through violence.
“If people stop believing, then all the priests, imams, popes, rabbi’s, ayatollah’s, etc. are out of a job.”
This is why it it futile to hope that Muslim clerics will reform Islam. Other factors aside, they see what happened when Christianity became moderate: church attendance dropped and so did jobs and funds for clergy. You cannot realistically expect from anyone to undermine his own business.
It is absurd to me that Western politicians regard the religious institutions as legitimate representatives of Muslim communities. Be it Obama’s visit to a mosque or French authorities asking imams to negotiate during riots in Muslim ghettos. I think all this sends a message of acceptance of Islamic theocracy.
Maher’s occasional “off colour” language may be why
I can imagine the world without faith and it doesn’t frighten me.
I can also imagine a world without reason and that does frighten me.
National white noise.
It’s hard to complain about the National Prayer Breakfast since the first meeting in 1953, the United States has been at peace and enjoyed unimagined prosperity. These prayers to the Christian God/Jesus resulted in all foreign powers respecting us as the moral beacon of the world, all competing religions submit to Christian America, including the radical Islamic groups like ISIS, these prayers have ending hunger, eliminated disease, brought us full employment, every man has the right woman as his wife, helpmate and sex toy and the women all appreciate being subordinate to their man, all every child is born without birth defects and are better than average, these kids obey their parents and the authorities, minorities accept their inferior position to White Christian Americans which ended racism and discrimination, drug use ended, crime has disappeared from our great Christian nation allowing us to close every prison and jail, there are no GLBTQ Americans as such perversion has been eliminated by our devotion to Jesus through these prayers. We live in a perfect society, so why would we complain about having our government leaders endorse and participate in these obviously effective prayers that have brought us paradise on earth?
That’s called American Exceptionalism. 😉
True Dat! But I thought Obama didn’t think America was Exceptional. That’s what they said on Fox News.
I think in this case he made an exception.
I would like to think Hamilton said it during the Convention in Philly back in 1787 but even if not, he probably wanted to.
Delegate Ben Franklin proposed to start each session in prayer. Hamilton supposedly declared that he saw no need for calling in foreign aid.
At any rate the proposal was not acted upon because no funds were available for clergy.
“…political, social, and business elite to assemble and build relationships.”
That’s what Washington needs a special day set aside for the elite to network. Without that special day they’d never get to know each other.
Yeah, anytime you hear politicians pledging fealty to “Judeo-Christian values,” the “Judeo” part is a sop to keep The Jews Who Own All Media® off their backs and to keep the AIPAC campaign dosh flowing.
That’s all that stops some of them from coming out and saying that the Jews killed Jesus and from voicing their suspicions about the ingredients in matzo. (Christ, it’s only the first week of February, still days before the first actual presidential primary, and already I’ve fallen into a death-spiral of political cynicism.)
“Please God, keep me safe from all those who believe in you.” That would be acceptable.
+ 1
“You can skip the first 37 minutes as nothing happens: it’s just people coming in and sitting down. ”
*Now* I remember why I used to hate church services. It wasn’t the implied insult to my intelligence from all the doctrinal woo and primitive moralising. They were just so fucking *boring*. 😉
cr
Agreed…“Say what we say when we say it…then you can go home to your toys…”
Heroine is a great cure for fear too. That is probably why it is called heroine.
Did they pray that everyone would accept the truth that evolution by natural selection is true ?
Meanwhile in the U.K. the BBC is doing a good thing by helping people to study / read / think more widely on the subject of religion. They have a BBC iWonder webpage & videos presented by atheist theologian Prof Francesca Stavrakopoulou. I noticed it because she tweeted about it. Also Steven Pinker gets a mention under heading 6 ‘Where else can meaning be found : moral goodness.’
Section 7 Where next has ‘God on my mind: Evolution.’ which is linked to a a radio 4 discussion from 2010 about ~ the psychology of why people make up religions.
The reality is that the coverage of any atheist/humanist position at the BBC is dwarfed by the coverage of the BBC’s religious affairs schedule
My faith in Hell used to plague me with nightmares and anguish for weeks at a time over stuff as mundane as having thoughts that contained curse words. Faith in Heaven was not the cure for that; reason was.
Sorry to hear you had such a worried youth. Life can be stressful enough without having imaginary crimes forced on you.
I’m sometimes skeptical when religious people tell me religion didn’t have any negatives at all. I guess it depends on the personality and specifics of your circumstances. In any event, such unnecessary anguish is truly a sin committed by the religious community.
Religion, at least in the Abrahamic tradition, is focused heavily on the fact that we keep living after we die. The afterlife is then defined as a dichotomy of absolute bliss versus absolute torture, both lasting an infinite amount of time. Anyone suggesting their are no negatives in this system is doubly deluded, first for accepting the system without evidence and second for claiming eternal torture is not a negative.
Religions, such as Hinduism, which focus on eternal rebirths, make far more sense. At least there’s redemption after the punishment. For me, I broke out if my fear of death by asking what evidence there is for life after death. There is none, and despite my moral reprehension at the Christian view, I rejected it because I don’t see reason to believe it is true. Objection on any other basis implies that the Universe should be fair and that’s what got humanity into this mess in the first place.
Sorry for the their/there mixup. I’ll blame autocorrect and the Macallan 12 I had tonight.
In fact, religion thrives upon fear. It helps companies and politicians likewise to control the mood of the masses and make them do things, participate in actions, and support undertakings they would not otherwise. Racism, sexism, bigotry, war – with one ring to rule them all: fear.
I get lots of “thumbs-downs” when I reply to an Xtian’s comment exhorting prayer with the reminder that Jesus specifically said not to do it in public……