Beating a Dead Horse

[howeird]

Over on the book of face, I've wrapped up my part of a conversation with a couple of Obamalamadingdangs who obviously have not bothered to read El Presidente's books, and are 1000% certain he was raised by devoted church-going Christians in the faith. He wasn't. According to both his books, his maternal grandparents (who raised him) were free thinkers, his mother absolutely despised religion, and he had none until swinging to the other side of the pendulum and becoming a nearly fundamentalist Christian relatively late in life.

My original reason for poking my head in on the conversation was several people were yelling about how stupid and ignorant the people are who still believe Obama is not a US citizen and is Muslim. My poke was that while I am convinced that he is a US citizen who has adopted the Christian religion, I can see how there could be a reasonable doubt
 -After all, he has chosen to keep his utterly Islamic name Barak Hussein
- His father and paternal grandfather were Muslim (his father had 5 wives)
- His stepfather was Muslim, and helped raise him for a short time in Muslim Indonesia
- His father was a citizen of Kenya, and as the son of a foreign national Barak Jr. had the opportunity to become a citizen of Kenya when he came of age. The US allows dual citizenship, I am not sure if Kenya does.

It's called being a Devil's Advocate. And now that I am done writing this, I am going online to listen to Glenn Beck's "In Your Dreams" speech. :-)

Comments

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Devil's Advocate is one phrase for it. :) It does seem to me, though, that there are occasions and subjects wherein devil's advocacy becomes less of an amusing game and more just troublemaking for the hell of it.

But that's probably just me, and I have a long history of being taken in by so-called devil's advocates and then having to swallow my rage when they told me they were just joking. So I'm jaundiced on the subject.

[howeird]

I have a long history of being taken in by so-called devil's advocates
I hear what you are saying, there are a lot of folks out there who argue the fallacy as if they believe it to be truth. I try not to be one of them. As I said here and on FB, while I don't have a whole lot of love for the man, between his first autobiography and a lot of Wikipedia and news service reading, I'm sure he is what he says he is as far as citizenship and religion go. If I was at all PC I'd say "not that it matters what religion he is", but frankly his description of his Christianization scares the crap out of me. He makes Bush look like a Unitarian. So far he has not tried to legislate his religious beliefs, for which I am truly grateful.