Pastor Rick's Test - The Candidates Submit, and a Principle Suffers

At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister -- no matter how beloved -- is supremely wrong.

It is also un-American.

For the past several days, since mega-pastor Rick Warren interviewed Barack Obama and John McCain at his Saddleback Church, most political debate has focused on who won.

Was it the nuanced, thoughtful Obama, who may have convinced a few more skeptics that he isn't a Muslim? Or was it the direct, confident McCain, who breezes through town-hall-style meetings the way Obama sinks three-pointers from the back court

The candidates' usual supporters felt validated in their choices. McCain convinced and comforted with characteristic certitude those who are most at ease with certitude; Obama convinced and comforted with his characteristic intellectual ambivalence those who are most at ease with ambivalence.

The winner, of course, was Warren, who has managed to position himself as political arbiter in a nation founded on the separation of church and state.

The loser was America.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/19/AR2008081902396.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

How would the Founding Fathers have fared in this forum?

whom they will cast their vote. But it shouldn't mean I have to be exposed to it. It has been everywhere and if you are NOT a Christian, all this talk will make you feel left out. Which is probably the intent of Rick Warren.

But, Kathleen Parker puts it more eloquently:

"For the moment, let's set aside our curiosity about what Jesus might do in a given circumstance and wonder what our Founding Fathers would have done at Saddleback Church. What would have happened to Thomas Jefferson if he had responded as he wrote in 1781:

"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

Would the crowd at Saddleback have applauded and nodded through that one? Doubtful.

By today's new standard of pulpits in the public square, Jefferson -- the great advocate for religious freedom in America -- would have lost."

It seems that when religion and politics mix, they are both corrupted.

I hope I would have the common sense to be mortified by this.

Everyone here keeps talking about how they are so upset with the way this transpired with McSame cheating. I'm mortified that this meeting was even allowed to happen.

I am so sick of the current point of view in our God obsessed freakfest of a country that should more rightly be called Jesusland than America. I was raised Southern Baptist and am now Wiccan, but even if it were my Goddess being trotted out as the grand litmus test for our politicians, I would be just as mortified. While I know that separation of church and state has always been more of an illusion than a reality (see: Marriage run by the State, for starters), I would prefer that the illusion remain up and running.



I feel like we are in a time that harkins back to the McCarthy era or even further back to the Salem Witch trials or the time of the Inquisition. Or if one doesn't care to look at historical comparisons, one need only look to the religious totalitarian regimes in some of the Middle Eastern countries to see where we are headed. I have yet to be dissuaded from the notion that fundamentalism, of any ilk, is dangerous and I think we are inching or maybe even hurtling toward that being the dominant way of this country.



Sorry, I needed to rant a bit. Thank you, though, for being a breath of fresh air in the fetid atmosphere that is growing more prevalent here. And take heart, the hundreds (maybe, thousands) of hate emails you will get will subside.

Warren was the largest loser of the "forum." He lied, he manipulated and is currently running around trying to save his butt.

Nope, you don't get to be the "next" Billy Graham.

Rick, enjoy your lucre, you're just another snake-handling, oil selling Fundamentalist.

He's no reverend, pastor or minister. He's Ricky the Liar. His organization is not a 'chruch' but rather a money gathering and political propaganda outfit that cares not for the truth, only for profit and political gain.
A con man, working the long con, caught telling a blatant lie that reveals his actual agenda.