On Dec 17 2012 12:28 PM, fffurken wrote:
> God/Religion does give comfort to many in exceptionally tragic times
> like this and although I haven't seen the event in full, certainly
> from snippets I saw that unity and togetherness was a central theme.
> To criticise the president of a country with so many religious people
> in it for talking about God at an event like this is truly nothing
> more than a hateful attack and the usual Obama-haters are here to do
> that (people like mo_ron, PDS, bub, Poptard). I also, btw, don't see
> why it should have offended any non-theist either.
Only speaking for myself here (and not the other "haters")... There are
two reasons I found this speech particularly disturbing: One, he seemed to
be assuming the mantle of a religious/spiritual leader, which IMO is a
dangerous overreach for a head of state. Leave that to the pastors. Two,
in light of his enthusiastic support of drone strikes, executive
assassinations, ongoing wars throughout the Middle East, etc. – by which
he has basically assumed the legal and moral justification to murder
anyone, anywhere, at his sole discretion – his sorrow strikes me as
absolutely the most hypocritical and insincere expression of sympathy
imaginable.
American culture has become such a bizarre, cognitively dissonant mess –
we're inappropriately, almost voyeuristically grief-stricken by a tragedy
that has no direct impact on our lives (like Sandy Hook), and yet we're
absolutely impervious these very same feelings when we inflict horrors
orders of magnitude worse on non-white foreigners all over the world. And
we wonder why our children grow up confused, angry and depressed?