And god said, "Let there be tRump"!

Back in the old country, the leader of the government boasts about leading a bachelor life in order to serve the country.  A day before the general elections, he went to meditate in a cave.  Or, so it was reported. I suppose questions shall not be asked on why his meditation had to be photographed and widely distributed.  This is the same leader who handpicked a "yogi" as the chief minister of the most populous state in the union.  Politics is nothing but doing god's work!

Back in the old days, when the Ayatollahs took over governing in Iran, we wondered and worried about such a convergence of politics and religion.  It was, ahem, unholy.  And these kinds of things never would happen in the beacon of democracy that the United States is, we believed.

Live long enough and you will see wishes and nightmares come true!

A number of Republicans, and especially the party's white evangelical members, believe that god chose tRump to be the President. His pussy-grabbing bravado is ok with god? His bigotry is ok with god? His lying is ok with god?  Heck, violation of every one of the holy Ten Commandments is ok with this god?

In fact, god has a clear plan, which the “Independent Network Charismatic,” or “INC Christianity” cheer, and "is significantly changing the religious landscape in America – and the nation’s politics."

A large number of evangelical Christians in the U.S. believe that God has chosen Donald Trump to advance the kingdom of God on Earth. Several high-profile religious leaders have made similar claims, often comparing Trump to King Cyrus who was asked by God to rescue the nation of Israel from exile in Babylon.

It is all good, as long as you keep your girls away from him, I guess.

Remember this post on the Bethel ministry youth who bugged, er, "encouraged" us?  Apparently that group also is a part of the INC Christianity.

Most INC Christian groups we studied seek to bring heaven or God’s intended perfect society to Earth by placing “kingdom-minded people” in powerful positions at the top of all sectors of society. These “seven mountains of culture” include business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family and religion. In this form of “trickle-down Christianity,” they believe if Christians rise to the top of all seven “mountains,” society will be completely transformed.

Trickle-down Christianity.  Oh my!

While the Ukraine scandal, family separations at the border, and allegations of corruption have made some evangelical Christians question their support of Donald Trump, most of those steeped in INC Christianity will never abandon their president.
To them, as we found, to oppose Donald Trump is to oppose God who chose him specifically to bring America and the world back to God.

God's will hath no why.

Calling a Black POTUS married 25 yrs to 1 wife with 2 children, no mistresses, affairs or scandals, ‘the antichrist’ but a white POTUS married thrice, 5 kids by 3 women, mistresses, affairs & scandals, ‘God‘s anointed,’ proves your religion is white supremacy, not christianity.

— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) December 4, 2019

Roaches, monkeys, and man

The undergraduate years gave me the time and space for me to figure out how I viewed many aspects of life, including religion.  Like a pendulum that violently swings, suggesting instability and the entire structure falling apart, the violence within was also reflected in my words and action.  In retrospect, it is so clear that I could have either had a complete and total mental breakdown or I could have achieved clarity on how to move forward.  I am immensely glad, and relieved, that I did not suffer a breakdown.

All that was from thinking about what I had known from the years of brainwashing.  I had yet to start any serious reading and thinking about how screwed up other religions might be.  Graduate school provided me that opportunity too.

While I did not take courses on religions, many of the books and articles that I read, and the lectures that I listened to, gave me insights.  One of those was about the relationship between god, nature, and man.

In the traditional approaches in the various strands of Hindu faith, there is plenty of nature worship.  Mountains are sacred as are rivers and trees.  And, of course, even killing the damn roaches troubled the really faithful ones.  But, apparently not so in the Judaeo-Christian framework.  Why?  The Bible said so:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

God rules over man, who rules over nature.  A relationship that is very different from what the faith in the old country told me.

Of course, just because people say they are religious does not mean they truly mean it. Many devout brahmins, for instance, devour meat.  And there are nature-worshiping hippies among Christians.  But, the broad framework suggests that the faithful might look at nature differently because their views stem from what their religions instructed them.

Do evangelical Christians in the US then put into practice a view that man rules over nature?  And, therefore, do they think differently from many of us who are worried about environmental crises and climate change in particular?

The following excerpt should settle that, it seems:

Here, for example, is what a church youth minister had to say about environmental care: “If we have the opportunity we should help take care of this planet that we’ve been given. Having said that, I also believe that the value of human life is higher than the value of a whale, or a species of monkey.”
It’s not that evangelicals don’t care about the environment. It’s that they care about people more.

Of course, the people that evangelicals care about don't live in shitholes--but, that is a post for another day!

Meera Subramanian worked on a series to find the middle ground in these environment discussions.  In one, she talked to a bunch of students at the Harvard of the evangelicals--Wheaton College.

While many evangelicals are preoccupied with the long-term state of human souls and the protection of the unborn, Diego and the other students I met at Wheaton are also considering other eternal implications and a broader definition of pro-life. They are concerned about the lifespan of climate pollutants that will last in the atmosphere for thousands of years, and about the lives of the poor and weak who are being disproportionately harmed by the effects of those greenhouse gases. 

But, as much as I found the world a challenging place back when I was a teenager, these students also are in a tough spot:

It can be tough to be an evangelical who cares about climate change, Chelsey said, "because the environmental activists don't trust you and the evangelicals hate you." Or they could hate you

If only we could engage in serious and sincere discussions all over the world on the relationship between humans and the natural world that envelops us.  If only!

Jesus said, "get the fuck out of here!"

President tRump, whose strongest supporters are white evangelical Christians, knows how Jesus would treat the homeless.  tRump expressed that very, very clearly:

He expressed sympathy for real estate investors here and other Californians whose property values or quality of life are threatened.
“In many cases, they came from other countries and they moved to Los Angeles or they moved to San Francisco because of the prestige of the city, and all of a sudden they have tents,” Trump said. “Hundreds and hundreds of tents and people living at the entrance to their office building. And they want to leave.”
In Los Angeles and San Francisco, Trump said, people are living on the “best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings . . . where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes, where they went to those locations because of the prestige.” ...
Trump has characterized the homeless problem in California and other places as a “disgrace,” saying this July: “We may do something to get that whole thing cleaned up. It’s inappropriate.” He more recently directed aides to figure out “how the hell we can get these people off the streets,” one senior administration official said.

As always, tRump offers a clear response to What Would Jesus Do?

Of course, I am not the only one who is angry at this President's inhumane approach to homelessness, and to the hypocrisy of his bible-thumping supporters.  This columnist, for instance, offers to rewrite a King tRump version of the bible, and suggests many sarcastic interpretations of Jesus' thoughts, like this one:

“A righteous man rounds up the poor and puts them someplace where people don’t have to see how gross they are; a wicked man allows people who pay tremendous taxes to be inconvenienced.”

This is how you make god great again!

Here is one exhibit that tRump and his supporters wouldn't even care about.  A local story of a homeless woman who was run over by a garbage truck.  She was once the kid on the right in this photo:

Much later, she was the mother in this photo:

She was 57 years old and homeless when she died.

Annette Lorraine Montero, unhoused and apparently suffering from mental illness, was run over and killed by a garbage truck as she slept in a parking lot near downtown Eugene.

Here's another exhibit, from Los Angeles.  The homeless man in the photo below was not born homeless. "He was a Yale graduate, Wall Street banker and entrepreneur."

Homelessness is a complex human problem.  This horrible human being in the Oval Office doesn't have an iota of empathy in him to begin to understand is not a surprise.  What excuse do the followers of Jesus have?

And if we cannot empathize with a fellow human right in front of our eyes, how are we going to even begin to understand the plight of humans far away, like the refugees fleeing wars?

And these are the same people who believe that I am going to hell because I am an atheist who does not believe in Jesus?  If only they understood that it is we humans who create hell right here on earth.  Why don't they want us to work together in order to create a heaven right here on earth!

Finding meaning in meaninglessness

tRump is a RINO.  No, not that one.  But, this: He is religious in name only.

The "Two Corinthians" man is far from being a true Christian, as much as he is far from being a patriot when he makes out with the American flag.  Not for a moment does any sane person ever imagine tRump getting high on religion, like some of the uber-religious do.  In a marvelous autobiographical essay, the author writes: "I have confused religion with drugs, drugs with music, music with religion. I can’t tell whether my inclination toward ecstasy is a sign that I still believe in God, or if it was only because of that ecstatic tendency that I ever believed at all."  Maybe if tRump had tasted alcohol, his life--and ours--would have been different.  But then we also had a disastrous Republican President who had not only binged on alcohol but had even done cocaine, but found god after all that!

Anyway, the demagogue knows that bringing Jesus into political rhetoric is important in this country that was founded by fanatics who fled England: "the impulse to purify the group through separation from mainstream society, now regarded as the signature of a cult, could not be more fundamental to the nation’s history.”

And here I am, an atheist, who has never been anywhere near even pot, and I have no idea how the more potent drugs are.  Alcohol is rarer in my life than animal protein is.  I don't need religion or drugs to be ecstatic about life!

God and religion are not going to die anytime soon.  At a dinner a month ago at a meeting, an older man engaged me in a conversation about yoga and more.  The more included woo-woo talk. And then he made the mistake of asking me for my opinions.  I told him, in a matter of fact tone, that all our angst seems to be because we humans can't seem to figure out how to deal with two definitive aspects: We are here because our parents had sex, and we are going to die.  I suppose now he knows better to avoid me the next time he sees me ;)

With time, I have come to understand that life is what it is.  And life ends. Dogs die. Trees die. We humans also die.  Perhaps we are the only living beings who are fully aware that death awaits us, and I am thankful for that:  "we need death, as a blessing; eternity is at best incoherent or meaningless, and at worst terrifying; and we should trust in ourselves rather than put our faith in some kind of transcendent rescue from the joy and pain of life."

In my transition from a believer, I thought I had to beat up on religion, on faith.  I wanted to argue that there is no god.  But, I care not anymore.  Have not cared about those for a long while.  My atheism does not depend on beating up on god or religion.  Like the review essay notes, such a framework also "releases atheism from its ancient curse: its sticky intimacy with theism."

Instead, religious practice could be seen as valuable and even cherishable, once it is understood to be a natural human quest for meaning. Everything flows from the double assumption that only finitude makes for ultimate meaning and that most religious values are unconsciously secular. We are meaning-haunted creatures.

We are meaning-haunted creatures.  What a lovely phrasing!

Some day in the future, I hope, we will have a political system in which politicians do not have to fake their ways with religion and god.

We still haven’t seen that system, and it’s hard to imagine it, but someone went up the mountain and looked out, and saw the promised land. And that land is in this life, not in another one.

Murderous Masturbating Men!

A few days ago, I tweeted this:

#SNL has an awesome #Election2020 bumper sticker for #Republicans who are opposed to #abortion:
"Life begins at erection"
🤣🤣🤣
And, oh my, Cecily Strong as Susan Collins is phenomenal!https://t.co/wcmGyelQGi#tRump #ShootsOn5thAvenueAllTheTime

— Am.Dr.Khe (@congoboy) May 12, 2019

It kept nagging me that I have seen "life begins at erection" before.  But, simply could not track that down.

Today, I did.

I found that at my own blog! 

A post that is almost seven years old included this cartoon:

We men have it easy.  A few minutes of pleasure, and we move on. 

Now, should one of the sperms crack through the egg, then it is the women who has to deal with a fetus inside her for 280 days.  And then give birth.  And then feed and clean and ...

Yet, as The Guardian put it:

Source

CNN compares Alabama's move with the rest of the world, and I find this that shocked me:

Countries with more liberal laws include Finland, India and Japan, where provisions for abortion are made not only in cases of rape or risk to the woman's health, but also on socioeconomic grounds.

India? Do mOdi and his toadies know about this?

Commentators are educating us about what happened in Romania, when the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu completely banned abortion and contraception.

Prior to 1966, Romania had one of the most liberal abortion policies in the world. But, desperate for population growth, Ceaușescu issued Decree 770, essentially nationalizing Romanian women’s wombs. Both abortion and contraception were criminalized for all women age 45 and under who had not borne at least four children (later increased to five). The only exceptions were for rape and incest, high-risk pregnancies, and cases in which the fetus could contract a hereditary disease from either parent. The law was strictly enforced. The Romanian secret police, the Securitate, registered suspected pregnancies and kept tabs on women until the birth of the child. It was the kind of natalist authoritarianism that US "pro-life" advocates have long dreamed of.

The sharia comes to Alabama. And to Georgia, to Missouri, to ... Orgasmic times for a good chunk of the 63 million!

Need a Plan B. Problem is that it does not exist!

The sun is shining, and spring is in full bloom.

Yet, as Max Boot writes, "I am in despair as I have never been before about the future of our experiment in self-rule."

tRump has proved over and over again that nobody will do anything even if he shoots somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue.

And now he apparently has god also on his side!

“People say, ‘How do you get through that whole stuff? How do you get through those witch hunts and everything else?’” Trump said, turning to Vice President Pence. “And you know what we do, Mike? We just do it, right? And we think about God.”

Holy shit!

And, he continued:

“One of the things that Mike and I were discussing just a little while ago—people are so proud to be using that beautiful word, God, and they’re using the word God again, and they’re not hiding from it,” he said. “They’re not being told to take it down, and they’re not saying we can’t honor God. In God we trust. So important.”

Thus spake the pussy-grabbing sleazeball!

It does not shock me anymore that the religious right is solidly behind this horrible human being.  While politics always has made strange bedfellows, never have we witnessed such a combination.  The righteous followers of Jesus in bed with "the racist, pxxxy-grabbing, child-caging, transphobic, Muslim-hating, “sh*t hole” mocking Nazi apologist," as Charles Blow describes tRump.

We continue to dig way down and far away from the high bar that Abraham Lincoln set.  Lincoln  was asked if God was on his side, during the Civil War.  To which Lincoln replied: “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”

If god is always right, and he has selected tRump as his envoy, as the evangelicals claim in their support for him, does it mean that god approves racism; pussy-grabbing; child-caging; homo- and trans-phobia; Islamophobia; mocking the poor in shitholes; promoting white supremacy; ...?

Maybe god will reelect him in 2020 in order to teach us non-believers a lesson that we will never forget!

Apartheid in America

In 1492, Columbus "discovered" India.

Jill Lepore's narration of the story of the United States from that moment is compelling.  Deeply disturbing, even if the facts are not always new.  To read them all in a single-volume book is immensely more powerful than I had imagined.

The 400 year anniversary was during the post-war Reconstruction.  The original inhabitants had been practically wiped out, and most of the rest driven out of their lands.  Humans from Africa had been imported, traded, held as property, and finally proclaimed to be free by Lincoln.  A destructive Civil War was fought, in which the slave states lost.  Meanwhile, Mexicans and Chinese were also given the rough treatment.

Throughout all these, while the citizenship of the European settlers and their descendants was assumed as a given, the citizenship of non-whites was, well, unresolved.  (This is, of course, an ongoing issue as well, with the party of whites desperately trying to deny citizenship to non-whites.)

The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed freed slaves equal protection and due process of law, yes, but they were considered to be "Separate" in the post-war era.  Jill Lepore writes about the irony of the Fourteenth Amendment--business used that to further cement a legal fiction that corporations are persons!

In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that over the course of fifty years, "only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.

It shouldn't surprise us that today's Party of Lincoln champions business interests more than human interests, especially the interests of disadvantaged non-white humans.  As Lepore comments, "rights proffered to the people were proffered, instead, to corporations."

In 1892, the country hosted "the largest-ever world's fair" in Chicago.  Frederick Douglass was the only eminent African American invited to address.  Otherwise, "as if to shame the Negro, they exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage."

When the day came for Douglass to deliver his talk, "he arrived to find the fair decked out with watermelons, and white hecklers waiting for him."

That reminds me about the time when a white friend "joked" about how to get Obama to quit the presidency. (This friend--a born again evangelical Christian--is a GOP loyalist.)  This white friend "joked" that a trail of watermelons leading out of the White House would do the trick.  I gave that white friend the benefit of doubt, and considered that a reflection of his puke-worthy taste in humor.  But, in retrospect, I should have served the quit notice right then. Mea culpa.

Douglass offered his blunt assessment:

The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution.

This is how we can even frame the problem that we now have with trump's voters and enablers: Do they have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution?  So far, the answer is a clear NO! :(

Four years after the 400-year anniversary of Columbus, in 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of yet another atrocity, in Plessy v. Ferguson.  The court ruled that separate accommodations for blacks and whites were not unequal accommodations.  Separate but equal became the law of the land for more than half a century.

Jill Lepore sums it up well: "The Confederacy had lost the war, but it had won the peace."

Donald Dick!

When it is convenient for them, evangelical Christians like to say that they only condemn sin but not the sinner.  In the case of trump, they not only do not condemn him, they elected him and are solidly behind him.

I am sure they are happy with the country's first porn president!

He is the first truly shameless president, the first porn president, and that is why it is Stormy Daniels—more than the FBI or the IRS or the string of women who have claimed sexual harassment or abuse by him—who just might take him down.

I simply cannot wrap my mind around the fact that the "moral majority" claim this man as their leader!

Stormy Daniels was not given a million dollars in seed money from a rich father, but in many other respects she is like Trump. She sees human sexuality as rife for transaction, she has no shame, and she’s tough. She, too, cultivates a passion of the leisure class (he golfs, she owns and rides horses competitively) and she shares his vision for imposing her name on a vast landscape. For Trump, this means blighting skylines with ugly buildings, each of them crowned with his big ’80s logo, that arrangement of gilded letters that stands for the worst of the decade. She seeks to control a vast region of online pornography by writing and directing and starring in films that fuse the storytelling and prop-filled premises of the ’70s long form with the contortionist extremes and necessary visual tropes of the contemporary short form. Like Trump, she understands that to be a winner you must be your own brand, and that if you spend your life as a Miss December, you will never really come out ahead: It’s your name you want on the building—or the Pornhub channel—not your employer’s.

After reading the essay, and especially that paragraph, I now see trump only as an aging former porn star.  

If George Costanza dreamed of his porn star alter-ego as Buck Naked, I can't help wonder what trump's porn star name would have been ... David Dennison? John Miller? John Barron? Nah, these are way too un-porn!

He’s a porn president, where every intimate interaction is for sale if the money is right, and where the underlying truth of each deal is that at the end of it somebody is going to get screwed. This time—maybe, maybe—it could be him.

I can't wait for this porn president to be screwed big time.  

But, will a porn star help to bring down a president?

“Ultimately, he is going to be forced to resign,” said Michael Avenatti, the attorney for the adult film actor who says she had an affair with Donald Trump and was paid by Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, to keep it quiet.
“I don’t know how he will ultimately spin his departure, but I firmly believe there is going to be too much evidence of wrongdoing by him and those around him for him to be able to survive the balance of his term.”

Paging Robert Mueller!

Immoral priorities

Of course we don't expect our politicians to be people of absolutely perfect moral standing.  We are humans and we are imperfect, and our elected officials will also be imperfect humans.

Thus, it has always been a question of how much imperfectness will we tolerate.  Gary Hart was on a roll, leading in the polls with a winning formula that had him practically in the Oval Office.  And then his monkey business came out, with his affair with Donna Rice and the infamous photograph on a yacht named Monkey Business.  He was gone in no time.

Thirty years later, trump was elected to the Oval Office despite--or because of--his horrible track record.  Ironically, his strongest supporters are the moral crusaders of our time--the evangelicals.  These Jesus-loving moralists elected him and support him.  Heck, even his current wife does!

And what kind of a scumbag is he?

Trump’s background and beliefs could hardly be more incompatible with traditional Christian models of life and leadership. Trump’s past political stances (he once supported the right to partial-birth abortion), his character (he has bragged about sexually assaulting women), and even his language (he introduced the words pussy and shithole into presidential discourse) would more naturally lead religious conservatives toward exorcism than alliance. This is a man who has cruelly publicized his infidelities, made disturbing sexual comments about his elder daughter, and boasted about the size of his penis on the debate stage. His lawyer reportedly arranged a $130,000 payment to a porn star to dissuade her from disclosing an alleged affair. Yet religious conservatives who once blanched at PG-13 public standards now yawn at such NC-17 maneuvers.

An born-again friend of mine, with whom I have practically disconnected the old relations, is one of those trump supporters!  These people apparently know all too well WWJD!

These evangelicals have no problems with "the distinctly non-Christian substance of his values"

Trump’s unapologetic materialism—his equation of financial and social success with human achievement and worth—is a negation of Christian teaching. His tribalism and hatred for “the other” stand in direct opposition to Jesus’s radical ethic of neighbor love. Trump’s strength-worship and contempt for “losers” smack more of Nietzsche than of Christ. Blessed are the proud. Blessed are the ruthless. Blessed are the shameless. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after fame.

Gary Hart must be kicking himself for being 30 years too early!

So, where does this leave us?

Here is the uncomfortable reality: I do not believe that most evangelicals are racist. But every strong Trump supporter has decided that racism is not a moral disqualification in the president of the United States. And that is something more than a political compromise. It is a revelation of moral priorities.

Immoral 63 million voters need to have their own come-to-Jesus moments regarding:

For a package of political benefits, these evangelical leaders have associated the Christian faith with racism and nativism. They have associated the Christian faith with misogyny and the mocking of the disabled. They have associated the Christian faith with lawlessness, corruption, and routine deception. They have associated the Christian faith with moral confusion about the surpassing evils of white supremacy and neo-Nazism. The world is full of tragic choices and compromises. But for this man? For this cause?

For now, 63 million voters stand accused. The evangelicals have to additionally deal with their lord too!

WWJD?

The answer to that question, my friend, is blowing in the polluted wind.

Jesus elected trump so that we can burn coal and protect the fetus!

Evangelicals know that trump is doing god's work.  Yes, that trump. Doing god's work.

A book is coming out soon on trump's faith.  Yes, that trump's faith.

david brody writes in a NY Times opinion piece about trump being a man of faith.  Yes, dammit, that same trump.

Donald Trump is on a spiritual voyage that has accelerated in recent years, thanks to evangelicals who have employed the biblical mandate of sharing and showing God’s love to him rather than shunning him.

God does not choose to work through people like me, but prefers scumbags like trump.  God's will hath no why, indeed!

brody writes about the “most evangelical-friendly United States president ever.”:

This president’s effect on our cultural norms has been shocking. His critics would call it appalling; evangelicals say it’s immensely satisfying: They’ve seen a culture deteriorate quickly in the past decade, and they’re looking for a bold culture warrior to fight for them. Showing that God does indeed have a sense of humor, He gave them Mr. Trump. Yet in God’s perfection, it’s a match made in heaven. Mr. Trump and evangelicals share a disdain for political correctness, a world seen through absolutes and a desire to see an America that embraces Judeo-Christian values again rather than rejecting them.

I had no idea that god hates political correctness.

trump's religious assistant for the environment, scott pruitt, talked to davod brody about doing god's work at the EPA:

Pruitt believes God commands us to take care of the environment and that also means to use what He has provided. "The biblical world view with respect to these issues is that we have a responsibility to manage and cultivate, harvest the natural resources that we've been blessed with to truly bless our fellow mankind."

Drill, baby, drill!  The good lord provided coal and oil for our benefit.

How did pruitt know what god wanted?

"I spent a couple years just earnestly praying, asking the question that I don't think we ask enough, 'God what do you want to do with me?'" Pruitt said. "Really getting into our prayer closet, seeking His heart, asking what He wants to do in our lives."

And what happened?

"It was actually Isaiah chapter one that I was reading through at that time that really spoke to my heart," he continued. "Specifically, in the latter part of chapter one where God says to Israel, 'I will restore your leaders as in the days of old, your judges as at the beginning.' And there was just a desire that welled up in me to say, 'I want to be like those leaders that we had at our founding, at the inception of our country.'"

And these are the same people complaining that Iran is a theocracy!

Jeez!

More mixing of religion and state?

I don't think continuing the current administration's foray into mixing religion and government is a good idea:

Obama will create a President’s Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships
As Barack Obama has said many times, he believes that change comes not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up, and few are closer to the people than our churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques. And many of the challenges we face today—from saving our planet to ending poverty—are simply too big for government to solve alone. We need all hands on deck.

That’s why Obama will help draw on their strength of these groups through the creation of a new President’s Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

July 2nd uppdate:
The headline of a beliefnet blog says it all: Obama: Bush's Faith-Based Plan Didn't Go Far Enough!