Why? Because, even as the political pundits on PBS recognize, this yearly speech does not boost the presidents image as much as it prevents it from sliding down. Besides, in this case, the president is regurgitating typical neo-con politics.
My wife braved the event. Twice she rushed into my room exclaiming: "yougottahearthis!"
1) The president claimed that the true Islam faith is "noble".
2) The president extolled the virtues of Democracy as the path for a terror-free world (and its up to America to save the world, of course).
(This was too much excitement for my wife, so she changed channels.)
From a Christian perspective, when one realizes that man's basic need is redemption, it follows that unregenerate man will seek everything but God to bring salvation.
In this case it is politics. Otherwise known as the government.
Specifically, president Bush argued that the true way to eradicate terrorism was through revolutionizing the political process with Democracy.
There was no mention of culture. There was no reference to religion. Obviously, this silence follows when politics is the reference point of modern Humanism.
Besides the philosophical and theological arguments against such an approach, the simple fact that the Palestinian Democracy voted overwhelmingly for a hard-core terrorist organization flies in the face of such American utopias.
Democracy only manifested the wickedness of evil hearts.
Salvation is not through the change in environment, whether cultural, political or ecological; it is only through regeneration of man's heart by the power of Christ's Spirit.
SDG
1 comment:
Portraying the president as if he thinks he's presenting a solution to the deeper problem of sin is about as uncharitable as you can get. He's the president of the United States, and it's his job to do the best he can with the tools at his disposal to combat dangers to the country he's been entrusted with by God. Those tools don't include spiritual ones, so pretending he's dealing with those problems in order to do some heresy hunting seems pretty unfair.
As for Islam being noble in its truer form, all he's saying is that the principles in the Qur'an are in large part very noble. They're not like al Qaeda. He's not pronouncing on Islam's value in terms of relating to God. He's a political leader talking about the moral teachings of a religion that many people follow in a way that is quite friendly the the general moral perspective most Americans share.
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