Saturday 4 July 2015

Obama's eulogy of little grace

Obama's Charleston eulogy was certainly a great performance. It was moving, and I have no doubt it was heartfelt, but I was deeply saddened to see that he was preaching so much religious nonsense that I could not help but feel took away some of the dignity of the deceased.

It was a shameful thing to preach that the killer was somehow doing God's work, and that God works in mysterious ways.  There is nothing holy about the actions of a hate-filled cowardly murderer. It was demeaning to talk of God-given grace being given to the undeserving members of the Church as well as to the USA as a whole.  It was a denial of the true wickedness of the murder and of the powerful humanity of that community.   The families of the murdered and the community they lived in have shown extraordinary strength and courage.  It is their own strength, not some power of the spirit bestowed on them.  These people have shown the best of humanity - they have stood up for themselves, they did not need to be lifted up by God.

It was a shame that, giving the eulogy in front of such a courageous community, Obama didn't have the courage to praise that community for what it had achieved without invoking the name of a God who stood by while hatred killed so many good people.

Obama gave a powerful speech, but to me, it was a failure.

1 comment:

Jack said...

And more to the point, it was highly inappropriate for the president of a secular democracy where separation of church and state is supposed to be the law of the land to carry on like that about some sort of god. We don't need a pastor-in-chief.