Obama campaigned with the message of hope and change; but two policies, to which he deeply wants to commit the country, prove the falsity of his message. Outreach to Islam and national reform of health care are the defining ideas of his foreign policy and his domestic policy. Though these policies are obviously quite different, they share a common assumption. Both policies accept the notion that the individual may and should, under appropriate circumstances, relinguish the struggle to live and commit suicide.
Through his demand that we respect Islam, Obama indirectly demands that we respect its central doctrines, including those, such as murderous martyrdom, that are anathama to Christian values. Though he objected to violent extremism in Islam in his Cairo speech, Obama did not object specifically to murderous martyrdom as a Muslim doctrine. Islam includes the idea that killing through religious suicide is a good the Muslim can achieve for his religion. The Muslim should give up his life in war with nonbelievers who have refused obedience to Islam. These beliefs do not represent extremism in Islam but are among its central doctrines.
And, as we now know from several months of political discussion, ObamaCare includes the idea, that the individual should give up his life for the greater good of society. Obama has stated that persons with certain diseases should give up medical treatment offering some hope of prolonging life and resign to a pain-managed slide into death. ObamaCare is the medical inculcation of Marxist socialism. Islam and socialism offer hope, but not individual hope in this life. Both seat hope in the future, the religious afterlife in the case of Islam and the political future of socialist utopia in the case of socialism.
Obama, who identifies himself as a Christian, campaigns for these policies in apparent ignorance that they contradict the Christian message of hope. He speaks glibly about end-of-life decisions in ignorance of the offense his policies give to Christians. For Christians, life is the gift of God. Only God has the authority and right to withdraw life; and he withdraws life according to his inscrutable will. The individual is asked by God always to live forward, always to struggle to live, never to give up, even in the most dire circumstances. Life is always worth living. The Christian message is that faith in Jesus gives hope because each individual is promised salvation. For the Christian to give into suffering is to give into despair; to give into despair is to relinguish hope; to relinguish hope is to reject God's promise.
Obama's ideology is, ironically, not about hope for the individual, but about hope for society at the expense of the individual. The President counsels Americans to respect the notion that the individual fulfills the value of life, not by struggling to hold onto it, but by giving it up to a greater cause, as in the Islamic victory over nonbelievers or in the utopian redistribution of medical justice from one class to another. At odds with Christianity, the President ennobles personal despair by accepting the death of the individual as a benefit for the greater good. His rejection of Christian hope, his embrace of such despair, for political purposes is the reason that his two major policies have met with instantaneous, spontaneous rejection by the majority of the American people.
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