A lot of edits in that excerpt but if it's a faithful rendition of the speech he made then fair play to him. In the USA that amounts to a brave speech, even politically.

And yes, Barak Obama is a politician - of course he is. What on earth do you expect from your politicians?

I wish George Carlin was still alive - there is a broader issue here than religion (like how politics is just distracting people from the real power play). But that said, as puppets go this one is a Punch, not a Judy.

Thanks Topher. The only rational sensible vote choice this day is Obama ....

That's true. It makes me wonder whether people here in the UK are just as religious as people in the US, but only in private/in their heads, or maybe people here really are a bit skeptical of too much religion. I get the impression most people here either don't believe, believe in a quasi-religion/deism type belief, and/or believe in various new age nonsense. I tend to encounter few actual believers. I suspect there are quite a lot of British atheist/non-theist politicians who simply keep it to themselves.

Maybe...but only if he decided to run for office over 20 years ago, right about the time he was entering Harvard Law school.

In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama explains how, through working with black churches as a community organizer while in his twenties, he came to understand "the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change."

Who knows, maybe he really was planning that far ahead.

I watched the video that the same person put up about John McCain's views on religion and politics and I think it's safe to say that Obama seems like the person our community should rationally vote for. If I were an American my vote would be for Obama. It seems clear that Obama is playing up his religiosity to win votes. It would be impossible to win an election in America if you didn't pretend to be religious a little bit. I think if anyone is going to stand up for the principles of the Enlightenment, of science and free thinking it will be him and not "Oven Chips" McCain. Fuck it if he's made empty promises about welfare, fuck it if he's not really gonna pull out of Iraq, he's the best chance us atheists have of actually getting some representation. America, like the UK is a two party system, we only have two fucking choices: bad or not-quite-as-bad. Choose wisely.

a politician who wants to be palatable to the big bourgeoisie can never eschew religion, as it is the cornerstone of conservative politics.  the masses of the US are by a vast majority petty bourgeois.  they can only stay petty bourgeois by continual subjugation of the proletarian nations, i.e., those nations whose masses are overwhelmingly the exploited class. this subjugation, as sure as the sun rises, must only become more and more brutal as time goes by, as it is only in the nature of the proletariat to become conscious of itself as proletariat.  as the brutality increases, the petty bourgeois masses of the US can only soothe their consciences by recourse to a religio-fascist mentality ("us against them," in an idealist metaphysical sense).

obama is at best a social democrat.  his appeals to the "needs" of the ever-dwindling american proletariat only serve to placate his center-leftist allies while he, like every other politician, cozies up to the rightist, reactionary big bourgeoisie and institutes no real change at all.  his religious turns of phrase while promising some vague form of "change" will calm the petty bourgeois masses while the benumbed american proletariat will go along with anything that promises them entry into the ranks of the bourgeoisie.

america has essentially made itself revolution-proof on the home front by almost annihilating the revolutionary class, the proletariat, in its own population.  the means by which it accomplishes this can only be found in guam, the philippines, puerto rico, taiwan, south korea, south africa, guatemala, chile, the dominican republic, etc., etc.  in other words, it's digging its own grave by creating a revolutionary critical mass in the third world.  obama cannot change this.  it's not that he has no will to change, but the wheels of the dialectic have gathered too much momentum.  all his grandiloquence now does the american worker no more good than karl kautsky's did the german worker nearly a century ago, and certainly does the third world worker even less.  the choice between mccain and obama might very well amount to nothing more than greasing the tracks a little more or a little less.

religion will never disappear from america until class disappears internationally.  period.

i don't recall referencing the manifesto, nor does the development of socialist theory end with marx or engels (it continues to the present day), but i'll roll with you.  which arguments exactly?  has your exploration of socialist theory gone beyond a cursory reading of the manifesto? 

what sort of "scientist"?  political scientist?  economist?  what makes marx an in-actual "scientist"?  what sort of "scientist" was he supposed to be to begin with?  and sorry, hamby hasn't recommended any books to me lately, particularly touching marxism or socialism.  care to offer any?

Although I'm not American and so cannot vote, if I could it would be for Obama, not because of evolution or religion (although his intelligence in this area is a plus), but because I support a mixed economy verging to the left. (I do however think their opinion on evolution or other scientific issues does give a window into their reasoning process. If their willing to put their beliefs and desires before the evidence, how might this work with other issues, such as wars?)

I really cannot stand pure capitalism (which necessarily does not work; it simply leads to inequality). I only accept the practical benefits of it, but the so-called moral arguments are pure bs.

I think we should help others, such as by having universal health care paid by taxes, rather than insurance companies fleecing people into bankruptcy.

I really don't know why people hate government interference. We need government to referee the free market lest we're left with inequality and greedy suites taking advantage of the workers.

As for social issues.... the ironic thing is that it will most likely be McCain, not Obama, who will be the one restricting 'family values' and other social matters through a theological lense. When government does have to get involved with social issues such as abortion and stem cells research, it is usually the right to tries to limit such things, while the left tends to allow, but regulate them.

 But then again: Having a bi-party system doesn´t really allow for much choice. Its really all black and white (literarily)..

 So what if he projects religion - everyone knows you can´t win an election as an atheist, so why bother if you know you´re not gonna win? I´d love to see Obama place his left hand on "The genealogy of morals" when presented with the presidential oath, still I have a hard time seeing him actually go through with it.

 But then again I come from a country which endorses gay priests and same-sex marriage within the church...Cultural relativism is a wonderful thing