Dear friends:
 
Like Bill Clinton, Barak Hussein Obama suddenly appeared out of nowhere to land on the national center stage, like he had supernatural assistance.  He is the darling of the news media, which seem to be purposely concealing his middle name.
 
Pundits say he has an even chance of beating out Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination for President, or at the least, maybe her VP running mate.  Not bad for someone who has virtually no experience.  What (or who) is empowering him?
 
I have read that his name Barak was changed from Baraka, an Arabic word meaning “blessed.”  In Hebrew, the word barak is usually translated in the KJ Bible as “blessing,” but, oddly, in a few cases, barak is also translated as a “curse,” or blaspheme.”  (Strong’s Lexicon.)
 
Which will Barak Hussein Obama prove to be: a blessing or a curse?
 
The following is a mixed collection of information gathered on the Internet.
 
He was born of a Muslim father and an atheist mother, who in his own words was “a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, and position paper liberalism.” She divorced when he was two years old and remarried another Muslim living in Indonesia, where the young man was educated in Catholic and Muslim schools in one of the most radical Islamic countries in the world. After he was ten years old, he mostly was raised by his atheist grandparents.
 
After graduating from Columbia and then Harvard, he began working in Chicago supporting social programs. He recruited a local United Church of Christ Church on a government-sponsored community outreach. Around 1988, he joined the church because, he says, “that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved.”
 
The United Church of Christ is a very liberal denomination that supports homosexual marriage, abortion, environmental justice, globalism, the International Criminal Court, the Palestinian movement, and believes that Israel is illegally occupying the covenant land.  The UCC seems to conveniently justify and legitimize his beliefs that social progressivism is equal to Christ and he writes in his memoirs that his own salvation was not an “epiphany.” He reasoned after his daughter asked about life after death, “I wasn’t sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure where the soul resides or what existed before the Big Bang.”
 
Obama supports homosexual marriage, racial preferences, gun control, flag-burning, socialized medicine and the absolute right to abortion, including partial-birth abortions. He is anti-war, voted against the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, against privatizing Social Security and opposes the death penalty, three-strikes laws and school vouchers. He has no military service record.
 
He believes in the separation of church and state -- except when he campaigns in black churches.
 
He loves Jimmy Carter and is the 18th most liberal member of the Senate, receiving a 100% rating from Americans for Democratic Action, NARAL Pro -Choice America, National Organization for Women, the NAACP and the National Education Association.
 
Obama said to an interviewer, "The difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and proselytize.  There’s the belief, certainly in some quarters, that if people haven’t embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior, they’re going to hell."  The interviewer said Obama did not believe that he or anyone else was going to hell and that he wasn't sure he was going to heaven either.  "What I believe in is that if I live my life as well as I can, that I will be rewarded.  I don't presume to have knowledge of what happens after I die.  But I feel very strongly that whether the reward is in the here and now or in the hereafter, aligning myself to my faith and values is a good thing.”
 
What faith?  He obviously doesn’t know what he believes.  He obviously does not believe the Bible and the words of Jesus Christ and the apostles.
 
Jim