Obama and McCain: The Selfless-Driven Interviews

**The first 2008 presidential election event involving the presumptive nominees, Illinois Democratic Senator Barack Obama and Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, took place on August 16 at the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. The event was moderated by that church’s pastor, Rick Warren, author of a pop-religion, how-to-improve-your-soul book entitled The Purpose-Driven Life.

Warren began by telling his in-house evangelical audience and Fox News Channel viewers that, “We believe in the separation of church and state but we do not believe in the separation of faith and politics because faith is just a worldview and everybody has some kind of worldview and it’s important to know what they are.”

Well, not exactly. Some worldviews are based on careful and critical thinking, and observations about human nature and objective reality. They’re called philosophies. Others are based on—well—faith and at various points they dispense with the defining elements of the former. They’re called religions. And when one says, “I believe this because of a Christian/Muslim/Morman/Hindu/Wikkan/Scientologist revelation,” that’s usually a conversation stopper. But let’s turn to Pastor Warren’s mega-church’s mega-political event and use reason to cut through moral claims based on religion, to discover what the candidates’ worldviews are and what their implications might be.

Warren’s format was to first question Obama for one hour, with McCain isolated so he could not hear Obama’s answers, and next to ask McCain the same questions.

The questions showed that both candidates share a fundamental moral belief about which they are both dead wrong: both disparage the self.

When asked about his greatest moral failing, Obama said that as a young man he abused drugs and alcohol. He then offered that, “What I trace this to is a certain selfishness on my part. I was so obsessed with me …

From the Ayn Rand Lexicon:

Always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one.

Your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness.

Some worldviews are based on careful and critical thinking, and observations about human nature and objective reality. They’re called philosophies. Others are based on—well—faith and at various points they dispense with the defining elements of the former. They’re called religions.

So where do you fit theology into this little dichotomy? Because I'm fairly certain many of the great Catholic thinkers (see: St. Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, &al) believe there is much overlap between the two.

True, they thought that. Thomas Aquinas in particular tried to reconcile the Aristotelian understanding of a rationally-ordered universe that the human mind is capable of understanding with revealed Christian religion. Aquinas’s work in many areas, especially natural law and epistemology, was outstanding.

One of his most important pronouncments was that what reason and revelation tells us will never contradict each other. But what that meant was that more and more individuals could rely on reason and, at first, try to reconcile it’s findings with Biblical verses and, later, just assume that they were consistent somehow, and, finally, dispense with revealed religion as a source of knowledge altogether.

Aquinas among others tried to use reason to understand what they assumed to be a god that governs the universe. But Aquinas’s proofs of a god ultimately contradicted themselves. e.g. Everything needs a cause. There must be a first cause. God is that cause. But what caused god? I like, though don’t agree with, the attempt to prove god by Paul Elmer More in “A Skeptical Approach to Religion.”

But theologicians have not succeeded and ultimately have had to fall back on faith and revelation, which was the point I made.

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