Snopes.com seeks to disprove the “allegations” that Obama is a Muslim, but in the process, they provide some interesting information that people should read — read the fine print, as they say.
[Note that snopes.com, while it is viewed as an authentic site to prove or disprove “urban legends”, are very liberal. (They claim that the allegation against Hillary not receiving the Gold Star Mothers is not true, but when you read their own details, it shows that it is true) — this is just another example of having to read the fine print, not just their “true/false” assessment]
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/muslim.asp
“Barack Hussein Obama (Senator Obama’s father) was born on the shores of Lake Victoria in
Alego, Kenya. He met and married an American woman, Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas,
while they were both attending the University of Hawaii. Their son, also named Barack
Hussein Obama was born on 4 August 1961 at the Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu,
Hawaii.
Although the elder Obama was raised as a Muslim, no evidence supports the claim that he
was ever a “radical Muslim,” and Senator Obama’s family histories note that his father was
an atheist or agnostic (i.e., no longer a practicing Muslim) by the time he married the
younger Obama’s mother.
Of his mother’s religious views, Senator Obama wrote:
For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb
of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.
This isn’t to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her mind, a
working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any wellrounded
education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat
on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or
Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the
Buddhist temple, the chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient
Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplings
required no sustained commitment on my part. Religion was an expression of human
culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways — and not
necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and
understand the deeper truths about our lives.
In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist she would
become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a
suitable detachment as well.
Barack Obama’s parents divorced when he was two years old, his father moving to
Connecticut to continue his education before returning to Kenya.
When the younger Obama
was six years old, his mother married again, this time to Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian oil
manager. Barack and his mother moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, where Obama spent 4-5 years
attending both Muslim and Catholic schools before his mother sent him back to the United
States to live with his maternal grandmother. The school Barack Obama attended in
Indonesia was “Muslim” primarily in the sense that the preponderance of its student body
was Muslim (because Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country), but both the Muslim and
Catholic schools he attended in Indonesia offered a few hours of religious instruction each
week.
....
The beginnings of Obama’s relationship with the church were
described in an April 2004 Chicago Sun-Times article:
Obama is unapologetic in saying he has a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” As
a sign of that relationship, he says, he walked down the aisle of Chicago’s Trinity
United Church of Christ in response to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s altar call one
Sunday morning about 16 years ago.”
NOTE: He spent “4-5 years” in Indonesia, after moving there when he was 6-7. So apparently he returned to the US when he was around 12 — having been exposed to Islam quite a bit, prior to that.
He claims he started a relationship with a church in 1985, but if you read more (right at snopes.com, at above link, you find that his interest was in activism, not church.
“So how did he become a churchgoer?
It began in 1985, when he came to Chicago as a $13,000-a-year community organizer,
working with a number of African-American churches in the Roseland, West Pullman and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods that were trying to deal with the devastation
caused by shuttered steel plants.
“I started working with both the ministers and the lay people in these churches on
issues like creating job-training programs, or after-school programs for youth, or
making sure that city services were fairly allocated to underserved communities,” he
says. “And it was in those places where I think what had been more of an intellectual
view of religion deepened.
“I became much more familiar with the ongoing tradition of the historic black church
and its importance in the community. And the power of that culture to give people
strength in very difficult circumstances, and the power of that church to give people
courage against great odds. And it moved me deeply.”
As I understand it, the actual legality of their union is suspect. In reading a discussion of Barry's autobiography, it was stated that Barry didn't check out the factuality of a marriage because he didn't know what he'd find. (I didn't read the autobio, myself; so this may be erroneous.)
Kindly read through my postings on Obama before using either as a reference.