Not a Muslim!

So badly does the left want to bash those on the 'willfully ignorant' right who believe Obama isn't a Christian that HuffPo has now forgotten about dangerous domestic terrorists and is now publishing apologias for Christianity. Of course in typical Huffer fashion the writer goes completely off the rails at the end of his piece:

Jesus himself was not a Christian. Perhaps the most overlooked fact by religious illiterates is that Jesus was a Jew, and he never referred to his followers as "Christians."

Jesus referred to his followers as disciples. Only decades later in Antioch was the term "Christian" used of Jesus followers, and it was a derisive term coined by detractors.

So will someone remind me again why we're getting so worked up about whether or not Obama is a Christian, when Jesus himself wasn't?

Might those be the most inane string of words ever typed in English?

Jesus called himself the Messiah, which the Jewish Pharisees rejected. So while Jesus might have technically been a Jew, he was also a heretic, and those who believed were also heretics. Ergo, anyone who believed in Christ back then--and now--is called a Christian, not a Jew. It's hard to believe someone would actually use such an argument to defend anything.

But it's interesting to see Huffpo now making a robust defense of a president's religious views after trying to convince us Bush was either a fake Christian or a nutjob extremist just a few years ago. They were skeptics then, and perhaps with good reason--reverend Wright once stated that politicians have to do what they do, and preachers do what they do. So maybe they could get Mr. Staub to come back and tackle the meaning of this when he's next in the mood to lecture willful idiots:

"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."

Obama doesn't believe he, or anyone else, will go to hell.

But he's not sure if he'll be going to heaven, either.

"I don't presume to have knowledge of what happens after I die," he says. "When I tuck in my daughters at night, and I feel like I've been a good father to them, and I see in them that I am transferring values that I got from my mother and that they're kind people and that they're honest people, and they're curious people, that's a little piece of heaven."

Not to be overly critical of the man's beliefs (we are all sinners) but that pretty much sounds like the same god his agnostic mother worshiped. If Obama claimed to be a Muslim, yet declared public unbelief in the Prophet's teachings, would he still be vigorously defended as a Muslim by folks like Mr. Staub, the press, or the Muslim Ummah?