For all those who try to put Obama in a box, or slap a label on him, they'd have trouble doing that after reading this story. But those who would slap a label on Obama aren't inclined to read this story and would likely find the story too complex to read.
Newsweek: For company, he had books. There was Saint Augustine, the fourth-century North African bishop who wrote the West's first spiritual memoir and built the theological foundations of the Christian Church. There was Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher and father of existentialism. There was Graham Greene, the Roman Catholic Englishman whose short novels are full of compromise, ambivalence and pain. Obama meditated on these men and argued with them in his mind.
When he felt restless on a Sunday morning, he would wander into an African-American congregation such as Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. "I'd just sit in the back and I'd listen to the choir and I'd listen to the sermon," he says, smiling a little as he remembers those early days in the wilderness. "There were times that I would just start tearing up listening to the choir and share that sense of release."
His mom's belief is closest to what I believe. All religions can offer a path to God but no religion is the truth, or owns the truth, though as we well know, many think they do, which is where many of the world's problems lie-- self righteousness -- ironically, the opposite of religion's intention.
Did Ann believe in God? Obama calls his mother "an agnostic." "I think she believed in a higher power," he says. "She believed in the fundamental order and goodness of the universe. She would have been very comfortable with Einstein's idea that God doesn't play dice. But I think she was very suspicious of the notion that one particular organized religion offered one truth."
