What did Obama actually say in his interview on French television?
And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. And so there's got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.It seems clear that Obama was not likely implying that the U.S. was less a Christian Nation than a Muslim Nation. He was simply playing the game that parallels that of saying if California were a nation, it would have one of the largest GDPs of countries in the world. He was simply saying that enough Americans were Muslim that their numbers are very important relative to the number of Muslims in the world. This is not as inflammatory as Sean Hannity was making it. It is wrong however.
Muslims in America like to say that they number somewhere between 3 and 8 million or between 1.0 and 2.6% of Americans. This is an exaggeration used to try to project more political influence than they really have. The Pew Research Center in 2007 says that Muslims are 0.6% of the adult American population. In comparison, 78.4% are Christian, 1.7% are Jewish, 0.7% are Buddhist, 0.4% are Hindu, and 1.2% are Other (Native American religions, Unitarians, New Age, Wiccams, etc.). In addition, 16.1% are unaffiliated. Of these, 1.6% are atheists and 2.4% are agnostics. Apparently Muslims are not a very large fraction of the American population. The present population is about 304 million people, so 0.6% is 1.8 million people. There are several tens of countries in the world with more Muslims than the U.S., including France. For this reason, Barack Hussein's statement is a gross exaggeration and therefor false.
Of course, when Barack Hussein said in Turkey that we were not a Christian Nation, he really inflamed many Christians like Sean Hannity. A country that trumpets its claim that its citizens have freedom of conscience through such explicit rights as freedom of religion (which should have been called freedom of conscience and certainly includes the freedom to any religion or to no religion), freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, and the freedom to petition government, is not a Christian Nation. This need not deny that most Americans are and have been Christians or that this fact has not played an important role in our history. It simply says there is no requirement that a citizen in good standing need be a Christian.
I am and will remain very critical of Barack Hussein Obama. However, I am very busy fighting his program for converting Americans into a nation of servents to socialist governments. I have no desire to manufacture issues with him. There are plenty of real issues and I could easily make it my full time profession to simply address those real issues. Furthermore, those who accuse him of errors he has not committed and faults he has not revealed, undermine their credibility, and to some degree that is taken as undermining the credibility of everyone who is critical of him. So, you Conservatives need to be a good deal more rigorous in your arguments against this despot.
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