by Vernon Crumrine

Created on: November 08, 2010

According to Newsweek magazine, 11% of the American public continues to believe that President Barack Obama is a Muslim. Many more than that may express at least some level of doubt on that particular question. First of all, let me be very clear; I am not writing this article to argue that our president either is or is not a follower of the religion of Islam.

The privately-held beliefs of virtually anyone are, I am convinced, utterly beyond our personal knowledge. We are permitted to see and hear only those selected hidden thoughts which others may be willing to share. And it’s clear, I believe, that that kind of sharing may not always reveal to us exactly what we think it does.

I do believe that our democratic views of what religion should be, and the role that religion should play however, can often be at odds with one of our founding fathers primary concepts: that one should be free to worship as one chooses.

But rather than such worship truly being the informed choice of just one individual, what we really seem to have come to expect, and sometimes demand, is almost a kind of quasi-state religion; one which honors and is limited to primarily a traditional Christian philosophy.

We sometimes tend not only to brand differences in religion, but also quite often to brandish religion. While we may give lip service to complete and utter freedom in religion, and say that we hold out tolerance for beliefs we ourselves may not hold, we still regularly characterize and brand the beliefs of those which may be unlike our own.

And in so doing we use religion not so much as a means to connect our most private selves with the mind of God, but instead to do battle with one another. If we are consciously looking for and then selecting a convenient slot in which to place people, along with their religious beliefs, we are in reality exhibiting very little tolerance for any system of beliefs which we see as being unlike our own. And if we are acting in this manner, we may be more precisely practicing the idea of tolerating religion more than we are actually practicing religious tolerance.

We reason that we must certainly be the sole holders of the truth that is God; we and only we are on the right side; the side of God. He was just a man, of course, yet Abraham Lincoln once reasoned that "Since God cannot (possibly) be on every side – we should pray (simply) to be on God’s side." Faith is a necessary part of any religion, yes, but then so is that

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