On the Cult of the Messiah Barack Obama.

Religion is a strange thing.

It comes in different shapes and sizes, in all kinds of strange disguises. Sometimes something that appears to be a formal religion turns out, on examination, to be nothing of the kind – I’d certainly venture to say that Hinduism, for instance, isn’t really a religion at all but more an agglomeration of social practices and tradition.

And sometimes something that isn’t, on the face of it, a religion, actually is.

I will make a statement here of a fact which I completely believe:

Obamaism is a genuine religion, and Obama religionists are fundamentalist believers.

 We’ve all of us seen them online in the last four years...the reflexive supporters of the Nobel Peace Prizident Barack Obama, people so unthinkingly supportive of his activities that they will seek to defend anything and everything he says and does. Some of them I have personally come across claim, for instance,

* Obama EARNED (block letters as in the original) the Nobel Peace Prize.

* Obama is being treated badly by his political opponents.

* Obama’s drone programme is all about fighting terrorism.

Of course, none of these “facts” stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Obama did not “earn” the Nobel Peace Prize, he was given it for the stupendous feat of not being George W Bush. Obama’s alleged political opponents do not treat him “badly”, unless putting up a sham opponent so as to ensure his re-election constitutes treating him badly. As for the drone programme, it is a war crime pure and simple; and to a normal person Barack Obama is a vile corporate shill and war criminal and nothing more.

But Obama religionists are not normal people. They are as much fundamentalist believers in the religion of Barack Obama as any other religious fundamentalist, and as impervious to logic and facts as a jihad warrior or a Christian Creationist.

To a fundamentalist believer, the facts don’t count. Where normal people assess facts and draw conclusions, religious fundamentalists start from conclusions and selectively choose and manipulate facts to fit that conclusion. When facts are lacking, they either invent their own or dismiss the requirement for facts altogether, settling for attacking the actual facts and evidence proving the opposite of what they have decided.

Then there is the religious trick of setting up a counterpoint to the deity, call it what you will – the devil, or the evil one, or the asura, or whatever...the polar opposite of the goodness of the object of worship. A neutral person might find that this counterpoint isn’t really very different from the deity, and may even come across as a less obnoxious alternative; but to the religious fundamentalist, all evil flows from that source, and the deity is nothing but good. To this end, they’ll point to the positive comments and actions of the deity, however minuscule they be, and ignore the evil. They will deny the evil exists, and condemn anyone who points it out as a heretic and apostate.

This will be true even if the religion is a transparently fraudulent scheme, like Scientology or the Moon cult, and the more of a hollow sham it is to those standing on the outside, the more passionately will its adherents defend it against critics. As a general rule, the more insecure a cultist is, the more aggressive he is.

Every one of these characteristics is present in the worshippers of the Cult of Barack Obama...and George W Bush serves as a handy devil, even though by any objective parameter Bush wasn’t markedly worse than Obama and in several respects (like his refusal to countenance attacking Iran or openly backing jihadist terrorists) was better. (I will not comment on their domestic record since I am not an American, but from what I know Bush didn’t formalise murdering people, including American citizens, on suspicion as a matter of policy, and was probably less restrictive on civil rights.)

It’s a strange fact that a large number of Obama religionists characterise themselves as liberals and either atheists or agnostics. I’d call their liberalism a faux-liberalism, the kind of liberalism which handily supports war when it’s presented as a “civilising mission”; and as for their alleged atheism, the substitution of a human and mortal deity for a notional celestial one doesn’t make it any less of a deity. 

One might wonder how many of these Obama religionists are actually believers of his cult - and how many were conned by him and don't possess the intellectual honesty to admit they were duped. Those features, too, are present in believers of any religion, and in no way detract from the religious nature of the Obama Cult.

The only question is, to me, how far these worshippers are ready to take their religion. What happens if the Holy Messiah Obama – or, to be more exact, his corporate sponsors and controllers, whom his worshippers refuse to admit exist as such – decide that he will make a great Perpetual Puppet, and declare the end of the two-term limit for US Presidents? Will his worshippers, who defend the same policies under him as they condemned under Bush, go along with the decision?

I am certain that they will.

We shall see for ourselves soon enough, assuming we don’t get droned first.

Ah men.

Note: There is a tendency online for people to refer to Obama religionists as "Obamabots". Such a term is insulting to robots, who are programmed to act in a certain way and are not responsible for their actions...unlike Obama worshippers, who have consciously chosen their god.