This sounds like one of the basic differences in belief between orthodox Judaism and orthodox Christianity. Most early Christians were literally ‘Jews for Jesus’ and most modern Christian would affirm that Jesus was the Jewish messiah, even if they aren’t Jews themselves. The fact that non-messianic Jews don’t believe that Jesus was the messiah is kind of the point.
His intelligence?
I mean, when Michelle Bachman or Ted Cruz say they believe an invisible man in the sky invented people 6000 years ago, I kind of have to figure that yeah- They actually believe that.
Somebody as intelligent as Obama, who spends that much time urging people to get along, I just can’t imagine puts all that much stock in it. I’m guessing he falls into the rather large percentage of people who have just enough family tradition of churchgoing to get some sort of familiar comfort out of it, even if they don’t really believe in that particular desert god.
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This is why I tend to refer to them as Abrahamists. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Mormons, Catholics- They’re just warring sects of the same religion.
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Fixed that (at least for racism, where I think generational churn seems to be the only solution that is working).
I’m sure the stats say that more educated implies more likely to be atheist, but plenty of very, very smart people believe in some kind of god. I would put down a wager that Obama does not think there is a grey-bearded white man living in the clouds who spends the bulk of his days worrying about penises, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t Christian, because I don’t think most Christians believe that these days.
To be honest, I don’t think I really understand what it is a lot of religious people do believe, but I’m pretty sure they believe something that is pretty compatible with everything I’ve seen and hear from Obama.
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I get the impression they don’t believe that stuff they wasted a lot of time and money trying to teach me to believe at school.
Is the 'old dude in a toga thing just what they teach kids as an introduction to Christianity, then pull the switcheroo later on, or did they actually believe that in the past, and have switched to something more…holistic?
Some of the smartest people I know are religious. Not fundamentalists, of course. Humans think big thoughts about big ideas: religious terms are one way to express those ideas. It’s a form of metaphor. As long as you don’t literally think there’s a white man sitting on a throne in the sky sending billions of people to burn alive for infinite time, using poetic and symbolic terms to express your thoughts (and fears) about the how and why of the universe doesn’t have to conflict with simultaneously understanding the physics of it.
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Hah! Great minds think alike… (just finished posting a very similar response)
I’d like to add that just because a person knows they are using poetic and symbolic terms to express their thoughts doesn’t mean they don’t believe what they are saying.
I recall a few weeks ago I recall Cathy Brennan coming on the forums to defend herself against an article that said she was a biological essentialist, which was odd given her admission that she didn’t know what the term meant. Her comments went on to show that she was in fact a biological essentialist and she was just wrong about not being one.
I don’t think you can apply that same form of reasoning to people’s belief in God. If someone says they believe in god you can’t use characteristics of God or characteristics of believers in God to argue that they are mistaken about believing. Or at least I can’t as an atheist. The only people who are in a position to argue that someone else doesn’t believe in God are people who have a very fixed idea of what/who God is in the real world, and those people are almost certainly just dead wrong to begin with.
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As mentioned earlier in this thread, I’d have to imagine that someone brought up in a country as openly religious as the USA (despite or because of the secular nature of the state, on paper at least?) would likely be at least culturally Christian in a way that makes less sense to Europeans - you hear of Jewish Atheism a lot, so I imagine the same thing exists for people raised in a Christian background.
As @mikethebard points out - when I doubt that Obama is really a Christian I have no evidence of that, I’m just projecting because I perceive him as a smart person and I like to think that atheists are smarter than those backwards religious types. It’s egotism. I’m happy to accept that people I don’t like, or perceive as a bit backwards, like Santorum, or Huckabee, or Palin et al do believe in toga man, because it reinforces my negative opinion of them.
Anyway, if Obama says he’s a Christian, he is, because religion is a personal thing and I don’t have any right or evidence to gainsay him (although I retain my doubts 
)
ETA:
In the UK, Cameron says he’s ‘Evangelical’ about his Christianity, Clegg is an atheist, Miliband is a “Jewish atheist” (who said he wanted to be the first Jewish PM, because he forgot about Disraeli), while Fromage is all about “muscular defence of Judeo-Christian heritage” - which sounds like a dog-whistle for Islamophobia.
And here’s a non-story from the Guardian about how atheists aren’t actually more angry than the religious.
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One of the issues here is that many liberals consider religion to be a personal and subjective identity, while many conservatives believe it to be as political as it is personal and that it can be defined. For these people, doubting that he’s a Christian is like liberals claiming that “deep down”, he’s not really a liberal because they believe that he isn’t committed to liberal principles. People claim that others aren’t true liberals, feminists or Jews because they believe that the terms mean something and that the identity will have a noticeable influence on their opinions and actions, even though they’re also personal issues related to belief and identity.
Claiming that he’s actually a Muslim is pretty ridiculous though.
Well, just like my informal poll of one Jew told me that Jews for Jesus are not Jews, I think that if Christians want to say he isn’t Christian because he doesn’t adhere to X, Y, and Z, then that makes some sense, although I’d wager heavily that any such claim would be based on ignorance of the breadth of Christianity and arrogance about the idea of that person’s Christianity being the best kind. But I’ve even heard crazy anti-gay, give-me-money-or-go-to-hell preachers basically go with the “If you accept Christ into your heart you’re Christian” thing. They’ll haggle over who is a “good” Christian, but not so much over who is a Christian. Saying someone isn’t Christian when they say they are is an accusation of an extreme and unforgivable lie.
But, like you say, going from (for example) “He’s not really Christian because he won’t ban gay marriage” to “He’s Muslim” is fantastic leap that can’t really make sense unless you think Muslim just means “Bad person.”
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In some ways, I’d say groups like Orthodox Jews and Christians also use the ‘No True Scotsman’ argument, they’re just a lot more consistent about it.
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