so you watch carefully selected snippets of decades of preaching and you have this innate ability to see this church as preaching nothing but hate?

I'm sorry but you're too intelligent to be falling for this manipulation Scott. I'll agree that I immediately saw the damage the tapes could have to Obama's campaign but I never once believed that the few seconds of rants could possibly be the overriding message from this minister if Obama liked the man. It just didn't make sense from a human nature standpoint. Intelligent, articulate, and compassionate people simply do not associate with and admire hate-mongerers so it was pretty obvious these were abberations and not the norm.

I fully understand religion by the way. I haven't been an atheist all my life you know. I've had exposure to a wide range of preachers and ministers and all have had their days when they said things they wished they'd thought more about before spewing.

If what everyone is saying about Wright was true you'd see armed insurrection coming from the congregation of that church. Instead what you see is a place that seems to do good work for the community. Maybe those types of angry rants actually give the people there a place to vent their own frustrations in a safe environment instead of aiming their rage at their neighbors.

And ultimately, we're all hiding behind one overriding fact here. In spite of the fact that the Rev. Wright's timing and common sense were failing when he said the US was responsible for 9/11 there is an uneasy truth behind that notion. We empowered and armed the perpetrator of the misdeed and heavily support the corrupt regime in Saudi Arabia from which the actual hijackers germinated. Now of course that's not justification for someone to coopt Islamic teaching to find justification for killing innocents but we can't bury our heads in the sand in regards to the impact our stupid foreign policy creates. Those moronic suicidal creatures didn't aim at buildings in Sweden or the Netherlands. They came after us because we play this idiotic game of nation building, a task we absolutely suck at and need to stop.

Art