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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (30484)	10/26/2006 6:51:08 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541971

You jump around to a lot of points, but Bush's religious views were clearly on the record before he became president, as reflected in this 1999 Washington Post profile excerpt: In the end, Bush said, the key to giving up alcohol was the new spirituality he had begun to embrace the year before. Bush is not a particularly introspective man, but whatever soul-searching there was to do, he had started doing in the summer of 1985, after a conversation at the family summer retreat in Kennebunkport with the Rev. Billy Graham, a longtime family friend and spiritual adviser. Graham, he said, "planted a seed in my heart and I began to change." As a boy, Bush worshiped in both Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches. After he married, he switched to the Methodist church of his wife. He had attended a men's Bible study group a few years earlier, but he began to take the Scriptures more seriously, reading the Bible cover to cover more than once. As his faith began to take root, Bush found he could be exuberant without the aid of alcohol. The very aspects of his personality that made George W. Bush the guy everyone wanted to sit next to at dinner – the nervous energy, the sharp wit, the impulsiveness and lack of structure – were also the parts of himself that Bush wanted to seize control of but not lose. "I think if . . . you become more spiritual, you begin to realize the effect of alcohol over-consuming because it begins to drown the spirit," he said. Bush takes pride in saying that he never went into a substance abuse program such as Alcoholics Anonymous, but indicated that he was guided by the broader AA philosophy of placing one's faith in God. "If you change your heart, you can change your behavior," Bush said. I agree 100% that Bush's governing style is divisive, but that has nothing to do with his religion, given that the vast majority of Americans are also religious.