Well, Frank, I don't really know how to document who founded the National Prayer Breakfast in 1953 (Obama says it had its roots in the Depression), and I don't really care. Most likely, those people are either dead or nearly so. The fact of the matter is, every President since Eisenhower has attended.

It gives the President an opportunity to speak from a spiritual perspective - and the wise ones do it from a non-ideological spiritual perspective, attempting to bring unity and tolerance amidst the ideological discord in our country.

Click here to see what President Obama said. I think he said it from the heart, and I think what he said it of great value.

Obama says, "The particular faith that motivates each of us can promote a greater good for all of us....Instead of driving us apart, our varied beliefs can bring us together to feed the hungry and comfort the afflicted; to make peace where there is strife and rebuild what has broken; to lift up those who have fallen on hard times."

If I honestly seek what is good, why should anyone care what my religious perspective is?

It grieves me to see these "religious" discussions at Mudcat, where so many people I know and respect, speak with such bigotry. If you're not religious, that's fine - but have the common decency to respect your brothers and sisters who do have a spiritual perspective, unless you have hard evidence to prove that their way of looking at things is somehow destructive. The Conventional Wisdom here is that all religious people are blockheaded fundamentalists, and that's simply not true.

-Joe Offer, angrily-