Mr. Obama's faith

here is a transcript of an interview Barack Obama gave back in 2004. Read all of it when you can, but in the meantime I found these exchanges to be fascinating:

OBAMA:Where do you move forward with that?
This is something that I’m sure I’d have serious debates with my fellow Christians about. I think that the difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and prostelytize. There’s the belief, certainly in some quarters, that people haven’t embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior that they’re going to hell.

GG:You don’t believe that?

OBAMA:I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell.
I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity.
That’s just not part of my religious makeup.
….

GG:Do you believe in heaven?

OBAMA:Do I believe in the harps and clouds and wings?

GG:A place spiritually you go to after you die?

OBAMA:What I believe in is that if I live my life as well as I can, that I will be rewarded. I don’t presume to have knowledge of what happens after I die. But I feel very strongly that whether the reward is in the here and now or in the hereafter, the aligning myself to my faith and my values is a good thing.
When I tuck in my daughters at night and I feel like I’ve been a good father to them, and I see in them that I am transferring values that I got from my mother and that they’re kind people and that they’re honest people, and they’re curious people, that’s a little piece of heaven.

GG:Do you believe in sin?

OBAMA:Yes.

GG:What is sin?

OBAMA:Being out of alignment with my values.

GG:What happens if you have sin in your life?

OBAMA:I think it’s the same thing as the question about heaven. In the same way that if I’m true to myself and my faith that that is its own reward, when I’m not true to it, it’s its own punishment.

emphasis added by BKI

I wonder how many people who consider themselves to be christians believe that sin is “being out of alignment with my values”?

how amazingly self-referential is that? The ultimate questions of right and wrong, heaven and hell determined by whether or not his actions are consistent with his internal values.